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Tuesday, February 09, 2021

WHAT WE WANT AND WHY.

 


Knowing as we do the ambition and aspirations of our fellow-socialists to grow our movement, we fear that the progress we have made has been unsatisfactory. But no matter what our adversaries may say, and however slow progress may so far have been, the future is with us. One is apt to forget that capitalism, though it has lasted far too long for us already, has after all only had a short run, compared with preceding stages in the evolution of human society. Even so, it shows already unmistakable signs of being decrepit scarcely coping with all 
its problems and dilemmas. Just observe the pitiful helplessness of the whole crowd of capitalism’s henchmen and hirelings, of its spokesmen in the media, excuse its failures. Note capitalism’s prominent men and women, its scientists, its military experts  warning and imploring the ordinary men and women throughout the world to end the menace of global warming which they, the politicians know not how to end.

 

One wishes that the ordinary men and women throughout the world would put an end to the sordid system of competitive capitalism.

 

The task of spreading this knowledge is left to the socialist. With our scant means, and all the wide channels of propaganda closed against us, it is indeed a heavy task. There is only one ally for opening the workers’ eyes and driving home the lesson that nothing but a fundamental change as proposed by socialists, can help. That ally is the constant deterioration of conditions and the glaring failure and futility of all efforts and measures to cope with it. With all the long and painful experience before them, the workers should certainly no longer be as ready as they have been in the past, to swallow the rubbish that capitalism is the only possible system and that common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by society as a whole is supposed to be a Utopia.


 There is the task, a hard task admittedly, but worth the doing. Life to the socialist means unremitting toil in the cause of socialism, perseverance in spite of all discouragement, the marching onward in the face of all doubts and difficulties. Even if we of this generation do not see and taste the fruits of our sowing, yet even then we shall have our reward—in the knowledge that we have fought on the side of energy against apathy, of youth against the decrepit, of life itself against death.

 

Socialism has not yet been achieved and the capitalist class are still strongly entrenched in possession of property and power. Large numbers of workers now realise that capitalism cannot provide comfort, security and peace to the populations of the world, but much has yet to be done before mere discontent with capitalism can be transformed into an understanding of the need for replacing capitalism by a social system in which the means of production and distribution shall be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community. Much of the discontent of the working class, instead of being directed to the building up of political parties having socialism as their aim, is being frittered away uselessly in “Labour” parties aiming to reform capitalism by democratic means or in "Communist” parties which have the object of introducing state capitalism. Neither in aim nor in method does the Socialist Party or its companion parties in Canada, India, New Zealand and United States of America fall into either of these two camps. These parties hold that the sole aim of the genuine socialist movement is and must be to achieve socialism; that this can be done only when a majority of the workers have become socialists; that the road to socialism is by gaining control of the machinery of government by democratic, parliamentary means; and that the Socialist Party, while extending the hand of fraternity to the workers of all lands, must on principle refuse to ally itself with the parties of capitalism, whether they openly avow themselves such or whether they pursue the aim of capitalist reform under the name of "Labour” or “Communist.”

 

Many of the adherents of reformism and advocates of state capitalism pay lip service to internationalism, yet, like the British Labour Party on the one hand and the Communist Party on the other, are prepared to lend themselves to the furtherance of capitalist imperialism. Socialists can have no part or lot in capitalism and imperialism.

 

Unlike those parties, which degrade the name of socialism, the Socialist Party and its companion parties have an unbroken record of loyalty to socialism and working-class internationalism in peace or in war. In the Great War, 1914-1918, and in the World War, 1939-1945, the Socialist Party stood by the principles of socialism and proudly proclaimed its refusal to give support to capitalist war. True to our international Socialist principles we seek contact with Socialist workers in other countries who take their stand on the same principles, with a view to setting on foot at last a genuine world socialist movement free from the national prejudices and compromise policies that up to the present have hindered the earlier march of the Internationals.



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