The Socialist 'Freedom' Party

The Socialist Party is fighting for socialist freedom. The working class is on the defencive all over the world. It is confused and disoriented, it has lost a lot of confidence in its power. These are not the happiest days for socialism. We know that. the failure of the proletariat anywhere else to come to power, has raised more than one gloomy doubt about the social ability of the working class to reorganise society rationally, about the very possibility of a socialist future. There are those who declare You cannot free your own self. Wherever you tried it yourself, you failed. You are too weak, too stupid, too undisciplined if left to your own democratic devices. You failed because there have always been the rulers and the ruled, and that is how it will always be. Socialism is but an ideal, a Utopia.

Social interests shape ideas. Ideas serve social interests. The ideological campaign against Marxism is still what it always was: an integral part of the fight against socialism and the interests of the working class. The defence of Marxism is the fight for socialism, the fight to enable the working class to leap forward again with renewed confidence in its own strength, in its great emancipating mission, in its eventual triumph. We are not idol-worshippers. We are not uncritical eulogists of Marx. That the working class can overthrow the rule of capital and the bourgeois state, not in the books of Karl Marx, but in the living struggle of organised workers. Are we supposed to forget the impossible dream? No way.

Our party’s task is to educate the millions of fellow-workers with a guide of what we are all fighting for and how society can be reorganised to put an end to poverty and injustice once and for all. Capitalists make beautiful promises for a paradise on earth, of peace and good will, empty promises supposed to make up for the shortages in happiness and the other necessities of life. What is needed for permanent peace is more than a change of personnel at the controls. Power and profit – the motive force of capital,ism – must perish. The peoples of the world will be able to produce their goods and their resources ACCORDING TO THEIR HUMAN NEEDS.

The Socialist Party’s message in unorthodox. We do not presume to be your political leaders. In elections we make no promises and we do not appeal for your vote. In line with our democratic approach to politics and desire to disseminate the socialist idea, we would use our limited funds to stand token candidates in a few constituencies and local election wards around the country.

Here the real alternatives are made clear: either the continuance of capitalism, with all the miseries and indignities that flow from it, or the establishment of of world-wide social equality based upon the common ownership of the means of living. We seek a mandate for socialism. Nothing less will do.

Faced with a world in which many members of mankind is starving, a class-divided world wracked with war and haunted by insecurity, the Socialist Party is the one organisation which realises that to solve such problems our capitalist way of life which gives rise to them must be replaced by a new social structure. It is both necessary and practical for the working nine-tenths of humanity to organise, consciously and democratically, to dispossess the owning one-tenth, and to place in the hands of the community the means of providing comfort and plenty for all.

Socialism involves far more even than the provision of abundance, of which we would take freely according to our needs. When work ceases to be employment, it will not remain the meaningless drudgery it is when we are forced to do it for a wage or salary. When the world’s resources are held in common and things are made not for profit but solely for use, work will take on a meaning it cannot have today.

Craftsmanship will flourish and the gap between the creative artist and the mass-produced manufacture of products will be closed. We ourselves shall decide where we work, how long, and at what pace.

Technology, now so largely devoted to developing means of destruction, will be diverted towards eliminating undesirable toil. All peoples will live together in harmony. We shall become integrated, creative human beings.

It is a mistake to believe that the Labour Party, with its petty national mentality and its list of palliatives, contributes towards socialism. Like the Conservatives and LibDems they aspire to administer capitalism and, in power, do all the terrible things this task involves. The “socialism” of the Labour Party is a myth.