The Socialist Party leaves reforms of all kinds to those who think the present social system worth reforming. For its part, the Socialist Party seeks the abolition of the entire capitalist system. Let us rather take up the work of clarifying out movement; let us cast out the dross of legislative reform, and carry to the working class an uncompromising message, rallying them for the first step — the conquest of political power. It advocates that the workers must gain political power in order to get possession of the government. It will then be possible for them to use the institution of the State for its final function — the abolition of all classes by the socialisation of the means of wealth production. We, the Impossibilists, have always been charged with not being constructive. Actually, however, it was the gradualists who perform no constructive work themselves.
The framework of the new socialist society requires no building within the old. It is already built — in the form of highly organised, socialised production, which by the way is in no way connected with the cooperative movement of industrial unionism. The task that presents itself is to abolish the present class ownership. Let us not fritter away our time dreaming about how affairs will be administered in the future socialist world. What the Socialist Party presents is a clear-cut revolutionary platform around which most workers could consistently rally and present an unbroken front to the class enemy.
We live in a world where hunger, poverty, unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and many forms of repression, including the most barbaric, such as torture and genocide, are the lot of the planet’s inhabitants. Around the world, the lives of hundreds of millions of men, women, and children scarcely tolerable and injustice has become common practice. Humanity’s resources are senselessly wasted while people’s needs remain unsatisfied. The land is despoiled and misery abounds. We ask: why is it that we have to put up with these conditions? The reality is that the vast majority of the people of the globe share a common condition: that of living in a society where the owners of the means of production impose their will over those who possess nothing or little. In other words, the vast majority of people live in a society divided into social classes where the propertied classes, the capitalists and landowners, dominate the classes who have little or no property, the workers. The economic base of this social regime is the capitalist system. Essentially, capitalism is the result of the exploitation of the labour power of working people by the employers, owners of the means of production.
The mission of the working class is thus not only to replace the rule of one class with that of another, as has happened already in previous revolutions, but also to liberate all of humanity from the chains of exploitation and oppression by the abolition of classes themselves. In this way the divisions between the city and countryside, and between mental and manual labour will also be abolished, and a society without a State will be created, since the State is nothing other than the instrument of the dictatorship of one class over the others. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will suppress the private ownership of the means of production in order to establish socialist and collective property, and replace capitalist commodity production by the socialist organization of production based on the labour of all the members of society and designed to ensure the complete well-being and full development of each person. The Socialist Party expresses the idea that the only demand that can really lead to emancipation is the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, the abolition of the exploitation of Man by Man, and the construction of a socialist society. It is the fundamental task of the socialist revolution.
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