We are the exploited

The vast majority of industrial magnates did not get there by working their way up by their own efforts but by piracy, robbery and fleecing the public. The “divine right” of management was not acquired through Providence but through the unholy exploitation of the people. Capitalism is outlived. It has submitted us to recurrent crises, each one worse than the previous one, with another just around the corner. Wealth should belong to those who do the work of society. Let the organised working people manage industry, eliminate private profit, plan production to suit the needs of the people – for peace, prosperity and plenty for all.

The Socialist Party hopes that clarity about the aims of socialism shall soon become so universal among our fellow-workers that the human family will avert the catastrophe looming before us and enter upon a splendid era of harmony, tranquillity and freedom. The Socialist Party's case for socialism is no utopian scheme, no fanciful creation of one person's imagination. The State cannot be bent to socialist purposes for the fundamental reason that the political form of government was not designed to serve as the instrument of the popular will. On the contrary, the origin of the State traces to the desire and the need of a ruling oligarchy to destroy the ancient influence of the people in communal affairs. And down through the centuries the State has, by a process of adaptation, continued unfailingly to perform its essential function, that of being the organised power through which the majority has been oppressed and a minority's self-interest imposed as the social law. Such has been its role, such will be its role as long as it survives, for such is its central principle. Socialist society can make no more use of it than of the slave-master's whip.

Socialism is not the rebuilding of society from scratch, it is the rebuilding of society from wherever it happens to be when the time to rebuild is upon us. The cooperative society can be attained only by the enormous project of changing the consciousness of our class, until the majority will have reversed their present opinions, no matter how long this shall take to accomplish. Then the population as a whole, acting democratically, can remake our institutions. Any other programme is vanguardism.

Ignorance and misery, with all concomitant evils, are perpetuated by this system, which makes human labour a ware to be bought in the open market, and places no real value on human life. Science and technology are diverted from their humane purposes and made instruments for the enslavement and the starvation of men, women and children. We stand for socialism, a new system in which the people own and control the the economy, through social and administrative institutions of the widest democracy. We stand for a socialism policy which is completely independent of and opposed to both of the reactionary systems of exploitation of man by man which now divide the world. 

Capitalism is an outlived system whose lifeblood is private profit and oppression, whether or not represented as the “welfare state” and whether or not its government is administered by liberals or self-styled “socialists.” it perpetuates poverty, unemployment, racism, and warfare. To our mind the working class integrity of the Socialist Party is of primary importance. All the votes of the people would do us no good if our party ceased to be a revolutionary party, or only incidentally so, while yielding more and more to the pressure to modify the principles of the party for the sake of swelling the membership numbers and gaining votes.