The Socialist Party points to the solution of our many social problems that the means of life, operated as they are by the workers collectively must be controlled collectively. They must be made the common possession of society. Wealth must be produced for social use and not for private profit.
Poverty prevails throughout the capitalist world irrespective of forms of government, rising or falling birth rates, etc. It exists because the abundance of wealth produced by the workers is in the hands of the non-producers, the capitalists, who own the means and results of production. The workers’ share of that wealth is wages, a fraction of the total values they produce. Wealth is produced to-day for markets, which relatively shrink as world competition grows more intense. Labour saving devices increase the number of unemployed, as they reduce the number required for a given amount of production. Wars are fought either to extend or retain markets for the disposal of wealth primarily produced for sale. The propertyless condition of the workers compels them to enter the labour market in order to meet the owners of their means of living—the buyers of their labour power—and the effective sale of that labour power is expressed in its price or wage.
The workers, as a class, are not poor because of their larger families. Wealth has increased much faster than the population. The workers are born poor, remain poor, single or married, employed or unemployed, with small families or large. The workers are poor today in the midst of plenty. The employer is only interested in the worker as a factor in production, as an economic category, he is indifferent to all else about the worker save his cheapness, efficiency and docility. Anything that tends to weaken or decrease these qualities naturally meets with the determined opposition of the capitalist class, while all that makes the worker cheaper, more productive and more contented with his lot as a wage-slave is eagerly welcomed and actively supported.
The budding international solidarity of the past has been swallowed up by the armed and antagonistic camps of to-day, but our message still remains as urgent and as alive as when it was first delivered, the message of socialism, the only message of hope, of solidarity, of certainty in a world of hatred, strife and uncertainty.
This message has its roots far back in the past. The germs of communistic ideas go back centuries, but the germs of socialistic ideas, as we know them to-day, were synonymous with the growth of capitalism. We again call attention to the only bright gleam in the heavy clouds that hover over us—our message of hope. The determination to establish a new form of society in which everything that is in and on the earth shall be the common heritage of all mankind; where security, comfort and harmony will be the lot of all. All that is necessary for the establishment of this society is understanding and the will to achieve it. If humankind will not rouse themselves for their own sakes, surely they will hear the cry of generations yet unborn and establish Socialism before it is too late.
Until the people have succeeded in overthrowing the present grotesquely stupid and inhuman social order, the mass of the people will remain what they are—heirs to the slavery of ages, exposed to all the evils and vicissitudes of a system based on property and production for profit. It is the height of folly on the part of the working class to continue placing their trust in mealy-mouthed professional politicians and glib-tongued “personalities,” and to fall again and again for their propaganda, despite all past disillusions and these leaders' glaring failure everywhere to deliver the goods. With the technical achievements and mass production that the last 100 years have brought to mankind, the social adjustment to this technical development, i.e. the fundamental change in the constitution of society as taught and advocated by scientific socialism, is now the only thing that matters. That teaching is that the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution must be converted from private and state control to the common property of the whole people if poverty, insecurity, class-conflict and war is to be effaced from the face of the earth.
It's as simple as that.
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