Free the People

 It is impossible for either the Conservative or the Labour Party, Republican or the Democratic Party, to offer any practicable solution for our social ills because those maladies are the inevitable and natural outgrowth of the wage system which system these parties are alike pledged to support and defend the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class is a continuous and irrepressible conflict, a conflict that tends every day rather be intensified than to be softened.

 Socialism means co-operative economics, based on common ownership of land and the means of production. Poverty is due to capitalism, i.e., to the monopoly by a diminishing class of the fruits of social effort. It can be abolished so soon as the class which suffers from it realises the cause of it and removes that cause. When the workers organise as a class, seize political power, and convert the means of living into the common property of all, then and then only will class distinctions and their social and economic accompaniments disappear.

The struggle between the capitalists over the surplus wealth wrung from their slaves on the one hand and the struggle between the slaves for jobs on the other are the fruits of immature development. They will vanish when in the struggle between these two classes as a whole, the workers, are victorious. Production will then be carried on in conscious co-operation in order to secure the fullest possible development for every individual. 

Our work is not to pander to the prejudices of the ignorant but to win the workers’ minds for socialism. Not by agreeing with their unsound ideas but by replacing these wrong notions with sound knowledge. Nothing can help you but the conscious organisation of your class for the conquest of political power and the introduction of a social order in which “private” or “public” property based on profit-making shall find no place, but in which the means of life shall be the common heritage of all.

 We do not say that “everything in the garden will be lovely” when a class-conscious working class controls Parliament. The capture of the political machinery is, as Marx says in the Communist Manifesto, the first step which must be taken to obtain emancipation. The succeeding conditions may be quite unlovely, depending upon the circumstances of the time and the degree of counter-revolution attempted. Parliament is a machine that arose and evolved long before capitalism. The tremendous outlay of finance and effort on the part of capitalists to assure that the workers vote for capitalist candidates and their lackeys show how important control of Parliament is. Then we are told that socialist control of Parliament will allow capitalists to have the money to pay for the upkeep of the armed forces for their own use. The actual fact is that the armed forces are maintained out of funds voted by Parliament. These huge sums are obtained from taxation paid by the employers out of the surplus extracted from the result of the workers’ labour. This exploitation will stop when the workers control political power and hence the funds out of which capitalists can pay armies will cease.

The capitalist system could not be run by bodies of employers hiring some armed bands to attack the whole working class. Capitalism depends, upon the regular and smooth conduct of affairs under which the wheels of industry can turn, commerce be carried on and profits are obtained. Therefore a constitution with delegated functions and a Parliament controlling nationally the forces of repression is an essential thing to the life of capitalism in all “advanced” countries.

The vote does not itself abolish capitalism but the vote in the hands of an organised socialist working class in advanced “democratic” capitalist countries, gives control of the machinery of coercion, the army, etc. Whether and how that force will need to be used depends on the capitalist minority, who will then, if they resist the majority, be rebels. Therefore, the resolute efforts of all those aiming at the conquest of the social powers are to control the political machine.

Mussolini or Lenin or Hitler, or the worldwide struggles of rising capitalists—each had to, first of all, conquer political power as represented in the political machinery of each country. The capitalists being few, are compelled to hire the workers to run the system, and also the civil and military forces to control it. Further, officers are helpless without an army and the army acts not according to its officers but according to instructions that are given by those in charge of political power.

Our policy is framed for the country in which we live, and according to existing conditions. Parliament being the central machine of the present constitution, we are compelled to control it in our own interests as a working class.

Should the capitalists destroy the constitution, the situation would be changed and the detailed policy of the workers would be different. But this assumption of the destruction of Parliamentary institutions reckons without the facts of economic life. In destroying the constitution the capitalists would cripple their system. Capitalism in advanced countries depends upon government by elected authority, local and national and the disruption of these bodies would result in chaos, not in a system. The incitement to open warfare resulting from the abolition of Parliament would prevent that ordered working of affairs upon which capitalism depends.

A socialist working-class intent upon abolishing capitalism would have a policy directly in conflict with the interests of capitalists—financial or industrial, and the day of Parliament carrying out the wishes of the capitalists would be over. Socialist knowledge, socialist organisation and socialist political action by the mass of the working class. The class war is the only sound basis for the socialist theory.

It cannot be too often repeated that socialism is not inevitable in the sense that the return of the seasons, the alternation of day and night, the ebb and flow of the tides are inevitable. Socialism is the first conscious putting forth of human genius in a concrete endeavour to make the earth a common human possession. Humanly speaking, it appears to us to be humanity’s next step. We recognise that the process can be helped or retarded. We can form but the merest estimate of the extent to which selfishness and stupidity may retard the change, but we are certain that each and every new member of the Socialist Party hastens its coming and the speedy realisation of our hopes - SOCIALISM.