Establish the socialist co-operative commonwealth

 

Members of the World Socialist Movement are not emotionally insensitive on the pain suffered by many of our brothers and sisters around the world . But we refuse to be so emotionally committed that we lose sight of our own aim and object—Socialism. Emotion is only a positive and constructive force when it is controlled and directed. When it is misdirected its effects are negative and pernicious. We do not put forward our diagnosis of society merely because it is right, but because in the conclusions we draw from it are the humanitarian assumptions of remedying the social ills of today’s society. We are keenly aware of the many problems inflicted upon our fellow-workers, but we refuse in lieu of our own remedy to accept what we hold to be harmful soporifics based on a faulty diagnosis. To act other than we do would be to impugn our own humanitarian aims and falsify the reason for the  existence of our political organisation. We offer the universal unity of humanity. Others have paid lip service to this ideal. We have acted upon it and not to act on what you believe is not really to believe it at all.

Only in the socialist commonwealth, will vanish the ills we desire to end, and how ever distant it may be, we must travel that road. For ourselves, it is our hope and  wish that we may live to witness the establishment in many lands of that cooperative commonwealth, and the expansion of human happiness. Being socialists, we have an attainable ideal. Socialism, we say, is the only practicable solution for abolishing the many evils that are the product of the operations of capitalism. Socialism, we suggest, is the only system that can effectually realise for the world’s millions a real, true and full life, such as should be theirs who are the wealth producers.

We seek a world where here is peace  from pole to pole; a world where war and the very causes of war are abolished. We desire a full, joyous and unfettered life for all peoples everywhere. We campaign for the complete emancipation of the world’s workers from their wage-slavery, so that all these desirable things should be ours. We must overthrow the capitalist system, and establish in its place the socialist cooperative commonwealth of the world.

So long as we continue to tolerate this system of private ownership and production for profit, so long will the needs of humanity be disregarded. The hungry want food, and they cannot buy it because of their poverty. They are ill-housed and yet the race-horses of the wealthy are splendidly stabled and cared for. “Man's inhumanity to man,” as Burns so aptly phrased it, is exemplified to the nth degree by the social system we know as capitalism. In time of ”peace” or war, human considerations are the last things the ruling-class think of. We must have a goal to reach, a splendid purpose to fulfil far beyond the petty idea of working for wages in order to get a living; or the parochial ideas of reformers. Socialism, alone, opens up an immense vista of boundless development for the individual and for the world’s multi-millions. For socialism will come to free Mankind from bondage. We know that the socialist commonwealth, alone, can realise in full a social condition of equality and concord that is expressed by the phrase: “Each for all, and all for each!” 

Do you want joy and peace and freedom in full splendour?

You will get these only through your own wise and determined efforts—by establishing a worldwide socialist cooperative commonwealth. To those who understand and agree with our case for socialism our we extend an earnest invitation to assist in the efforts we are making to build up a vigorous and healthy socialist organisation.

bound together by a common understanding, with the bond of class-conscious solidarity, determined to wage uncompromising war on all who bar our way toward the goal of our ambition—the establishment of the socialist co-operative commonwealth, where poverty will give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.