The Emancipation of the Wage Slaves

 

The purpose of the Socialist Party is to accomplish the Co-operative Commonwealth. We demand the common ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people — that is our demand. The elimination of rent, interest, and profit and instead the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people — that is our demand. Cooperative industry in which all shall work together in harmony as the basis of a new social system, that is our demand. The end of class struggles and class rule, of master and slave, of poverty  of cruelty and crime; the birth of freedom, the dawn of brotherhood, the evolution of mankind — that is our demand. That is our socialism!

The Socialist Party is organising to securing control of  government powers. Having conquered the political power upon the platform that declares in favour of common ownership in the name of the people, they will take possession of production. It will already have already begun the organisation of industry , that is to say, self-management. Industry will be will be cooperative in every department of human industry. Men and women will be economically free; life will no longer be a struggle for survival and sustenance. Labour will no longer be servitude. Every person will gladly do one’s share of the world’s useful work. Every person will be able to say honestly they enjoy his or her share. Every technology will be a blessing to mankind because it will serve to reduce the number of hours constituting a day’s work, and the work-day will be shortened in exact proportion to the progress of invention. Labour will no longer be bought and sold on the market of the world. We will not make things for sale, but will make things to use. We will fill the world with wealth and every person can have all that a person can rationally use. Rent, interest, and profit, three forces of exploitation, will disappear forever.

The existing system is unspeakably cruel. Capitalist society is a diseased organism. We boast of our civilisation and yet every nation on the face of the globe is armed to the teeth against other nations. Is that civilisation in the proper sense of the term? We must bear in mind that competition is war; that war is the normal state of capitalism. With the end of capitalism comes the end of war, and the inauguration of peace. The Socialist Party does what little it can to hasten to coming of the day when war shall curse this earth no more. Its members are not patriots and possess no ambition to kill their fellow-workers from another land.

The Socialist Party is the expression of the world socialist movement, based upon the class struggle in which all workers of all countries, regardless of race, nationality, creed, or sex, are called upon to unite against the capitalist class, their shared common exploiter and oppressor. In the class struggle the equality of all workers is a foregone conclusion, and who does not recognise and subscribe to it as one of the basic principles of the socialism  is not a socialist and should be speedily set adrift to  return to the capitalist parties with their divisions.  Foolish and vain indeed is the person who makes the colour of skin or nationality the stepping-stone to an imaginary superiority. Socialism will give all people economic freedom. Socialism will break the chains of capitalism.

The abolition of the capitalist system does not merely mean the emancipation of the working class, but of all society. It will level upwards. This planet for the first time  will be fit for  men and women to live in.