The workers’ revolution can and will eliminate war be-cause, by overthrowing capitalist economy and supplanting capitalism with a socialist economy, it will remove the causes of war. Under socialism there will no longer exist the basic contradictions that lead to war. Artificial economic barriers based on national boundaries will be removed. The expansion of the means of production, under the ownership and control of society as a whole, will proceed in accordance with a rational plan adjusted to the needs of the members of society. Socialism will remove the limits on consumption, and hence permit the scientific and controlled development of production. Thus, under socialism, war will disappear because the causes of war will be done away with.
Under capitalism the ownership of land and the means of production and distribution is in private (individual, state or corporate) hands. The distribution of the means or instruments of production under capitalism puts the possessors of capital in command of society, and of the proletariat, which is divorced from property and has only its own labour power at its disposal. Utopians who still dream of developing socialism right in the heart of capitalism by means of “producers’ cooperatives but working class acquires economic supremacy only after it has seized political power. Under state-ownership the workers still has no property. It remains a propertyless class.
It is in the best interests of the working people that the struggle for political power should be carried through by peaceful means, without civil war. Political power must be won; and in the struggle for power, the winning of a majority in Parliament, supreme organ of representative power, is one of the essential steps. When a socialist majority in Parliament is won it will need the support of the mass movement outside Parliament so it can be made into the effective instrument of the people's will to replace capitalism by socialism. It is necessary for workers to support this party, to vote for it, to be actively involved in it. Our primary purpose, what have always said as the necessary first step, is the launching of the whole working class, and getting it moving forward as a class in the right direction towards socialism.
We claim our ‘Right to Live’ and to live well. Let us scorn all these decoy ducks and organise to bring about the common ownership of the means of life, which alone will enable us to secure the only Right we are concerned about. Then and not till then shall we recognise our social obligation to perform our share of the necessary work.
The Socialist Party is not the evangelists of a new revelation. We do not believe in the permanence of capitalism. We aim to build – and we invite you to join us in building – a party which will be a worthy of the Marxist tradition. We are a party that honestly tells the truth to the workers, a fully democratic party, united with one goal, the victory of humanity. The strength of the mass movement will be felt in Parliament, and the strength of the socialist movement within Parliament will strengthen the movement outside. The one supports the other. The real movement is to end a social system that imposes unnecessary suffering on the majority of people as part of the everyday normal life.
How comes it that the men and women who till the soil, who dig in the mines, who tend the machines, who toil in the factory and the houses, and, in a word, who create the whole of the wealth, receive only sufficient to maintain themselves and their families on the border line of bare physical efficiency, while those who do not aid in production – the employing class – obtain more than is enough to supply their every necessity, comfort and luxury?
To find a solution to this problem is the task to which the Socialist Party applies itself. We see clearly that only by studying the economics of wealth-production and distribution can we understand the anomalies of present-day society. We see, further, that having gained a knowledge of the economic causes of social inequality, he must apply this knowledge through political action – through the building up of a socialist organisation for the capture of Parliament and the conquest of the powers of the State. We ask you, therefore, to study the principles upon which our party is based, to find out for yourselves what socialism is and how socialism and socialism alone can abolish class society and establish in its stead a society based upon social equality. Socialism is, then, the ethics of humanity, the necessary economic foundation of a rational code of morality.
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