There is nothing that fuels the socialist movement more than capitalism’s own troubles, the displeasure, disaffection, and anxiety it produces. The fundamental driving forces behind the movement for Socialism are the rigours, the hardships of a working-class existence under a social system that turns out wealth unlimited and permits only a minority to enjoy it. This contradiction makes fools or knaves out of all supporters of capitalism who pose as champions of working class desires. People are getting ever closer to understanding that they live in an economic system that is not for them. Our fellow-workers will sooner or later realise that capitalism—i.e., the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution—is the cause of their poverty and its attendant evils and that any and all reforms within capitalist society will do nothing more than to bring about some slight amelioration of the poverty problem. The socialist movement can be regenerated. In this capitalist system, we are wage slaves and socialists are determined not to be slaves anymore. They pay us a wage and in turn, for it, they take and do with us whatever they want. They use us like animals, like a machine, just another tool to get as much energy and money out of our labour as they can. The Socialist Party is not a political party that says it represents everybody. The Socialist Party does not say it represents both capitalists and the workers, and preaches the idea of harmony between capitalists and the workers because there can’t be harmony between the slaves and the slave-masters. There can’t be harmony between the exploited and the exploiters because the slave-master lives by exploiting the workers – the capitalist lives by exploiting, that’s his whole existence. And we live for the day when we can break those chains of exploitation. The Socialist Party is the party of the wage-slave. We proudly and openly proclaim that. And more than that, we proudly and openly proclaim that our class which is now in wage slavery is not going to put up with it much longer. We’re going to break those shackles. We are one mighty class and we intend taking power throughout the world for the first time in history.
The natural instinct of human beings is towards cooperation and sharing, but, distorted by capitalism and its dog-eat-dog competition and ideology of nationalism, self-interest has become the pre-eminent behaviour trait. Nationalism in one country begets its echo in others. The world is besieged by a range of problems, many if not all of which are firmly rooted in the outdated socio-economic structure of capitalism and which threaten the survival of the human race and the planet. This capitalist system of wage slavery doesn’t allow us the choice of whether or not we are going to struggle. Everybody knows the fact that we all have to struggle to get by. The history of our class in this country is the history of struggle. Work is a struggle, daily life is a struggle, and winning our emancipation is going to be a struggle. We all should know about it, learn from it and build on it. This whole system of capitalism forces us to struggle, drives us to unite together to fight back. We learn through our struggle that by ourselves, as one person, we can’t accomplish very much, but when we unite together we can move forward and gain a better understanding so we can break these chains.
Our society has to be re-built to meet the needs of all. The employing class doesn’t consciously organise production and they can’t consciously organise production for the needs and the interest of society as a whole. The capitalists are not thinking about the interests of society, they’re not thinking about what people need. Each one of them is thinking about one thing, and the first question they’re all asking when they see anything, whether it’s a person or raw materials, a machine, or whatever – the first question they ask is, “How can I make money out of it?” That’s the whole name of the game and that’s how they try to run society. And those are the ideas they try to put into everybody’s mind – that you are either a slave or slave-master, you are either working for somebody or else you’ve got to make somebody work for you. Each of them is in competition with the other, and each of them is constantly trying to make it over on the other and sell more than the other one. And in doing this they are constantly introducing new machines and throwing workers into the streets, trying to make the products faster and undersell their competition. There’s only one place you can make money – that’s out of us. So they drive us harder to make more money for them. And each of them tries to expand production as if there were no limit to it – until it runs up against the limits of this set-up itself. A tremendous gulf develops between what’s produced under these conditions and what we can buy with the wages we get from them. So the whole breakneck pace turns around. They lay us off and, those left get driven even harder, and so the gulf gets bigger and so it goes, as we see now.
This is not a system that can meet the needs of the people. It’s not a system that even considers the question of how to meet the needs of the people. When the slaves start rebelling, they will throw a few scraps and hope that it gets people fighting among themselves for those. Under the present relations, this is the way it is. But this is not because of any forces beyond our control that cannot be changed. It’s simply and only because of the economic relations and economic system of capitalism that we live under, and because of the rule, the dictatorship, of this capitalist class. Come election time they’re all for the working man and woman. They’re all for us say, “I’m a worker just like the rest of you all.”
The only solution is the ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by the working class, to be administered in the interests of the community as a whole. With this understanding clearly established in the mind of the working class, we shall be standing on the threshold of a new and happier era in human history.
Regardless of nationality, race, colour, and political and religious creeds, the working class has always been inspired by one idea—the overthrow of capitalist society, built on slavery, exploitation and violence. In this struggle of labour against capital, the working class can win only by mustering all their forces against the common enemy. This is why for the working class, in order to save itself from economic exploitation and enslavement —unity is imperative. There is but one power that can save mankind from being plunged into catastrophe. That power is the working class if property organised and determined to fight all who would oppose and prevent its complete emancipation. When workers flex their muscles, capital quakes. As individuals, we are powerless to change things. We can’t use that two feet of conveyor belt before us by ourselves. The forces we have at our command in society, these machines and everything else that make society run, cannot be run by individuals working against each other, just for themselves. We have to cooperate. But together we are not powerless. In fact, we are the most powerful class in history. We are the class that’s going to transform all of society and advances humanity to a whole new higher level of social evolution.
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