When the Socialist Party was founded the original members saw nothing but growth and victory ahead of them. They would be sadly disappointed that nearly a hundred and twenty years later socialism has not yet been achieved. Yet they would be heartened that the Socialist Party remains knitted together by solidarity of feeling and action, still inspired by the same idea, continuing to work for the common cause, regardless of national boundaries and regardless of racial distinctions.
We, in the Socialist Party, are today the only organisation which has still retained a clear vision, an unclouded mind, in this general din of confusion and unreason; and it falls to us to continue our opposition to this criminal economic system. Since the Socialist Party was formed it has resolutely refused to join in demands for palliatives, and assert that such a campaign will divert from the complete overthrow of the wage system.
The world was never more unsafe for civilisation. We believe in democracy. We adhere to democratic principles. We believe in a social system based on production for use, not for profit, a system of production and distribution socially owned and democratically controlled in the interests of the people. We believe in the attainment of our ends by peaceful, legal means, through political action, through education and agitation. We stand side by side with trade unionism and political action, as a means of combatting the evils of capitalism and laying the foundation of a class-free society.
We declare uncompromisingly and unequivocally for socialism. Between the capitalist class and the working class there is an irrepressible conflict. Capitalism divides society into two antagonistic forces, because it is based upon two sets of conflicting economic interests. They each desire economic independence. One of these forces believes that it is justly entitled to the economic independence which it has, but which it manifestly did not create; the other force believes that it is being unjustly deprived of that which it creates and which it never possesses. A capitalist is one who profits by the system. If he labors himself, it does not alter the fact that he has an income apart from his labor sufficient to sustain him for life without labour, and therefore his is economically independent
The Socialist Party platform declares the objects to be the formation of a working class party; the abolition of wage slavery; severance with all capitalist and reform parties; abolition of class rule; the establishment of world socialism, the cooperative commonwealth. Private ownership of the means of production and distribution is the seed or germ of capitalism, of which wage slavery is the most revolting feature. This seed has now brought forth a bitter fruit in the class struggle, but the Socialist Party, champions the working class, declaring its intention to be the abolition of wage slavery by the establishment of a national system of cooperative industry, based upon the social or common ownership of the means of production and distribution, to be administered by society in the common interest of all its members and the complete emancipation of the socially useful classes from the domination of capitalism.
The present unplanned system of production, due to the individual ownership and cultivation of land for private profit, together with the introduction of machinery which so greatly multiplies results is, under the competitive system, bound to be profitless and ruinous to the farmers. Why should they of all people be opposed to collective ownership of the land? How many of them today own the land they live upon? Why should we struggle through a lifetime to maintain private ownership of a few acres, to leave to our children, subject to all the vicissitudes of the capitalist system, when through the substitution of common ownership, we relieve ourselves of this death grapple with greed, make ourselves and our children the wards and defenders of society?
In socialism, private ownership and barter in capital being at an end, money would lose the functions which it possessed under capitalism Party, progress towards the the abolition of wage slavery and establishment of the cooperative commonwealth.
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