The sacredness of property

“Workingmen of all Countries, Unite!” are the stirring words that close the “Communist Manifesto.”  In the struggle to liberate mankind from the reign of classes forever, unlike the capitalists, the interests of the working class are not tied to any particular country. Its struggle takes place on a world-wide scale to defeat the capitalist class on a world-wide scale. The consequence of this principle is that it means the simple solidarity of one worker with another, irrespective of nationality and readily support the struggles of workers in other lands. Nationalism helps bind the working class to the employers of its nation.  Socialism unites the working people of the world against the bosses. 

The Socialist Party is the partisans of the working class. We also advocate for fundamental system change.  Change never comes from elections alone, but it almost always proceeds through electoral battles for political power. The authors of the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”, cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by “democracy” the rule of the people, the majority.  “The first step”, said the Manifesto, “in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” Only the revolution that replaces the class rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers can really establish democracy. Capitalism, under any kind of government, is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists. Marxists defined socialism as a class-free society—with abundance, freedom, and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a so-called workers’ state. The Communist Manifesto said: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association.” Note that well: “an association”, not a state—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”

Although, the Socialist Party strives to replace capitalism with socialism, we also accept that it is both possible and essential to fight now within capitalism to defend and improve the conditions of the working people. The Socialist Party's aim is socialism because socialism is the only way to end the class divisions in society. Capitalist expansion entails political patronage and public plunder. Capitalism can well afford to extend a limited measure of democratic liberties without too great fear that its rule would be challenged. Socialism comes not as a remedy for the evils of existing society, but as alternative principles for a new society. The task of creating a free society is the mightiest to which humanity has summoned itself, and it is a task which now presses urgently upon us. No person is free so long as he or she is dependent upon some other body. Private ownership of property, of its productive machinery, means private ownership of the people. Who sells his or her labor-power for wages sells themselves; for his or her labour-power is life. The wages system is merely an advance in the slave-system, but it is no fit system for free men and women. We build, instead, on a sure foundation for the commonwealth, the common freedom, the common abundance and well-being of all men and women. Nature offers resources enough for the abundance of life for countless billions of human beings.

Some say that socialism might be the answer for a society of angels and that we must wait till we have a better brand of a person before we can have socialism. All of which is very much like saying that it is not safe to cure a sick person of illness until he or she gets well. It is a strange belief that makes men and women regard what they know to be elementally good as dangerous in practice, and what they know to be elementally wrong as practically safe. Socialism proposes to abolish that slavery and competition which capitalism sends with all its forces into making people brutal and dishonest. The whole influence of competition and capitalism is to war against empathy and liberty, and to make all that is worthy of human life impossible.

Lords of capital and lords of land will exist and despoil the earth with economic and military wars until the disinherited of the world arises to take possession of its inheritance. What the Socialist Party means by class-consciousness is that nothing can hide the hideous fact that one class of human beings are living off another class, that the capitalist class is helping itself to the products of the producing class. So long as workers are willing to be a mere wage-slaves, so long as we are led about by politicians, our conditions worsen. Fellow-workers must achieve their own liberty if it is ever to be achieved. Liberty cannot be handed down by superiors to inferiors; it has never been so achieved, and ought not to be so achieved. If liberty were something that could be endowed upon one class by another, presented as a gift, it would vanish in the night. Men are not free until they have won and established their own freedom and power. Socialism comes not to destroy, but to fulfill all the true ideals of liberty. It comes with no attack upon property, but rather to save the property from the attacks and ravages of a system that is the destruction of all that makes property sacred; for the property is sacred only as it serves the highest uses of all mankind in common.