Our Objective - Agitate, Educate, Organise!

I see a time of seven generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become one circle again. --- Crazy Horse

Men and women stand side by side and demand full economic and social freedom, and the establishment in the near future of a co-operative commonwealth. What are we out for? Nothing less than a social revolution, a complete transformation of human society from its base. That is no little thing. It is about the biggest task that any body of men and women have ever set their hands to. And what are the means at our disposal, the material with which we have to work? We have no other material than people like ourselves and no other means. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working-class themselves. There is no other way. We need all the help we can get. They cannot be emancipated against their will, and so far we have not succeeded in inspiring them with that consciousness of their present enslaved condition, that passionate desire for their own emancipation. For that we have been frequently and constantly derided by candid friends and critics, nevertheless, we do not see that they have succeeded any better than we have. The Socialist Party admits its obvious failure to rally the workers to muster under its banner, but the failure of all other workers’ bodies which have attempted the task have not succeeded. 

The Socialist Party challenged the prevailing view in the social democracy that the class struggle was to be won in the capitalist legislatures. Step by step concessions were to be wrested from the state; the working class and the socialist parties were to engage our masters by means of “constructive” reform and social legislation; each concession would act as a rung in the ladder of social revolution, upon which the workers could climb step by step, until finally, the new day dawned where working  people awoke to find the cooperative commonwealth functioning without disorder, confusion, on the ruins of the capitalist state. But that did not happened and the Socialist Party said it wouldn’t. The reformist organisations competed for votes, on the basis of social reforms, with the capitalist political parties. And they catered to the ignorance and prejudices of the workers, trading promises of immediate reforms for votes. We do not make a bible of Marx, but the left-reformists through intellectual gymnastics, evasions, misquotations, and citing sentences and phrases from their context, make Marx and Engels sponsors for their corrupted version of socialism. They have only achieved to make socialism more hazy and less definite. The reformists have failed to organise a working-class socialist party, independent of, and hostile to, all capitalist parties, as an instrument for the political, economic and social emancipation of the working-class.

It is in the direction of building up a class-conscious working-class Socialist Party that we bend our efforts with renewed energy. Agitate, Educate, Organise! Our goal is to win recruits to the Red Flag and to bring together all comrades and friends into a united socialist party for the emancipation of humanity! Socialism does not come to destroy but to fulfil the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Socialism comes not as a remedy for the evils of existing society, but for a new society, a coherent and free society. Socialism starts with the brotherhood and unity as a fact. It does not proclaim it as a sentiment, but recognises it as a scientific fact. Each for all and all for each is the only rational system to live in.

We are bound up together in this world and can only achieve our well-being together. We all in common depend upon the same common resources of nature. Since all people in common depend upon the sources and tools of production, there can be no individual liberty save these sources and tools belong to the people in common. No-one is free so long as the person is dependent upon another for the chance to earn a livelihood. If someone owns my bread, or owns that which I must have in order to get my bread, I am owned. Private ownership of the earth, of its productive machinery, means private ownership of the people who live on the earth. A person who sells his or her labour-power for wages sells oneself, for under capitalism labour-power is life. The wages system is merely another form of the slave-system, no fit system for free men and women. The labour of the world is essentially slave-labour. There can be no true freedom for mankind until there is not another hireling left under the sun. So long a few own that upon which all depend, we are alike enslaved, and robbed. Behind the economics of capitalism, this industrial system rests upon this power of private capital to legally appropriate the fruits of the labour of society. It is elementally wrong that some people should own that upon which all people depend; and the only elemental right is that the people in common should own that upon which the people in common depend; and the only just reward of labour is the whole produce of labour.

As history well witnesses, the concentration of the wealth into the hands of the few has been the poison. It has brought the decline or destruction of every nation, every civilisation. Concentrated wealth is not prosperity but disease. Socialism comes to remove the causes that prevent humanity from being sisters and brothers. Socialism strikes at the root of the chief cause of our social problems and proposes to abolish wage slavery and competition and capitalism, itself. The whole influence of capitalism is to war against liberty, and to make all that is noble and good in the world impossible to share.