The Strength of All for the Good of All

 If all the money in the world were heaped together in one vast pile it would be as powerless to do good for mankind. Labour is the motor that moves the world. Labour is the source of all wealth. In the present society the means of production are owned by the capitalists. That the working class is kept dependent on them is the ultimate cause of misery and all forms of oppression. The goal of the Socialist Party is therefore to abolish the existing mode of production (the wage system) and to allow the means of labour to be converted into the common property of society. Socialism should not only be a theory or a speculation as to the probable organisation of the society of the future. It should be a reality. The liberation of the working class from its present position is not a fight for new class privileges and prerogatives but for equal rights and equal obligations for all and for the abolition of class rule. The great mass of American working men add women are in abject slavery. A few realise it and protest — still others realise it and are content — while countless numbers of them are totally indifferent as to their condition, and oblivious of their surroundings. They are the victims of centuries of greed, centuries of tyranny and plunder, and if they are sunk to the level of total depravity, the blame is not with them. Many of them are satisfied to crawl and grovel, and will resist any attempt to free them. They have got to be educated and the process is slow and painful. The Socialist Party want nothing from the people but simply want them to do something for themselves other than being slaves and craven cowards.

The millions of wage-earners are wages-laves, and their masters control their lives and subject them to conditions as degrading as those which existed in times of chattel slavery. Our fellow-workers could change conditions to their liking, but divided on lines of political partisanship, intimidated, bulldozed, and bribed, they have done the bidding of the capitalist class, have been misled and betrayed by ignorant and dishonest leaders until hope has all but perished.

The Socialist Party proposes to put an end to the rule of capital by abolishing the capitalist class, and transferring the means of production and distribution from private hands for personal gain to common ownership for the welfare of all society. The profit system will cease to exist, and all industry will be owned and controlled by the people collectively, organised and operating with the most improved machinery. This will mean economic equality, the basis of the only real civilisation the world can ever know. Wage slavery will cease. The capitalist master and the wage-slave will disappear all together. Working people will abolish the slavery of capitalism and give us the cooperative commonwealth. Their aspiration will be “each for all and all for each.” It is no utopian dream, not the product of imagination, not a mirage to allure and then vanish, but a concrete proposition we place before our fellow-workers.

We are aware that socialism is a term little understood and that it is everywhere a target for denunciation by the plutocratic media. When looked at it means a more perfect and equitable distributions of the products of labour; cooperation instead of competition; common ownership of land,  and all the means of production and distribution. It proclaims the coming of the cooperative commonwealth to take the place of wage slavery. Many idealists and reformists construe socialism to mean all kinds of silly things, which no socialist imagines, and which makes socialism appear ridiculous to many people. The trouble is not with socialism, but with what these people imagine to be socialism. The present capitalist system is not only a failure, but a colossal aggregation of crime. It robs, it degrades, it starves; it is a foul blot upon the face of our civilisation. Socialism is the common ownership for the good of all. The Socialist Party, is simply preparing the way for the peaceful and orderly transition to the socialist commonwealth, and if the transfer from capitalism to socialism is in any degree violent, it will be contrary to the wishes of the socialists. The establishment of industry upon a cooperative basis is the aim of the socialist movement. Rent, interest, and profit in every form will disappear and with them the parasites who have latched on to society like leeches and sap its life-blood away. Socialism is the only possible cure for poverty and its countless brood of festering ills. Wealth will be created for the use and enjoyment of those who create it. Wealth creation and health creation will go hand in hand. The human race will embrace cooperation of all for the good of all.