We need socialism

The Socialist Party is the political party of the working class. Not because we presently possess their support and votes. This is so because the Socialist Party is the sole promoter of the principles which the working class must adopt if it is ever to achieve its complete emancipation from wage-slavery and, at the same time, save society from catastrophe. 

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.