To the Workers, the World

 

We are very much at the beginning, but one full of urgency and possibility, of one of the biggest opportunity for the world socialist movement in decades. We can’t successfully deal with the problems of today unless we clearly understand the main features of our goal. Our task is to replace the dictatorship of the capitalist with social democracy. Underneath its guise of neutrality and impartiality the state exists to defend the interests of the wealthy by repressing other classes. A future society will be will differ from capitalism in that no classes will exist, therefore, there will be no need for a state or coercive force. Economic production will be developed to a point where each can give and take freely. Racism, nationalism and sexism will disappear. The conflicts between manual and mental labour and between urban and rural life will be reconciled. Capitalism is a system of greed whereby 1/10 of 1% of the population controls all the wealth of society. This wealth can only come through the exploitation of the toil of the working people.

At present the whole globe is under the rule of capitalism.This rule is based upon private property and the production of commodities for the market. A small group is in possession of the means of producing these goods, and of the means of distributing them; this is the capitalist class. Their ownership assures this class economic domination over billions of working people, who possess no means of production, and who are forced to sell their labour power. The working class serves as a living source of profit to the capitalists exploiting its labour. The working class, economically oppressed is the slave of capital. The economic domination is secured by its political rule, and by its control of state organisation. There is not a single country in the world where Capital is not trampling the most elementary demands of the working class underfoot. . Everywhere the employers are attacking the disorganised and divided workers’ movement. The capitalist governments, the employers’ organisations, the capitalist media, all are being utilised in the fight against the working class. The offensive of capital has crossed the national frontiers and is being fought on an international scale.

 

The aim pursued by the World Socialist Moveent is the substitution of the capitalist order by a cooperative commonwealth as the sole means of escape for humanity, for it alone is able to remove the fundamental defects of the capitalist system. By means of abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, and the passing of these means into common property, the socialist society replaces the unregulated force of competition and the blind course of production by a rational organisation and an appropriate plan. The abolition of anarchy in production and of competition implies the simultaneous disappearance of poverty and war. The abolition of private property does away with the exploitation of one human being by other human beings. The work done is no longer done for others. Every difference between poverty and wealth disappears. At the same time class rule vanish also, above all – state power. State power, which is the embodiment of class rule, vanishes with the vanishing of the classes.

 

The Socialist Party is not leninist or trotskyists or maoists, but we are plain revolutionaries. We do not intend to lead the masses towards a class-free society because we are a constituted part of the working-class ourselves and adhere faithfully to the motto of the First International: The emancipation of the workers is an act of the workers themselves. If the masses wait for a revolutionary vanguard to lead them to the free society, they will neither be liberated. Our function as revolutionaries is to expose and debunk capitalist ideologies to open the door to the construction of a socialist society. There are various false theories, conspiratorial views, overt and concealed moral and political assumptions that have wide influence in society; the role of the socialist critic is to expose these as illusions or ideologies, and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation to generation. The Socialist Party hold the hopeful belief that by education and rational persuasion men and women can decide on the formation of a free society. Our picture of a future free society would not even be intelligible to us if we were not already acquainted with examples of cooperative activities in our present society. Contrary to the utopian, the Socialist Party consider it is a matter of keeping alive what already exists, of keeping up resistance, urging on the struggle to emancipate ourselves from myths and illusions. Nearly all socialists agree that a free society can exist only through voluntary association, and that its ultimate success will depend upon the educational development of the workers who will supplant the wage system with a new social arrangement, based on solidarity and economic well-being for all. That is socialism, in theory and practice.