The myriad evils of capitalism will disappear only with the destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism. The Socialist Party dedicates itself to the struggle for socialism. It will do away with the anarchy of capitalism. Democratically-elected committees and councils in every district and industry will manage the affairs and services of society. Using the vast technological and natural resources of the world and freed from the fetters of production for profit factories will pour out their products in abundance to levels of undreamed-of plenty.
The Socialist Party refuse to join the reformists in the camp of capitalism. We differ from reformists in a fundamental way. They seek to modify the system while we try to abolish it. Socialists also differ from reformers in another fundamental respect. The believe a “fair” re- distribution of the national income in the country would solve the problems of racism, homelessness and poverty and end the widening chasm between the rich and the poor. The problem is that taxation question and the use of tax powers has been around for more years and the problems of impoverishment does not lie merely in the method of various tax codes. The source of the inequality lies in which class owns the means of production. A small group of millionaires and billionaires owns more than 90% of the wealth — the stocks, bonds, factories, real estate, natural resources, oil and gas, etc.
The process of pauperisation at one pole and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few at the other pole is a tendency inherent in all capitalist societies. It does not give way in times of recession or prosperity. Some capitalists may fall by the wayside but the capitalist class remains collectively the owners.
The working class that must overthrow capitalism and that task does not lie through support of capitalist governments. Today it is the ballot that we use against capitalism. Vote, then, for socialism.” Vote for the Socialist Party, the only party that keeps the revolutionary banner unfurled in an unremitting struggle for world socialism. With socialism, for the first time we can run our society and own lives, rather than submit to the forces of capitalism, which benefit a few at the expense of the majority. That’s why socialism opens a whole new era for humanity—a great qualitative leap since the beginning of civilisation.
The Socialist Party believes that most of the ills that afflict mankind stem from the bad social organisation fo capitalism; and that we could end it if we wished and knew how and in its place build a new society based upon cooperation and solidarity.
All the misery in which most workers live today, poverty, ignorance, crime, diseases, malnutrition, mental depression, and premature death stem from and arise from this present system of capitalism. People are disinherited, exploited and oppressed by a small possessing class. The government provides the necessary means of repression, and it exists to legalise and protect the owning class from the demands of the workers. The clergy with a series of fables about the will of God, and about an after-life etc., seeks to persuade the oppressed to accept oppression meekly, and just as the government does, to submit to the interest of the ruling class. Add to all this patriotism and nationalism, race hatred, wars, and armed peace creating rivalry and suspicion among all, spreading fear and insecurity.
The Socialist Party wants to change radically such a state of affairs. And since all these ills have their origin in the economic system where the struggle between individuals is urged, we seek seek after well-being through one’s own efforts in cooperation with everybody else, fraternal solidarity not competition.
The Socialist Party advocates the abolition of private property in land, in raw materials, and the instruments of labour, so that no one shall have the means of living by the exploitation of the labour of others, and that everybody, being assured of the means to produce and to live, shall be truly independent and in a position to unite freely among themselves for a common objective and according to their personal sympathies.
We wish to build organisation of social life by means of free association and federations of producers and consumers, created and modified according to the wishes of their members, guided by science and experience, and free from any kind of imposition which does not spring from natural needs, to which everyone, convinced by a feeling of overriding necessity, voluntarily submits. We stand for the end of government and of every coercive power which makes the law and imposes it on others. We propose the removal of all frontiers and in its stead the construction of a commonwealth of all peoples.
The question is of changing the way of life of society as a whole; of establishing relationships based on cooperation and solidarity; of achieving the full material development not for individuals, or members of one class or of a particular political party, but for all humanity is not something that can be imposed by force, but must emerge through the heightened consciousness of each one of us and be achieved with the free consent of all. The first task therefore of the Socialist Party must be to persuade people. We must make people aware of the misfortunes they suffer and of their opportunity to remove them. We must awaken sympathy in everybody for the suffering of others and a desire for the good of all people. We will arouse the sentiment of rebellion in the minds of men and women against the avoidable and unjust evils from which inflict us in society today, by helping to understand how they are caused and how it depends on human will to rid ourselves of them. it would be ridiculous and contrary to our principles to seek to impose freedom, by means of force on our goal of a voluntarist society. One must therefore rely on the free will of others, and all we can do is to provoke the development and the expression of the will of the people. But it would be equally absurd and contrary to our aims to admit that those who do not share our views should prevent us from expressing our will, so long as it does not deny them the same freedom.
We have to work to awaken in the exploited the conscious desire for a radical social transformation, and to persuade them that by uniting they have the strength to win; we must propagate our ideal and prepare to overcome those of the enemy, and to organise the new society, and when we will have the strength needed we must, by taking advantage of favourable circumstances as they arise, or which we can ourselves create, to make the social revolution to expropriate the owners of wealth, and by putting in common the means of life and production, and by preventing the setting up of new governments which would impose their will and to hamper the reorganisation of society by the people themselves.
