The Socialist Party and the Cooperative Commonwealth

Working people have suffered untold miseries under capitalist domination. The present and future outlook of the working class is extremely gloomy. The economic signs and portents point to increasing difficulties and increasing misery for the workers. The "Good Old Times  have fled, never to return. Outside of socialism there are no "Better Times " ahead for the working class. A number of developing countries have stepped up production and can meet, to a great extent, their own requirements; this limits the available world's markets. But such countries also step in as competitors, in foreign markets; this further curtails the available markets. This all-round competition intensifies the struggle for markets and brings about a greater concentration upon the question of lowering the cost of production of articles.

What are the elements required in order to produce wealth to-day? Raw material, machinery, and labour-power of various degrees of skill. Is there any shortage of raw material? The planet is teeming with raw material, and the untapped resources are as relatively unlimited as the development of human ingenuity. Is there a shortage of machinery? There are numerous first-class manufactories of all classes of machinery working short time for want of orders to execute. Is there a shortage of labour-power? The hundreds of thousands of unemployed of all degrees of skill searching anxiously, and so often unavailingly, for work can provide a complete answer to this question.

The Socialist Party promotes the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of a commonwealth of workers throughout the World, ensuring from everyone according to his or her ability and to everybody according to needs, under the motto “All for each and each for All”. 

This social revolution is the objective of the World Socialist Movement, the end towards which every step it must directly tend. It is idle to deny the war between the classes, or to pretend there can be conciliation between the opposing classes. It can be solved by nothing short of the worldwide destruction of the capitalist power. It is time for our fellow-workers to heed the call to discard its futile reformism, to jettison labour mis-leader’s careerism and opportunism. 

The Socialist Party holds aloft the red banner of the World Commune to be, when the class war shall have been for ever stamped out, when mankind shall no longer cower under the bludgeon of the oppressor, when the necessaries and amenities of life, the comfort and the culture, the honour and the power, shall before all,  when none shall be called master and none servant. The Socialist Party advocates the social administration of the co-operative commonwealth of the future, A system of society in which the factories, the transport, the mines etc,  shall be owned by all in common.

The Socialist Party lays emphasis on the fact that it is a movement fundamentally different from the Labour Party and from left-wing parties.

We come before the working class with a reasoned explanation of the economic ills of the world, and with a reasoned plan for placing the social system on a new basis in keeping with the development of man’s productive forces.

We appeal to the working class to understand and act upon socialist principles. We preach that the method of achieving socialism is by constitutional, majority, control of the political machinery through the vote. workers must abandon their present apathetic attitude and take a lively interest in their present social position — they must study socialism and find out what it means to them.

We come not to create chaos and civil war, but to bring order to a disordered world.

We are not political gangsters threatening the lives or well-being of any individual. We are not bent on revenge, or on penalising our political opponents or the members of the propertied class. While it is necessary that the means of production shall be brought under social ownership and control, socialism will offer to the whole community—ex-capitalists included—the comfort and security which rational use of modern productive forces renders possible.

Indeed, it is our boast that the increasing insecurity of life under capitalism and the chaotic conditions at home and abroad will, in time, drive more and more capitalists, as well as the workers, to recognise that the socialist movement is the only guarantee of ordered development for society as a whole.

Our answer to appeals for unity is, therefore, what it has always been. The Socialist Party is always prepared to welcome socialists to join us on the basis of our Declaration of Principles, which points the only road to socialism. Never, under any circumstances, are we prepared to unite with those who—however well-meaningly—are travelling to a different objective or who preach a policy of civil war, which, if acted upon, destroys all present hope of socialist propaganda and organisation and delays progress towards emancipation.

 The Socialist Party argues that capitalism as a world system has become reactionary and that it has no progressive role to play anywhere in the world. This is because socialism, the next stage in social development which will involve the emancipation of all mankind, is possible. Only socialism is progressive, and this alone is what workers everywhere should strive to establish.