A Manifesto for World Socialism

Yet every day our cause becomes clearer and the people more clever – Joseph Dietzgen, Social Democratic Philosophy

Capitalism is a system of violence. Poverty is built into its operation. The struggle for a livable planet is a life-and-death issue. Corporate greed has polluted our air, turned our soil toxic and poisoned our waters. Our survival necessitates social control of technology and production and the elimination of the blind consumerism that causes us to squander so many of the world's resources needlessly. The environmental movement holds revolutionary potential. The threat to the environment touches everyone. The need to deepen their understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature. People will have to change how they live and how society is organised. We believe in a socialism where fulfillment will be found in the relationships among people and not in the consumption of things. Only conscious socialist planning by all of society can make this a reality.

Without revolutionary organisation, we cannot advance the revolutionary movement. As working people, we need our own party to fight for our interests, to help unify our struggles and to enable us to bring about socialism. The Socialist Party's job is to continue the work of socialist propaganda at all times without fear or compromise. We point our fellow-workers to a new world, the cooperative commonwealth. When they want it it is within their grasp. If they have to fight for it with only a fraction of the courage, sacrifice and determination they fight the quarrels of their masters, then no combination of powers, even were they a thousand times more powerful than they are, could stand against it. New movements will arise which promise an easy road to the new world. There will be disappointments and set-backs. But out of the struggles and their lessons there will be some who will learn, and they will add to the strength of the socialist movement, preparing the way for the inevitable time when masses must accept the socialist message. Historically, the stage has not yet been reached when workers in large numbers grasp the socialist's message. But it can be hastened the more our message is spread. It is the business of all socialists to work for this end. It is your job if you are a socialist, to lend a helping hand in every possible way and so assist the movement to take all the shocks and use all the opportunities that the future may hold for it. socialism is an historical necessity thrown up by the economic and social development of centuries. The alternative to it is chaos and conflict. As socialists we are conscious agents of the process of history.

The Socialist Party's aim is to abolish poverty. That can be done only by abolishing the system based on class division—those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.

The reformer does not want to abolish poverty in the only way in which it can be done. Instead he wants to diminish poverty or remove some of the features that result from poverty. The most fatuous form this desire takes is to be found in the recurrent schemes for keeping rich and poor, but mixing them up a little—just as a defender of slavery might dwell on the beautiful thought of occasional friendly gatherings of slaves and slave owners.

There is, however, no indication that our rulers can cure unemployment. The capitalist employs a person for the purpose of producing a profit. If he or she can make no profit, he will not hire the worker, but will fire him or her, and so the unemployed army is created and will number millions, as our experience has shown us prior to the war.

The socialist way is to cure unemployment by socialising the machines and factories so that no man can be hired or fired by a capitalist owner, who now is solely concerned with a profit. Under Socialism, there would be no private owner to dictate to labour, and as a corollary there would he no profit. A man would have the right to work and the right to live. There would be no inequality of income, no money required to buy goods, and the wealth produced would be freely consumed by its creators, that is, the entire population. The workers alone have the power to change the world, provided they understand and apply the socialist remedy, i.e., of expropriating the machines and factories from their masters and making them into social property.

A Socialist Party does not waste time and energy chasing reforms. It seeks political power for the sole purpose of abolishing capitalism. The socialist ideal is, of course the substitution of collective ownership and control for capitalistic ownership and control with the consequent extinction of exploitation altogether. The Left are for state capitalism or collective exploitation. We are not concerned with state capitalism. We are concerned with socialism which is the negation of capitalism. Consequently state capitalism cannot be the ideal of any socialist. Ergo those who preach state capitalism or collective exploitation are not socialists.

It has always been the contention of Socialist Party that:

1. Capitalism, wherever it operates, despite differences in climate, language and culture, produces the same set of conditions from which inevitably flow the same problems. This is not to say that conditions are everywhere identical under capitalism; different areas are often undergoing different stages of capitalist evolution, depending on historical background. However, when Industrialism comes, late or early, capitalism comes with it: they are bound up in each other.
2. Capitalism, desiring always a submissive working class, seeks everywhere to condition the people: through religion, universities, the media of disseminating thought and ideas.
3. Despite the constant effort in this direction, there exists, invariably in capitalist society, groupings that contradict and are in opposition to capitalist society (where it hurts them) and towards one another.

Don’t like the world as it is? Imagine something different. The proposed alternative society to capitalism can only be socialism. What is involved is suppressing the production of exchange values for the benefit of the capitalist minority and replacing it with the production of use values for the satisfaction of real human needs, democratically determined. There is no other possible choice, no other possible alternative to this mode of production.