One for all and all for one

What will socialism mean in practice? It will mean that the capitalists will be deprived of their ownership and control of the factories and communications, mills and mines, and transportation. All these means of production which they have used and misused only to pile up profits for the owning employing class will be taken from them. Socialism will make an end of production for profit and will carry on production for use. The needs of all will be met, and new needs and pleasures now denied to the working class will be created and satisfied by a socialist organisation and expansion of production. Workers will produce far better and more willingly under their own management than they do now. For the first time the workers will know that greater productivity will no longer be a threat to their livelihood but will make it possible to raise the whole standard of living of all and shorten the hours of labour.

The capitalist is interested only in production for profit. The fact that people always need shoes and food and shelter is of absolutely no concern to him unless he can realize a profit for himself in producing these articles. If he cannot, he closes down his factories.

The ending of capitalism will put an end at the same time to the threat of wars, to the maintenance of armed forces in preparation for war abroad or suppression of the workers at home. The building of socialism will lead the whole of humanity towards a new world. This is the new world for which many generations of workers have struggled. It is for us in our generation to bring this new world into being. Revolution becomes possible when the working class is not prepared to live any longer under intolerable conditions and has a will to overthrow capitalism. A socialist party is based on the work of those who first taught how society develops and changes, on the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. A socialist party has no interests apart from those of the working class as a whole an so it will not betray the interests of the working class—for it has no other interests. The Socialist Party is distinctively the party, and its vote is distinctively the vote, of the working class. The revolutionary party of the working class cannot be grown overnight. It arises from the class struggle; and it develops with the development of the class struggle, in the fight against capitalism. But the working class must know how to struggle, to have an understanding of the laws of development of society and of the laws of revolution.

There is but one issue from the standpoint of labour, and that is Labour versus Capital. Upon that basis, the political alignment of the future will have to be made. There is no escape from it. For the present, the ignorance of the workers stands in the way of their economic and political solidarity, but this can and will be overcome.

What we aim at is a socialist party to take into membership all class-conscious wage-workers, thus making an injury to one the concern of all. The Socialist Party stands firmly on the bed-rock of the class struggle, and; declares, that so long as the means of production are in the hands of a numerically small class, the workers will be forced to sell their labour-power to them for a bare subsistence wage. Consequently, between these two classes, a struggle must go on until the toilers come together on the political as well as on the industrial field and take over for themselves that which, being the result of their labour, justly belongs to them.  We believe that the economic struggle against the employing class must give way to the mass political struggle against the capitalist state.

Anyone looking for answers to the problems of the workers’ movement will not find them on the Left. Blundering ahead without vision it has stumbled first into this path, then into that, it has made mistake after mistake, and all too often dissipated its strength in hopeless struggles which could have been avoided had it possessed socialist theory to guide its footsteps. 

 Class war between employers and workers over the product of labour goes on without letup. The employers will continue to try to destroy the workers’ standard of living and break the unions; the workers will continue to build their unions and to advance their interests.