The Socialist Party - Champions of the Exploited

We live in an age, where the dominant mood is one of cynicism and despair and where horizons are narrow and aspirations low. Capitalism is as mired as ever in its own crises and contradictions. Yet the Socialist Party’s talk of an alternative society is dismissed with a sceptical sneer as too many radicals on the Left have lost their sense of direction and their identity, and wallow in political and ideological confusion as they reject the fundamental tenets of socialism as ‘old fashioned’ and ‘out-dated’.

The Socialist Party see the present time as one of opportunity, with the chance to help with the rebirth of revolutionary thought, based unequivocally upon the concept of self-emancipation. Socialism is centred on human freedom and it is upon this that we wish to grow.

Socialists have argued that working people are the agents of socialism because in its experience of collective production it discovers the need for collective solutions to society’s problems. Every battle by workers, from the smallest walk-out to the greatest general strike, can be fought and won collectively or not at all. Land can be divided into individual plots, but a factories can only be collectively expropriated. The exploitation of the workers brings them face-to-face with the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society – the contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the social character of production.

Simply stated, the working class is defined as all those who:

1) Do not own the means of production;
2) Have to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class to make a living;
3) Directly, or indirectly, create surplus value...which is expropriated by the capitalist class. 

This exploitation, or expropriation of surplus value, creates an irreconcilable, antagonistic class contradiction between the working class and the employing. Only the emancipation from capital itself can liberate the working class. Its mission, therefore, is to overthrow their masters, establish socialism, a class-free society. 

Socialisation which is devised to spare the profits of the capitalist class cannot be a path to socialism. There is no other way but to suppress exploitation. The tactic of the Socialist Party is the political expropriation of the capitalist class today, and its economic expropriation tomorrow. The first great revolutionary effort of the workers will be to seize political power; so long as the capitalist hold the parliamentary stronghold, all working class measures will be rebuffed or if passed, it will be in such a form that they become illusory  and only benefit the capitalist class. When the ruling class are dispossessed of political power, then only will the Socialist Party be able to commence its economic expropriation. “Tax the rich” is far from being a revolutionary demand. Demanding taxation of the rich presumes the continued existence of the rich! The object in reality is to prevent the social expropriation of capitalist property, The Socialist Party intends to expropriate the capitalist class.

The working class is not a small, narrow class. In developed capitalist countries, the working class constitutes the vast majority of the population. We perceive an epoch where, with the needs of consumption and the powers of production scientifically calculated, consumption as well as production will be free. There will be neither wages nor market prices. Human society will then have achieved socialism