Who Are We? What Do We want?

Hunger, misery, disease, and death is the daily lot of too many of our brothers and sisters around the world. Too many men and women are subjected to horror and tyranny. Capitalism is a social system which breeds conflicts. It is a seething jungle of struggles wherein individuals, classes, nations, and empires fight against each other. Individual wage-earners vie with each other for jobs; capitalists outbid one another for markets; classes struggle against each other in the economic and political arenas; and nations are prepared to wipe each other off the map for the sake of imperial conquest. But the struggle, international in its extent, which looms larger than all others, is the conflict between capital and labour. In this struggle the former fights with ability and consciousness of aim, while the latter fights with great confusion and without a knowledge of its own strength.

From the Socialist Party goes the message of unity and international class solidarity. We are socialists because we believe that socialism will solve the miseries of the world. We hold that socialism is practical. Capitalism has only known how to cause humanity unhappiness; socialism will establish peace and happiness. Working people of Britain must be shown what binds them with to the working men and women of all the world. This situation, so unbearable for the exploited classes, can only be altered by the destruction of the capitalist system and the establishment of a socialist system of production and distribution. Reformist tactics have proven to be wholly illusory. To pursue them further will cause ever more misery.

The Socialist Party is a political organisation. Politics is our means. It is our justification for existence. We are not a party of property rights. We have the ideal of abundance and security and peace and democracy for all. Our greatest of hopes is an age of brotherhood of all men and women without hunger, without ignorance, without war.

Every day the capitalists try to discredit socialism and tell the workers that it is not a worthy goal to fight for. The propertied interests seek to mould the ideas of the workers in such a way that their intellectual, industrial, and political activities may not be directed against Capitalism. Capital reinforces its economic power through its control of the political machine, so, on the other hand, it wields political power due in great measure to its control of the press—the greatest weapon it has, educationally, for moulding the ideas and therefore the political activity of the workers. Capitalism, let us reiterate, uses its various avenues of activity in such a way that they support each other, and all of them combined reinforce the wages system. Thus the media, in the hands of capital, attacks labour in the field of education, industry, and politics. 

The capitalist class understands the need of political action. It intends to be prepared in order to crush the attempts of awakening labour seeking to organise its forces. The workers will be confronted by the whole economic force of capital in alliance with its political force—the State. Can the Socialist Party, therefore, neglect the political field, which is at present one of capital’s strongest buttresses? The Socialist Party says no. We dare not leave the enemy entrenched in any position from which it can threaten the working class. We hold the political weapon as the instrument by means of which the workers can capture the State in order to uproot it. The Socialist Party advocates political action because it is the destructive arm of labour which will overthrow capitalism. Many are opposed to political action for no other reason than that they have not realised all that it means. Because the political weapon is used by the capitalist class against Labour, and because the political State is a machine to maintain class rule, there are many workers who contend that working class political action is futile, if not dangerous. Our political declaration is to aim at the capture of the political machine in order to tear the State, with its armed force, out of the hands of the capitalist class, thus removing the murderous power which Capitalism looks to in its final conflict with Labour. In a word, the revolutionary value of political action lies in its being the instrument specially fashioned to destroy Capitalism. Just as industrial unionism is necessary to construct Socialism.

We are convinced that socialism is the only hope of the workers. Neither reforms nor palliatives can in any way remove the great economic contradictions inherent in capitalism. Socialism contends that the only solution for the social problem is to be found in the reorganisation of society upon the basis of the social ownership of the means of wealth production. This plan is neither based upon emotion nor sentiment. It is based upon economic necessity. Since wealth is socially created it must be socially owned and controlled. Until that is done capitalism will stagger from one contradiction to another; from one crisis to a worse one; from one conflict to an ever fiercer one. Labour as the creator of all economic wealth demands the control of its product. To facilitate this end, the Socialist Party has outlined the ways and means whereby the world cooperative commonwealth may be inaugurated.