How Shall We Live?

The issue is socialism vs. capitalism. As Tolstoy said, our masters will do any and everything but get off the backs of their workers.  The Socialist Party is well aware that socialism is a term little understood by most people, and that it is everywhere a target for denunciation by the plutocratic media. What socialism means is an improved and egalitarian distribution of the products of labour and cooperation instead of competition. It is the common ownership of land and all the means of production and distribution. Socialism is the coming of the cooperative commonwealth to take the place of wage slavery. The present economic system – capitalism - is not only a failure, but criminal. It robs and it starves. It is a foul blot upon the face of humanity. It promises only an increase of its horrors. Human power and natural resources are wasted by this system, which makes “profit” the only object in business. Ignorance and misery, with all concomitant evils, are perpetuated by this system, which makes a person’s ability to work a product to be bought in the open market, and placing no real value on an individual’s worth. Science and technology are diverted from their beneficial purposes and made into instruments for the enslavement of men and the starvation of women and children.

There is no hope for our fellow-workers except by the path mapped out by the Socialist Party, the advocates of the cooperative commonwealth. The resources of the world must pass into the possession of working humanity. All other problems, the problems of nationality and of race will be solved once society is freed from exploitation and class divisions. Socialism will bring real democracy. We  call upon all our fellow-workers to muster under the banner of the Socialist Party, so that we use of our political power and taking possession of the State machine, so that we may put an end to capitalism, restore the soil of the land, and turn over all the means of production, transportation, and distribution to the people as a collective body to construct a cooperative commonwealth in place of unplanned production, class war, and social disorder This will be a commonwealth which, will give to every worker the free exercise and the full benefit of his or her faculties, multiplied by all the advantages of modern day. 

The Socialist Party’s platform is an indictment of the capitalist system; it is the call to class consciousness and political action of the exploited working class; and it is a ringing declaration in favor of collective ownership of all the means of production and distribution, as the clarion voice of economic freedom. The Socialist Party is organising for the purpose of securing control of the government. Having conquered the political power upon the platform that declares in favor of common ownership in the name of the people, it will develop cooperation in every department of human industry. The labour of workers will no longer be bought and sold in the markets of the world. We will not make things for sale, but will make things to use. We will fill the world with wealth and every one can have all that he or she can rationally use. Rent, interest, and profit, three forces of exploitation, will disappear forever. The badge of labour will no longer be the badge of servitude. Every man will gladly do his share of the world’s useful work. Every new invention will be a blessing to mankind because it will serve to reduce working hours and increase leisure time. Men and women will be economically free; life will no longer be a struggle to survive. Abolishing of the capitalist system does not merely mean the emancipation of the working class, but of all society. The world will be healthy and fruitful, fit for men and women to bring children and grandchildren into. Nothing is so easily produced as wealth, and no one should suffer for the want of it. No-one should be compelled to depend on the arbitrary will of another person for the right of free access of what society produces. Everyone will work for the society, and society will work in the interests of all who compose it. 

The Socialist Party looks to a future of a world without a master, a world without a slave