Each for all and all for each

Socialism is the hope of the whole of humanity for the workers cannot liberate themselves without emancipating the whole of mankind. It is impossible to contemplate the horrors of capitalism and remain immune unless, indeed, one is emotionally dead to every sentiment of humanity.

We are ready to conquer capitalism by making use of our political liberty and by taking possession of the public power, so that we may put an end to the present barbarous class exploitation  by the abolition of capitalism and turning all of the land, and of all the means of production, transportation, and distribution, into the property of all people as a collective body, and the substitution of the cooperative commonwealth for the present state of unplanned production, and social disorder — a commonwealth which, although it will not make every man and women equal physically or mentally, will give to every worker the free exercise and the full benefit of his and her faculties, multiplied by all the modern factors of civilisation and ultimately inaugurate the universal brotherhood of mankind.

A class-free socialist commonwealth cannot be attained without the overthrow of the rule of capitalism. It is an illusion that it can be built up alongside and within capitalist society.  There can be very little gained by socialists trying to administer the capitalists’ political machinery; that this machinery is especially adapted to fit the necessity of the ruling class. A socialist official is powerless to do more than the machine permits, and the machine permits practically nothing. If socialism is simply going to be another system of exploitation it can easily graft on the old tree, as has its predecessors. But if it is to usher forth the triumph of a new era, the final capture, and overthrow of the master class and the establishment of an entirely new principle in production.

What the working class may gain under capitalism at one point, they lose at another; and that as the struggle goes on it will become more and more bitter, and the general distress and subjugation of the workers more and more acute; and that this process must go on until the workers learn the lesson that the source of their trouble is inherent in the wage system and that the remedy is not in placing patches on this system but to its final overthrow and the establishment of the cooperative commonwealth.

To accomplish this aim is the historic mission of the working class and one of the most effective tools at the command of the workers in the struggle against their class enemy, is socialist party,  a party not the work one man but a mass movement that has  grown out of the needs of the class whose interests it represents. The party that can speak in the name of labour is a socialist party.  However, many of you think that those of us in the  Socialist Party are impractical visionaries with strange notions in our heads and thus a waste of time. When we explain our ideas you dismiss it as mere theory yet are willing to accept others theories such as that immigration is the cause of your problems, that over-population is the root of what ails the world. You unquestioningly take such theories as veritable truths. Compromise and reforms will never destroy wage-slavery.  Through socialism alone will this be accomplished and it is the duty of every worker to align with the Socialist Party.  Link arms, fellow workers, with your brothers and sisters of other lands for there can be no grander reward than when there is no longer a master, no longer a slave.

Under capitalism, with its wage slavery, the worker and his family are nominally free; but, as we have seen, the land, the tools and all the product of his labour belong to the employing class. The workers are at liberty to change their individual masters, if they can, that is all. There is a continuous class war between wage slaves and the capitalist class, with its parasites. So long as wages are paid by one class to another class, so long will men and women remain slaves to the employing class. Wage slaves have ceased to be at the mercy of individual employers, but they cannot emancipate themselves from slavery to the employing class until they themselves cease to compete with one another for wages. “Free and Independent Workers” sell their labour power, which is the only commodity they possess, to the capitalists who own or control all the means of producing wealth, including the tools, raw material, land, and money.

Under the machine-method of production, the workers are controlled by their tools, instead of being in control of them. Under the capitalist system of production for exchange, the producers themselves have no control over their own products. Commodities, social goods, are produced, not directly for social purposes, but indirectly, in order to create a profit for the capitalists. If capitalists are unable for any reason to produce goods profitably, the wage-earners cease to be employed, though there may be a vast quantity of useful goods glutting the warehouses on the one hand, and millions of people who are anxious to have them on the other.

