The Socialist Party is the sole
organisation demanding the abolition of capitalism and advocating the
socialist reconstruction of society. It has been doing so for well
over 100 years. It is, in short, the organisation through which the
workers can establish their majority right to reorganise society.
However, our fellow-workers can begin to build socialism only when
they realise that the continued existence of capitalism is not only
completely contrary to workers' interests, but a menace to the
welfare of all society. And they can only gain the knowledge needed
to build such a movement by investigating the socialist case of the
Socialist Party. The capitalist political state must be dismantled
somehow. In keeping with socialist principles, the Socialist Party
proposes that workers attempt to do so peacefully, using the existing
democratic process, and to use force only if that effort is met with
force. How to achieve it is the problem. The problem is one of
tactics, and tactics depend on the social conditions and atmosphere
that exist in the whatever circumstance a country may be faced with.
We believe that the Socialist Party's electoral strategy offers the
best -- indeed the only realistic -- chance to achieve socialism in
the majority of countries that have democratic constitutions by
nonviolent and peaceful means. We believe it is the only way in which
the working class can organise itself for socialism while
simultaneously nullifying the ruling class's capacity to resist by
means of armed force. It is inconceivable that socialism would win at
the ballot box by a number so small that the outcome would be in
doubt. Indeed, even if the formality of vote counting was dispensed
with completely at such a juncture, the social atmosphere would be
charged with the electricity of impending change. It could not be
concealed. Where the ballot is silenced, the bullet must speak.
Capitalist
exploitation of workers did not stop when some workers formed unions.
The struggle over the division of labour's product continues to this
day. The unions only made it possible for workers to resist in
groups. At first, the capitalist owners of the means of production --
the factories, the farms, mills, mines, transport, and the tools and machines
needed to run them -- tried to destroy the unions. Compelled by the
profit motive and competition from their capitalist rivals, they
tried to keep wages low and to get ever more production out of the
workers. The workers, on the other hand, driven both by sheer
necessity and by normal ambition to rise above a state of constant
want, resisted and sought to force wages up. It was like dividing an
apple in two parts. If one part was larger the other had to be
smaller -- and this was the case whether the capitalist "pie"
was big, as in boom times, or small, as in periods of depression.
Accordingly, the struggle over labour's product is not simply a
struggle between individual workers and their employers. It is a
struggle between the working class and the capitalist class -- a
CLASS STRUGGLE that is inherent in and inseparable from the
capital-labour relationship.
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