The Aim of The World Socialist Movement

 

The emancipation of the working class knows no slogan with the word "wage" other than “abolish the wage system.”  The programme of revolution is revolution. Palliatives are props to that which the revolution intends to overthrow. Goals determine methods. The goal of social evolution is the final overthrow of class rule, its methods must fit the goal. Capitalism is the last expression of class rule. The economic foundation of class rule is the private ownership of the necessaries for production. The social structure of class rule is the political State -- that social structure in which government is an organ separate and apart from production, with no vital function other than the maintenance of the supremacy of the ruling class. The overthrow of class rule means the overthrow of the political State, and its substitution with world socialism, under which the necessaries for production are collectively owned and operated by and for the people.

The Socialist Party hates the iniquity of the capitalist system, but pities the perpetrator and bends his efforts to remove the conditions that made the iniquity possible -- the Socialist Party, accordingly, attacks the evil at its root. The non-socialist hates the perpetrator and visits punishment upon him, yet cultivates the social conditions that bred the iniquity -- the non-socialist, accordingly, waters the roots of the iniquity itself.

The Socialist Party holds capitalist society responsible for the billionaires, not the billionaires for capitalist society; the non-socialist holds billionaires guilty and acquits capitalist society. A socialist expresses no such individual malice or personal hatred.

The aim of the World Socialist Movement is the abolition of class rule and class conflict, with all their evil consequences, and the development of a state of society in which the few shall no longer be able to enjoy luxury and ease at the expense of over-work and insecurity for the majority. So great have science and invention increased our productive powers that an abundance of all the good things of life for the whole population could be produced without subjecting any human being to drudgery or exhausting toil. To assure plenty, security, leisure, and freedom for all, it is necessary that the existing property system, the existing forms of economic control and distribution of wealth, be so changed as to adapt them to the conditions of modern life.

The Socialist Party does not condemn private possessions as such. It condemns the private ownership of great socially necessary means of production, under which working people are employed only on such terms as assuring an unearned income to the owners and are thrown into idleness and want whenever the owners cannot profit by their work. Only by the socialised common ownership and democratic control of such productive wealth, doing away with exploitation and making the satisfaction of human wants the ruling motive in production, can the ideal of a class-free society be achieved. The interest of the wage-workers, demands this change.

Across the undeveloped and developing world, small farmers are steadily losing ground. They are exploited by the capitalist groups which control the transportation and marketing of their produce, by those from which they must purchase farm machinery and supplies, and above all by those which control money and credit. Year by year many thousands of them lose the title to their land and either sink into being hired farm labourers or else give up farming altogether and seek employment in an overcrowded urban labour market.

 Meanwhile, multinational corporations and operated by wage labour, are growing at the expense of the small-holder farmers.

The same forces are at work invading the trade of small retailers and merchants, crushed by the same power which exploits the wage workers. Although their immediate interests may conflict with those of the wage workers at some points, they coincide with them at many others. In the long run, they all have a common interest in changing the basis of our economic system.

 The overthrow of capitalism, and the establishment of socialism, that, and that alone, is the worker's hope. Political freedom must rest on the possession of the earth.

Gerrald Winstanley in his “The New Law of Righteousness,” denounced the private ownership of the land:

“And let all men say what they will, so long as such are rulers as call the land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of mine and thine, the common people shall never have their liberty…”