All for One and One for All

 Capitalism creates many problems and inflicts upon people all kinds of pressures. There was certainly plenty to protest about — there always is. What is baffling is despite so much experience in protesting people still persist in trying to campaign on individual issues and in isolation. They make little attempt to relate either one problem to another or to relate all the problems to a common cause. It seems that for every inhumanity there is a group of people ready to mushroom into an organisation and start protesting. The Socialist Party does not oppose the idea of resistance and protest but what we wish to happen is to make them a more fruitful form of expression. The fact that the horrors of capitalism do result in opposition and demonstrations is more hopeful than an attitude of indifference. But nothing is gained going over the same ground over and over again. The basic weakness of protest movements is that they all share one common illusion — that capitalism can be made to work in such a way that its worst effects can be avoided. They wrongly assume that politicians can at will adopt policies that would remove the problems endangered by capitalism. By engaging in reforms to mitigate some particular evil within the framework of capitalism they inevitably get involved in helping to perpetuate the very conditions which give rise to the evils against which they protest. We want the workers of the world to equip themselves with socialist understanding and put an end to the system that robs them, by bringing about socialism, a wage-free, class-free world based on free access and common ownership.

Exploitation, poverty, hunger and war, can only be abolished when their cause is understood. It is of little use to tinker with effects whilst the cause remains untouched and unchanged due to the fact that those who tinker with the effects are ignorant of the cause. When, and only when, a majority of the world's workers understand that ownership by the world capitalist class of the means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth, means perpetual poverty, shortages and wars for those who have to humble themselves for wages, will they be able to replace class ownership with common ownership, produce goods for use instead of profit and see that people receive in accordance with their needs instead of the limited confines of their wages packets.

To turn our eyes away from a problem is no solution, for the problem still remains. Unless they see that their interests can only be served by unity on a basis of understanding they cannot put the solution socialism into practice.  Mankind must become objective and not dominated by immediate conditions. We must move on to socialism. A socialist society will organise itself on a democratic basis at every level. The social form will not, nor cannot be, tied to the past, but it will truly reflect the great contribution of the past in the form of the accumulated knowledge and social experience so painfully acquired which has made socialism possible. It should not be forgotten that the principal institutions of mankind have developed from a few germs of thought and a few simple cells of organisation. The natural form of humanity is that which equates the individual with all men and women, and that great equaliser is common ownership of the means whereby we live. The citizens of the Socialist community will work voluntarily because they are doing a job they love, for the benefit of society as a whole—i.e., in the long run, for themselves. All work in a socialist society will be essential and useful. There will be no need to try to stop people from doing wasteful and unessential things, like pouring luxuries into the lap of already overfed parasites.  It is incumbent upon the Socialist Party to explain that socialism must be based on voluntary labour—not force, compulsion, trickery, or deceit. 

Workers will never be able to take sound action until they possess the knowledge of socialism that it is our aim to provide. Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely from one crisis to another.