Saving Humanity

“The strongest man is the one who is the least isolated; the most independent is the one who has most contacts and friendships and thereby a wider field for choosing his close collaborators; the most developed man is he who best can, and knows how to, utilise Man’s common inheritance as well as the achievements of his contemporaries.” Errico Malatesta

The Socialist Party stands for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a world socialist system. By socialism, we mean a system in which the means of production and distribution is commonly owned by society is democratically controlled by its members. Only socialism can rid the world of poverty and inequality, stop wars, end oppression and exploitation, save the environment from destruction and provide the conditions for the full realisation of human creative potential. A system under the democratic control of the people is the only basis for establishing a class-free and sustainable society based on the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The Socialist Party stand in the tradition of the socialists who opposed Leninism Stalinism, and Trotskyism and we fight today to reclaim the democratic, revolutionary politics of Marx and Engels. Socialism cannot be achieved by reform of the current system only through the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order workers defeat the capitalist class and permanently end its rule. For capitalism to be overthrown, the majority of the working class must be won over to revolutionary action and the socialist case.  The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. Socialism cannot come about by the actions of a minority. The struggle for socialism is the struggle of the great mass of workers to control their lives and their society, what Marx called “a movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority”. We support those workers' movements such as trade unions that tend to improve the position and self-confidence of workers and of other oppressed sections of the population as the basic defensive organisations of the working class.

All recorded history is the history of class struggles and consequent evolutionary changes in the form of society; the class divisions and institutions varying from age to age according to the current economic basis, and each form being superseded by another when its mission is fulfilled. Today this is truer than ever. Under the form of society dictated by modern capitalist production, the means of life are concentrated in the hands of a small privileged class, which exploits the propertyless working masses, appropriates all the product of their labour reduces them to the lowest and most servile level of existence that will permit them to continue working and reproducing their kind, and in addition obtains, by virtue of that economic supremacy, control of the entire state power. This regime of contradiction between ‘social production’ and ‘individual appropriation’, of irreconcilable antagonism between masters and man, employers and employed, property owners and proletarians – the class struggle of today – has brought mankind into unprecedented conflict, misery, and chaos – a veritable abomination of desolation and terror. But it is fast approaching a crisis entailing its overthrow which will lead to an emancipated world, a society of economic and social equals wherein class divisions, privileges and disabilities will for the first time in history be impossible; a system of social ownership of the means of production industrially administered by the workers on an organised and harmonious plan, ensuring from every man according to his capacity and to every man according to his needs, under the motto “All for each and each for All”.

This social revolution is the objective of the Socialist Party, the end towards which every step it takes must directly tend. The task is no mere pastime; it is a battle. We cannot deny the war between the classes, or to pretend it can somehow be peacefully resolved by an armistice.  So elemental, it is a conflict which can be ended by nothing short of the world wide destruction of the capitalist power.  It is time for our fellow-workers to hearken to the call, to discard its futile reformism, to jettison their leader’s careerism, opportunism and cowardice, full of doubts and fears, clinging with pitiful faith to capitalism, hoping against hope, sceptical of the working people upon whom they depend, they spread their pessimism like a poison into the workers themselves.  How familiar their wavering.

It is time to recognise the vital necessity of the fight and to unite all our forces in countering the class enemy, organised and unified by solidarity so as to deliver, in cooperation and coordination, the knockout blow to a hated class and system. The Socialist Party bids all class-conscious workers rally. Political parties are the product of the class struggle. In a class-free society which has rid itself of the remnants of vested class interests and associated ideology, there will be no political parties. They will be unnecessary. But we have not yet achieved a class-free society. We are in the midst of a society torn asunder by class struggle, and the political parties of necessity express and reflect the interests of classes in conflict. The working class is the custodian of socialism, of all further development of mankind. The capitalist class is no longer a progressive class. It cannot lead mankind forward. It can only drag it backward. Based upon private property, it has long-since fulfilled whatever progressive role it had to play in the development of society. Capitalism now fetters the productive forces, drags society into desolation and catastrophe.

This is the plain fact which we socialist understand this above all is no messiah or elite group can save mankind but there is but one possible hope: Socialism. Should mankind make the wrong choice, there will probably be surviving individual members of the human race to again start up the weary path through the countless ages of barbarism until eventually we once again reach civilisation.