The Hope Is Socialism

 

Freedom in its truest sense is yet unknown to mankind. The emancipation of labour is essential to the freedom of humanity. The working class is still on all fours, worked, ridden, whipped and stabled, to serve the convenience of its master. Economic freedom will elevate humanity to a higher level than it has ever known. Wealth and leisure for all. Socialism alone stresses the importance of the individual in a free society. 

Our system is based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production in our hands, in the hands of the workers. This will permit us to begin a planned socialist economy.

Look behind the mask of propaganda and lies that are told about wars and you will find, no matter what the country, that this is a gigantic struggle between the capitalist powers for land, raw material, markets, cheap labour, in a word, for PROFITS!  The aims of one nation’s capitalism are essentially the same as those of all other capitalist countries.

 Owners and capitalists do not sufficiently exploit the means of production they own and prevent others from exploiting them, partly for incompetence and indifference, and largely because of a system that often makes profits decrease with abundance and increase with the shortage. Because of the disorder inherent in the individualistic economy, there are unbalances between one place and the other, overproduction crises, etc., but all in all the general production is always on the verge of shortages.

The Socialist Party’s aim is to replace the capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible. The present order is marked by glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity, by chaotic waste and instability; and in an age of plenty, it condemns the great mass of the people to poverty and insecurity.

Power has become more and more concentrated into the hands of a small irresponsible minority of financiers and industrialists and to their predatory interests, the majority are habitually sacrificed. When private profit is the main stimulus to the economic effort, our society oscillates between periods of feverish prosperity in which the main benefits go to speculators and profiteers, and of catastrophic depression, in which the common man's normal state of insecurity and hardship is accentuated. We believe that these evils can be removed only in a planned and socialised economy in which our natural resources and principal means of production and distribution are owned, controlled and operated by the people.

 Our aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation. Nor shall we interfere with the cultural rights of racial or religious minorities. What we seek is a proper collective organisation of our economic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen. The idea of a cooperative commonwealth has to be supported by a majority of the people. We do not believe in change by violence.

The essence of the capitalist system is the ownership and control of the materials and tools of production and distribution by a small class whose legal title to the lands, forests, mines, transport, quarries, mills, factories, and other industrial and commercial utilities and plants gives them control over the lives of the working masses. The workers subsist in a new form of slavery, wherein labour-power is paid for by wages, and the bare chance to live depends upon employment by some capitalist master. There is but one solution for the ills of capitalist society, but one way for the workers to achieve freedom and human life — the way of the social revolution.

Under this system, each one is forever pitted against the other one. We want a system in which we can live side by side like brothers and sisters. With socialism, we would have real democracy. Socialism does not mean equal pay to all but about ending the wages system.