The Socialist Party seeks to abolish class-divided society. To achieve this, the revolutionary object of the workers must be socialism. As socialists, we are concerned with socialism and not with any scheme of taxation. Hence we oppose all other parties which endeavour to maintain in the workers’ minds the illusion that taxes are a political issue for them. When the working class have become conscious of their position as disinherited slaves and have determined to end capitalism and substitute socialism—when they have organised as a class and become politically supreme, they are hardly likely to waste their time in piecemeal measures. Instead of indulging in financial tricks in order to enable their wages to “buy back the whole of the wealth” they produce, they will organise a system of production and distribution in which wages and interest, along with the whole financial camouflage, will find no place. They will cease to produce commodities and will commence producing use-values only. Money therefore will cease to have any function to perform and the problems connected with money will cease to trouble them.
For the working population, it is a society of poverty and insecurity; to most of them, it offers not the slightest chance of escape from a lifetime of constant, heart-breaking effort to earn a living. For the working-class, it is a society that breeds war and strife, in which their masters, on whose behalf they fight, use every device to instigate antagonism between them. From the cradle to the grave, they are subjected to a mass of propaganda that deadens their minds, works on their prejudices, and endeavours by every means possible to turn their thoughts away from the real cause of their troubles. They are the tools of political leaders and demagogues who make them promises that they do not keep. Disappointed, they exchange one set of political leaders for another, whose promises are no more fulfilled than the promises of those before them.
They become disillusioned, bitter, and cynical; fair game for dictators and “strong men” who promise to lead them to a “promised land,’’ but instead lead them into greater disasters and misfortunes. All the time they are experiencing unemployment, poverty, insecurity, competition for jobs, struggles to “rise up the ladder." They seek to escape from the harsh world of reality in dreams and games of make-believe, in the lottery and computer games, but only for brief moments, for capitalism soon brings them back to things as they are, and not as they would wish them to be. They still have to contend with poverty, unemployment, insecurity, and war. For the working-class, capitalism is a society of mental, social, and economic frustration; as such it breeds race-prejudice and national chauvinism as a swamp breeds pestilence.
The growing difficulty of our masters and their apologists to prove the capitalist system a beneficial one for the workers enables us to be assured with no false optimism that time and truth are on our side. Capitalism has not changed. It is still a system of minority wealth and mass poverty and insecurity—and just at present, it is profits, stock exchange prices and the emergence of new crops of millionaires and billionaires. The socialist struggle has not ended, it has hardly begun, and it will achieve in due time a social system that really will be a social revolution.
The ruling class would have you believe that socialists call for violent action and are deluded, irrational, psychotic, and hateful while claiming for themselves the virtues of progress, logic, truth, beauty, and knowledge. Yet it is the socialists who say that existing productive relations have become fetters on the productive forces when new technology has outgrown the old organisation of production when automation, as it is wielded under the profit system brutally, makes millions of workers jobless and unproductive and that social revolution has become a necessity and all that means capitalism demands to be replaced by socialism. Socialism will unlock doors that have been barred to humanity.
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