The Socialist Party's Alternative

It is very easy to go with the flow, dead fish can that. But in order to be able to swim against the current, it is necessary to have ability, to exert energy and efforts, and even to risk death by drowning. The life line is provided by socialism.

It is very clear to many that today the workers as a class are not revolutionary. For them to become so implies a great mental change. Is it possible that our fellow-workers will ever be able to throw off their capitalistic outlook? The Socialist Party answers, yes! The process may turn out to be slower than we hope, but there are two powerful agents which further it—economic and social developments and socialist arguments. The function of the Socialist Party educational propaganda is to clarify and organise the vague anti-capitalist thoughts already present in the minds of discontented workers, by educating them to the true nature of capitalism and the means of their emancipation, thus giving to the working class an objective which social development demonstrates with ever increasing vividness to be both desirable and possible.

Only by the inauguration of international socialism will wars be abolished. For only then will there be no capitalist class to make war (using our class for the butcher's job) in order to seize territory which will become markets for their surplus products. For only then will the workers own and control all that which they alone produce, and only then will there be no vast surplus of wealth, stolen from the workers, for which a market must he found, and to provide a market for which working-class blood must be poured out like water. No man worthy of the name will hold back now.

To make our position clear, we emphasise that socialism can only be brought about by socialists. This involves the hard plodding work which the impatient and the ambitious cannot bear to undertake. The worker who speaks freely is open to the ridicule of those who have been conditioned to fear freedom. Our voices are all but drowned out by the pernicious blast of the capitalist media which functions as a silencer on the minds of the working class. But still we make our voices heard and, combined with the hard lessons of capitalist experience, those who ignore us today will be echoing our message in the times to come. It is our task to illuminate the dark places of capitalism in order to enlighten the workers as a preliminary to getting them to become active and understanding socialists.

The education of the workers may be a tedious process, but it is none the less essential for the achievement of our object. Show our fellow-workers the lines of class cleavage, its cause and the instrument of its perpetuation. Organise them politically for the capture of that instrument for their own purposes, that is, for the overthrow of the present social system and the establishment in its place of the socialist commonwealth. That and that alone is the cure for the misery of the working class.