A New Vision for the Working People

"The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" - Communist Manifesto

All socialists are rebels against any kind of enslavement and exploitation. Reformers believe that the working class can not emancipate itself by its own efforts. We are to be emancipated through the efforts of humanitarians, intellectually superior to the workers.  But it is clear that little was to be expected from the politicians and millionaires of the bourgeois.

 The Socialist Party perceives that the power necessary for the realisation of socialism can come only from the working class itself. The Socialist Party fights not only for shorter working hours and higher wages, unemployment insurance and shop councils, but also for the liberty, equality, fraternity of all human beings, regardless of race, gender, colour or nationality. Our Party declares that its aim is to develop the class consciousness of our fellow- workers through our education and agitation campaigns. We try to get the workers to have trust in their own power to achieve their own emancipation,  to have confidence in the ability of their own class.

The essence of socialism is cooperation, organisation, concerted effort, and united action on the part of the working class for their own advancement and their own emancipation. If a person does not understand the necessity of these things, the person does not understand socialism, and is not yet a socialist. The working class must organise to get it for themselves. The struggle against the capitalist class is a struggle against all who live by the labour of others, and against all exploitation. It can only end in taking political power by the working class, and the transfer of all land, instruments, factories, machinery and mines to the whole of society for the organisation of social production under which all that is produced by the workers and all improvements of production must benefit the people themselves.

The Socialist Party has always said that socialism cannot be established unless and until it has majority support and has always emphatically rejected minority violence. We are actively working to avoid violence by seeking to persuade in an open, democratic and peaceful manner a majority of the merits of socialism.

The socialist revolution will be essentially peaceful precisely because it will be the act of a conscious majority. Unfortunately, whether isolated incidents involving violence may occur does not depend on the majority, but on the anti-socialist minority.

Whether a minority of anti-socialists, faced with an overwhelming democratic decision in favour of the establishment of socialism, would dare to take up arms in a futile gesture against the socialist majority is very much open to question. But if they do, the Socialist majority must have a policy for dealing with them. We think it reasonable that steps should be taken to restrain them, even to the extent of using actual physical violence if need be. After all it will be they who began the violence and acted in an anti-democratic way. Not to act against them would be to allow a few fanatics to hold up the establishment of socialism. “Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary” only applies when once the vast majority of society are already in favour of the establishment of socialism.

Do you wish to hasten the day of victory? Join the Socialist Party! Don’t wait for the morrow. Join now. Take your place where you belong. You cannot do your duty by proxy. You have got to do it yourself and do it squarely and then as you look yourself in the face you will have no occasion to blush. You will know what it is to be a real man or woman. You will lose nothing; you will gain everything. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a spirit to develop. You need to know that you are verging on the edge of a great new world. You need to get in touch with your comrades and fellow workers and to become conscious of your interests, your powers and your possibilities as a class. You need to know that you belong to the great majority of humankind. You need to know that as long as you are ignorant, as long as you are indifferent, as long as you are apathetic, unorganised and content, you will remain exactly where you are. You will be exploited; you will be degraded, and you will have to beg for a job. You will get just enough for your slavish toil to keep you in working order, and you will be looked down upon with scorn and contempt by the very parasites that live in luxury out of your sweat and unpaid toil. The Socialist Party says: “Take possession of the factories and work-places in the name of the people.”