Under capitalism wealth can be produced in practically unlimited quantities, and yet the great majority of people live and die deprived of the good things in life, sometimes slightly above the poverty line, sometimes just below it, but always approximately at the bare subsistence level. Deep poverty prevails in the midst of vast abundance. Food is produced to excess, yet millions of hungry and underfed men, women, and children are never able to obtain a satisfactory meal. There is more than enough housing accommodation to shelter everyone quite adequately, yet families are compelled to live in one small, badly-ventilated and cheerless room.
Let us take another paradox of capitalism. The harder a person works the sooner he or she is out of a job, debarred from obtaining the things necessary for his or her well-being. The men and women who do the work of the world, without whose efforts human life on this planet would cease to function, are the poorest, economically, physically, and mentally, while on the other hand the people who do nothing useful or necessary, who indeed are the drones living on the honey produced by the workers, are the people to whom all the good things of life accrue. The wonders of nature, of art and science and literature, are open to the latter people—the members of the capitalist class — whereas all the workers can look forward to is a life of hard and generally sordid work, their reward for which is just a sufficiency of food, clothing, and shelter necessary to enable them to exist and to breed and rear a progeny, who in their turn will supply the place of their parents when the latter are considered by their masters unfit for anything but, the industrial scrap-heap.
It is the Socialist Party’s task to advocate a system wherein the means of production and distribution shall be socially owned and controlled. Wealth at the present time is only produced by the will of, and for the benefit of, the few who own the instruments whereby it is produced, and is naturally therefore, the sole property of those few. When the whole of the people have obtained control of the instruments of wealth production, of course, the wealth then produced will be the property of the whole of the people. Nothing could be simpler or more logical.
Yet the majority of the members of our class, so greatly are they saturated with capitalist indoctrination, that they favour the present system, while the Socialist Party position obtains little hearing and small support.
As, however, capitalism develops and the paradoxes become more glaring and more ridiculous, the Socialist Party view-point will continue to reach the understanding of the people. It is our assurance is that the members of our class will organise with us for the purpose of hastening the downfall of capitalism and of establishing the system of socialism, the ramifications and workings of which, admittedly, are as yet but dimly perceived, even by those who have devoted almost a lifelong study to the subject, but which the youngest socialist amongst us knows bears within it the potential of life undreamed of in this insane and inane system which we now live—or rather vegetate.
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