A Manifesto of World Socialism

There may still be room for some reforms for betterment of some sections of the working people in the present social system, but this is of minor consequence compared to the need for social revolution and radical reorganisation of society. We must achieve the socialisation of the means of production and distribution. Private property and the ownership industry and production by a minority for individual profit is not compatible with social evolution and has ceased to be progress. Despite its marvellous technology and invention this poor world of ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. That is the problem of problems now confronting us more and more insistently and until that is solved the world is halted and it will either resume its march toward industrial and social democracy or it will degenerate into chaos. There is no longer any excuse for a hungry person. All the material forces are available for the production of all things needed to provide food and shelter for every man, woman and child, putting an end to the poverty and misery. But these have to set into operation for the common good of all instead of the private profit of the few. A capitalist world can never be a free world.

The education of the people, not only the few, but the everyone is the task of the people and it must be emphasised that task can be performed only by themselves. To stir the people, to inspire them to think for themselves, to advocate the idea of mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is the Socialist Party’s contribution to the cause of humanity. Its declared principle is that workers have no interests in common with capitalists; that, in fact, their material interests are in conflict, and it is its declared purpose to abolish the wage-system, and supplant it by a system of co-operation in which the workers themselves shall have full control for their own benefit, and to this end they recognise the necessity of organising the political as well as the economic power of the working class to attain industrial democracy, by, for and of the workers, first, last and all the time.

Every useful and beautiful thing in the world, made by the hand and brain of man, is the creation of the men and the women who work. In a capitalist society, however, where all the lands and the natural resources of the earth, and all the instruments of production and distribution (transport, mines, factories, etc.) are already privately owned and controlled, Labour, the world’s true magic-maker, is shut off from the productive processes and from the power of producing a living, or of earning a living, except upon the terms laid down by the capitalist class.This is true in spite of the fact that all the capital in all the world is incapable of producing one loaf of bread, one pair of shoes, one house, one suit of clothes. Not one wheel would ever turn productively, not one machine would ever operate, not one train would ever move without the hands and brains of labour. Capital is utterly incapable of increasing itself. Unless he is able to filch the swag from some other capitalist who has exploited labour, the only way a capitalist may force his capital to multiply and bear the fruit of still more capital, is by the employment of labour. Without the hands and brains of labour, capital would remain forever stationary. A million dollar investment would remain one million dollars. The increase on this capital is the product of labour alone. We are not discussing a situation in which another capitalist comes along and invests another hundred thousand dollars in the first capitalist’s plant. What we are trying to explain is how the first capitalist, who possessed a one million dollar investment, finds himself at the end of the year, with this same one million dollars AND fifty thousand dollars additional capital (or profit).The only possible increase in capital, in this instance, comes through the exploitation of wage-labour.

A landlord may double the rents he demands of his tenants for his flats or his houses. But this merely doubles the income of the landlord. This does not increase the total commodity, money, or the total capital existing in the world. It merely transfers money from the pockets of your employer (who has to pay you. higher wages in order that you may pay increased rents) INTO the pockets of the landlord. One man will be five hundred dollars “out” and the other will be five hundred ahead in the game. You wage-workers only get a bare living (when you get that) anyway. In this transaction of rent-paying there is no increase in the total capital. the power of one capitalist landlord to raise the rents of shacks inhabited by the employees of other capitalists, for example, is his arbitrary monopolistic power to levy a tribute from the employing capitalists, because the landlord is able to force these employers to pay higher wages to their workers to enable them to pay his increased rents. No value and no capital is added to the total general capital. The landlord forces the corporation capitalists to divide the surplus value they have already extracted from their own workers, with him.

The Socialist Party is the party of the working class. The working class, the only class without which society could not exist and its emancipation, which will follow the abolition of the wage system, will mean the freedom of humanity, based upon cooperative industry; and it will also mean the end of the animal struggle for existence in human society and the beginning of the first real civilisation the world has ever known. A man or woman who wants his or her vote to count against the private ownership of the earth and the tyranny of class rule and for industrial democracy and the freedom of mankind will cast that vote for the Socialist Party. Any person who aspires to become free should join the Socialist Party, the only party that believes that the people have capacity for industrial as well as political self-government; the only party that proposes to make this in fact a government of and by and for the people.

The Socialist Party does not intend to “smash” those global corporations and the logistic networks of their worldwide supply chains. The Socialist Party, when it gets into power, will take control of the multinationals and have them owned and operated by all the people to produce wealth for all the people. In other words, the Socialist Party proposes to transfer the sources, means, and machinery of production and distribution from the private hands to the collective people, so that wealth may be produced in abundance, not to enrich a small class, but for the comfort and enjoyment of all. In every election campaign, this is the overshadowing issue, notwithstanding the capitalist attempts to obscure and to divert the attention of the people; and upon this great issue every first voter in the land who prefers freedom to slavery, peace to war, love to hate, plenty to poverty, happiness to wretchedness, man to mammon, should cast his or her vote for the Socialist Party.