Rent, profit, and interest are all provided by the workers. All three are the component parts of the labour value embodied in saleable commodities by the labour power of the workers, over and above the actual wages paid to the employee, and the cost of raw materials, incidental materials, etc., needed by the capitalist for the conduct of his business. The wages paid by the employers to their hands represent the customary standard of living of the skilled or unskilled workers employed. These wages are, on the average, returned in saleable values to the capitalist in a portion of the working day, or week, for which the worker has sold his labour power to the capitalist. The goods produced during the rest of the time the wage-earner works for the capitalist are the result of this extra and unpaid labour, furnished by the worker to the capitalist. It is the modern industrial expression of the corvée, enforced, not by the whip, but by pecuniary necessity and individual hunger. This is the surplus value, out of which all the classes who do not directly produce are paid their share, the parasites. Wages paid in money seem to workers to come to them from above, instead of being only the value of a portion of the goods they themselves produce, paid to them in the form of money. They owe this blunder to their own condition of servitude. Workers have advanced their labour power to the capitalist before they are paid their wages for its use. Capitalists, as a class, run no risks whatever; the unfortunate in the competitive struggle for gain are simply wiped out by their competitors, who benefit by their downfall. Shareholders in capitalist companies rarely or never render any service to the company, or the community, as shareholders. In the vast majority of cases, they have never visited the enterprises from which they draw their dividends.

 Production for profit and exchange by wage labour assumes the existence of large numbers of people who are divorced from the land and possess no property of their own. The only way to solve the growing antagonism between the two great classes of modern society is, by substituting co-operation for competition, in all branches of production and distribution. This involves a social revolution, peaceful or forcible. Wage-earners are thrown out of employment, not because they are clamouring for impossible wages, still less because they are unwilling to work, but because the employing class itself cannot produce at a loss.

Where freedom of speech, freedom of combination, together with political freedom and voting power, have been secured, the use of the political weapon in the first instance is by far the best course, and in the long run the most effective. This arises for several reasons:

(a) The wage-earners who, being too ignorant of the real interests of their class or insufficiently organised, will not go to the ballot-box to vote for their champions, certainly will never go to the barricades to fight for them effectively;

(b) If they win on the political field they are in a very much stronger position to enter upon actual civil war, and are ready to take over the machinery of government for the benefit of the whole community;

(c) Direct action, by means of successive strikes or a general strike of all the workers, would only disorganise the whole of the existing machinery of production and distribution which they desire to secure for themselves and the whole community. Even when the workers have succeeded in paralysing industry, they must co-ordinate by political means so created through some style of General Assembly.

Also, in any organised effort outside the political arena, the growing ill-feeling of all not immediately concerned in the strike when starvation set in, might lead to a military dictatorship of some duration, if only to secure renewed peace and daily sustenance for the majority. The inclination of the great majority of wage-earners has been to use political action in the interest of their class, with the object of obtaining direct control over the industrial forces. This means that, wherever the wage-earning class is sufficiently organised and disciplined, they should refrain from the use the dangerous weapon of the general strike. With political action, for which our forebears fought for and which we have secured there is far less danger of armed conflict. It cannot be doubted that if direct action such as a general strike took so wide a sweep as is contemplated, implying the cessation of work in every sphere of manufacture and transportation, this would almost inevitably lead to civil war. Then there may easily then arise differences between the strikers themselves; for it is by no means certain that men who are too slow and careless to vote for their own class champions would develop a whole-souled eagerness to fight for themselves and their class.

 Privation and shortages is apt to turn even enthusiasts for overthrow into partisans of a military dictatorship. No Government, also, would, or could surrender at once to such an organised stoppage of the whole national life, without a desperate effort, in which all the resources of the coercive State would be used. Is it advisable even to threaten to resort to such desperate tactics, when the alternative of political action is still open? Is it well to risk a defeat, which might be a throwback for a whole generation. The reaction upon failure would be terrible.

The Socialist Party aims at the entire emancipation of the workers from the mastery of the capitalist system via the ballot box, not for the enactment of palliative reforms under capitalism but for the immediate establishment of a co-operative commonwealth, that is, in fact, the emancipation of the whole wage-slave class.