There is nothing like victory to give workers confidence. Under capitalism, you don't always win even if you fight hard. The system is weighted in favour of the capitalists, and it takes a lot of hard struggle for workers to win battles in the class war. For the past couple of centuries the workers have been pressing on. And the capitalists have been pushing back. With their police scab-herders and their anti-union laws and their puppet Judges and their parties of Left and Right who seek to run the wages system, our class enemies have pushed and pushed. The tragedy is that workers are still fighting, when we can muster the confidence to fight, for the crumbs from the cake we ourselves bake. We should learn from the events that it is the wages system itself which is our enemy; only its abolition will mark the true victory of the working class.
The Socialist Party repudiates the myth that humans are inherently anti-social and uncooperative, and state emphatically that human nature is no barrier to a sane, socialist society. It rejects the economics of capitalism, which assert that we need buying and selling and prices to determine what people need; price-free access to all goods and services for everyone is the only way to allocate goods efficiently. We are seeing again the intensifying of human hardship side-by-side with surpluses of goods which the market cannot absorb. Which should just serve to remind us that capitalism is still a system of bitter contradictions which no government can iron out. They will disappear only when capitalism itself is abolished and socialism takes its place.
We know that capitalism will give workers all over the world insecurity and unemployment. It will grind out poverty and restriction and condemn millions of people to live, drab, inadequate lives. It may even give us frights like a war over Ukraine or South China Sea.
Socialism will finish the insecurities and the anomalies which blight our lives from one end of the year to another. The best we can wish ourselves is that the world working class will get enough understanding of society to throw off the system which restricts and condemns them and replace it with one in which happiness and plenty are no longer an empty dream.
The inadequacies of capitalism will play their part in bringing them to this. So to our readers in the slums nd in the other drab, dingy working class homes; to the unemployed and to those who know that their living is insecure; to those who hate and fear war: to all those who wish and work for a world fit for humans to live in. Many people insist that socialism means we would all have to conform while capitalism opposes this and encourages individuality. The truth is that capitalism dislikes individuality and loves conformity.
In a war between dictatorship and democracy, we are not indifferent in regard to the issue. It is plain that under a dictatorship you are robotised: you do not think, you obey; under a democracy you imbibe ideas, carefully fostered, which result in causing you to believe you are following your own inclinations when safeguarding ruling class interests.The crimes of dictators smell to high heavens, and the hypocrisy of the leaders of democracy arouse disgust amongst those to whom working class interests are paramount.
We much prefer a democracy to a dictatorship. We freely acknowledge that we prefer the latter, because, under a Democracy, there is a better chance for the laws of social evolution to work themselves out without unnecessary violence. We have been brought up that way, but when we see the dangling carrots held in front of the donkey to induce it to pull the load, we are wise to the game. In peace or war, so long as capitalism shall last, the wage slave is doomed to drag his or her heavy burden, and to receive as a recompense just about sufficient to do so.
Do the workers have the political capacity to overthrow capitalism? From its very beginning the Socialist Party has answered in the affirmative.It has taken the workers longer to gain power than we foresaw, but the class wars and industrial conflicts in which the workers have the opportunity to learn great political lessons have neither ceased nor diminished. This provides the workers with greater, large-scale opportunities to learn, for instance, that capitalism has nothing to offer them but mass misery. The bankruptcy of capitalism, which is increasingly evident to the workers, is a vital factor in any consideration of revolutionary prospects. Workers are far from the “impotence’’ attributed to them and there exists sufficient evidence of a vast reservoir of revolutionary energy stored up.
The Socialist Party says that workers in Britain or Russia, or the United States, or France and elsewhere throughout the world, can solve the problems of poverty in a world of potential plenty, by organising to establish a new and completely different form of a society of production of wealth solely for use and the satisfaction of needs. Such a society would not be Heaven on Earth or Utopia; but it would soon tackle, and solve, the basic problems thrown up by capitalism. And that is more than enough.
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