Between humanity and environment there is a reciprocal action. Men and women make society what it is and society makes men and women what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society people must be changed, and to transform people, society must be changed. How does one escape from this vicious circle? Poverty brutalises mankind, and to abolish poverty we must have a social conscience and determination. We must take advantage of all the means, all the possibilities and the opportunities that the present circumstances allows us to act on our fellow workers and to develop their consciousness and their demands; we must use all advance in human consciences to induce them to claim and to impose those major social transformations which are possible and which effectively serve to open the way to further advances later. We must not limit ourselves to simple propaganda. We must seek to get all the people to want always more and to increase its pressures, until it has achieved complete emancipation.
Words spoken and written alone cannot win over to our ideas. We must incite and encourage them to struggle, and join them in their struggle. The greatest value lies in the struggle itself. For thereby workers learn that the bosses interests are opposed to theirs and that they cannot improve their conditions, and much less emancipate themselves, except by uniting and becoming stronger than the bosses. If they succeed in getting what they demand, they will be better off. If they do not succeed they will be led to study the causes of their failure and recognise the need for closer unity and greater activity and they will in the end understand that to make their victory secure and definitive, it is necessary to abolish capitalism.
There exists no law of wages which determines what part of a worker’s labour should go to him or her and what proportion goes to the employers. Wages cannot normally be less than what is needed to maintain life, nor can they normally rise such that no profit margin is left to the boss. It is clear that in the first case workers would die, and therefore would stop drawing any wages, and in the second the bosses would stop employing labour and so would pay no more wages. But between these two impossible extremes there is an infinite scale of degrees ranging from the miserable conditions of many land workers to the almost respectable conditions of skilled workers.
Wages, hours, and other conditions of employment are the result of the struggle between bosses and workers. The former try to give the workers as little as possible and get them to work themselves to the bone; the latter try, or should try to work as little, and earn as much, as possible. Where workers accept any conditions, or even being discontented, do not know how to put up effective resistance to the bosses demands, they are soon reduced to bestial conditions of life. Where, instead, they have ideas as to how human beings should live and know how to join forces, and through refusal to work or the latent and open threat of rebellion, to win the bosses respect, in such cases, they are treated in a relatively decent way. One can therefore say that within certain limits, the wages he gets are what the worker (not as an individual, of course, but as a class) demands.
Through struggle, by resistance against the bosses, therefore, workers can up to a certain point, prevent a worsening of their conditions as well as obtaining real improvement. And the history of the workers’ movement has already demonstrated this truth. One must not however exaggerate the importance of this struggle between workers and bosses conducted exclusively in the economic field. Bosses can give in, and often they do in face of forcefully expressed demands so long as the demands are not too great; but if workers were to make demands (and it is imperative that they should) which would absorb all the bosses profits and be in effect an indirect form of expropriation, it is certain that the bosses would appeal to the government and would seek to use force to oblige the workers to remain in their state of wage slavery.
And even before, long before workers can expect to receive the full product of their labour, the economic struggle becomes impotent as a means of producing the improvements in living standards.
Workers produce everything and without them life would be impossible; therefore it would seem that by refusing to work they could demand whatever they wanted. But the union of all workers, even in one particular trade, and in one country is difficult to achieve, and opposing the union of workers are the bosses organisations. Workers live from day to day, and if they do not work they soon find themselves without food; whereas the bosses, because they have money, have access to all the goods in stock and can therefore sit back and wait until hunger reduces their employees to a more amenable frame of mind. The invention or the introduction of new machinery makes workers redundant and adds to the large army of unemployed, who are driven by hunger to sell their labour at any price. Immigration immediately creates problems in the countries where better working conditions exist, for the hordes of hungry workers, willy-nilly, offer the bosses an opportunity to depress wages all round. And all these facts, which necessarily derive from the capitalist system, conspire in counteracting and often destroying advances made in working class consciousness and solidarity. And in every case the overriding fact remains that production under capitalism is organised by each capitalist for his personal profit and not, as would be natural, to satisfy the needs of the workers in the best possible way. Hence the chaos, the waste of human effort, the organised scarcity of goods, useless and harmful occupations, unemployment, abandoned land, under-use of plant, and so on, all evils which cannot be avoided except by depriving the capitalists of the means of production and, it follows, the organisation of production.
Soon then, those workers who want to free themselves, or even only to effectively improve their conditions, will be faced with the need to defend themselves from the government, with the need to attack the government, which by legalising the right to property and protecting it with brute force, constitutes a barrier to human progress, which must be beaten down with force if one does not wish to remain indefinitely under present conditions or even worse.
From the economic struggle one must pass to the political struggle. Everything depends on what the people are capable of wanting. The Socialist Party shall push the people to expropriate the bosses and put all goods in common and organise their daily lives themselves, through freely constituted associations. If the mass of the population will not respond to our appeal they will remain slaves. Regardless, continue the struggle against the possessing class and the rulers without respite, having always in mind the complete economic and political emancipation of all mankind. We want men and women united as brothers and sisters; e want all cooperating voluntarily for the well-being of all; we want society to be for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being; we want freedom and solidarity for everybody. In order to achieve these all-important ends, it is necessary in our opinion that the means of production should be at the disposal of everybody and that no person or group, should be in a position to oblige others to submit to their will or to exercise their influence other than through the power of reason and by example. The expropriation of the capitalists is for the benefit of all
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