Forward to Socialist Revolution

We in the Socialist Party are socialists out of conviction – because we see capitalism as harmful to the world’s people. This system we live under, by its very nature, grinds down the poor and working people and sets one group against another. We see in socialism a more just, more cooperative and more peaceful society. The Socialist Party offers an alternative which can meet basic needs of people and which is based on cooperation and general, productive and fulfilling employment. Socialism offers a future free from the fears of poverty, sexism, racism, dog-eat-dog competition, joblessness, and the loneliness of old age. As the world socialist movement grows, we will be nearer to creating a society that allows each person to create and produce according to her or his ability and to obtain what she or he needs.

We see the primary task of our organisation to be the building of a mass movement of the working class to fight for socialism. Denouncing sincere opponents has replaced the patient work of winning them over. We expect that as such an organisation grows, its internal life would become richer and stronger. Members would and should develop social as well as political ties with each other. The organisation would have internal education, parties, picnics, dinners, athletics and the like, and would encourage an all-rounded development of its members. To enable all its members to be involved as fully as possible, the organisation commits itself to actively building the social life of the organisation.

We advocate and work for socialism–that is, common ownership and collective control of the means of production (factories, fields, utilities, etc.) We want a system based on cooperation, where the people build together for the common good. In a socialist world of plenty, mankind is at long last freed of the dominance of economics, the tyranny of economics. We will for the first time be free to develop the full potentialities and capacities of the human individual, and see the full flowering of humanity’s spirit. This is the only goal worth fighting for today. It is the real freedom. The end of socialism is not merely the remaking of the social system and of the world – it is the remaking of humankind itself. Socialism does not come to destroy but to fulfill the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Socialism comes not as a remedy for the evils of existing society, but as a program of principles for a new society.

There can be no social peace and sanity, no liberty, so long as some people own that upon which all people depend. All that can be said against slavery can also be said against the private ownership of economic sources and tools; for the private ownership of the common sources and machinery of life is nothing less than the ownership of human beings. No person is free so long as he or she is dependent upon some other for the chance to earn a livelihood. If someone owns my bread, or owns that which I must have in order to get my bread, they own my being, unless I choose to revolt. Private ownership of productive machinery, means private ownership of the people. Those who sell their labour-power for wages sells themselves; for their labour-power is their life. The wages system is merely another form of a slave-system, not a fit system for free men and women; and there can be no true freedom for all mankind until there is not another hireling left under the sun. The labour of the world is essentially slave-labour. There is not a wage-earner who is not in some degree sold his soul, even in spite of himself, by dependence upon the private buyer of his or her labour. So long as some own that upon which all depend, the owners and the dependents are alike corrupted, enslaved, and robbed. Our industrial system rests upon this power of private capital. A civilisation build upon fraud and force, gambling and stealing and slave-labour, simply builds for its own retribution. We build on a sure foundation only when we build a system that has for its end the commonwealth, the abundance and well-being of all men and women. Nature offers resources enough for abundance of life for countless billions of human beings. Socialists cannot consent that these resources should be appropriated by the few for the exploitation of the many.

Some say that socialism might answer for a society of angels, but not for a society of human beings such as we are; that we must wait till we have a better brand of human beings before we can have socialism. All of which is very much like saying that it is not safe to cure someone of disease until he or she gets well. It is a strange superstition 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 and capitalism which sends all its forces in the direction of making mankind brutal and dishonest. The whole influence of competition and capitalism is to war against love and liberty, and to make all that is noble in human life impossible. Socialism comes to remove the causes that prevent people from being sisters and brothers one with another and to bring in that equality of opportunity without which there can be no true fellowship, no abiding social solidarity. The lesson of association in freedom must be learned and it can only be learned by practicing it.

What the socialist does mean by class-consciousness is nothing can obviate the hideous fact that one class of human beings is living off another class because we knows perfectly well that the labourer cannot achieve freedom, nor have the produce of our labour, until we becomes conscious that we are the real producers and the owners of the Earth. Capitalists despoil the earth with economic and military wars until the disinherited labour of the world take possession of its inheritance. So long as the labourer is willing to be a mere wage-slaves, so long as we are led about by politicians , so long as workers will not act, our condition will worsen and worsen. We must achieve our own liberty, if it is ever to be achieved. Liberty cannot be handed down by a superior class to an inferior class; it has never been so achieved, and ought not to be so achieved. If liberty were something that could be imposed upon one class by another, or could be presented as a gift from superiors to inferiors, it could vanish in the night. Men are not free until they have won and established their freedom. The class-conscious appeal is not for strife or hostility, or antagonism, but for constructive purpose. The end of socialism is the abolition of all classes and parties and the coming in of but one class, the people. Unless labourers as a class are so awakened that they become courageous enough to adopt the cooperative commonwealth and adopt goodwill toward all men and women, no one can achieve their liberty for them, or ought to achieve it for them. All history demonstrates how the people have had to achieve for themselves each inch and gain of liberty, and how they have been again and again betrayed when their liberties have been committed to those above them in worldly condition. Socialism is essentially conservative. It comes not to destroy, but to fulfill — to fulfill all the true ideals of order and liberty. It offers the economic basis for the realisation of that fraternity which has been the dream of the ages.