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Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Apathy and silence is compliance


The Socialist Party desires to build a better and healthier society with mutual aid at its core. One thing the workers will get from all governments everywhere are the usual nauseating sermons from the rulers calling on the ruled to work harder and produce more. Members of the Socialist Party are struggling for social justice, for human emancipation, and for a solidarity economics. We seek a truly free society without violence and totalitarianism; a society in which everyone pulled together for the common good.

The Socialist Party argument is that the workers live by selling their mental and physical energies to the employing class. They then go to work and produce wealth for the employers of value far larger than that represented by their wages. It is out of this “surplus value” that the employing class came to be the owners of all but a small part of the accumulated wealth of the country. Broadly speaking, the employing class, in peace and in war, have squeezed out of their workers in factories, fields, mines, and offices, all that can be squeezed out of them in the existing circumstances. This is a very fortunate situation for the propertied class, but it has its corresponding disadvantage in that the civil and military costs of running the State, its administration, its police, its armaments and its wars, are in the last resort a burden on their profits and property. Far from being proponents of some all-engulfing statism, Marx and Engels saw the state, as class antagonisms dissipated, withering away — being transformed as an instrument to preserve democracy into an administrative tool.

As socialists, we re-affirm that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race in a world without national frontiers and in which free movement is possible and where all people live together as equals. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a World Cooperative Commonwealth of which we will all be free and equal members – citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.

We sympathise with the suffering of our fellow workers, whatever their ethnic origin. It is always they who suffer the brunt of their masters’ wars. Peace is always better than war because wars are never fought in the interests of ordinary people. It is also because war provides an ideal opportunity and excuse to suppress democratic rights on both sides. Peace will create better conditions for democracy. No longer obsessed with nationalistic conflict, our fellow-workers across the world will be able to re-focus on the social, economic and ecological problems spawned by the “normal” peacetime functioning of capitalism. A space for socialist ideas will then open up. 

The Socialist Party teaches that the revolution against capitalism and the socialist reconstruction of the old world can be accomplished only through conscious, collective action by the workers themselves. A mass socialist movement capable of coping with such a colossal task cannot arise haphazardly but requires to be consciously built.  Our aim is to transform from a propaganda group into a party capable of influencing and organising our fellow-workers to create a mass socialist party of the working class. When the majority of the people refuse to be fooled and intimidated any longer; when they refuse to stay on their knees; when they recognise the fundamental weakness of their oppressors, they can become transformed overnight from seemingly meek, subdued and helpless sheep into mighty lions.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like
dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many - they are few.


Shelley 

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