The world socialist revolution

 

There is ample room in a socialist world for the peoples of the world cooperating for their common good, but there is no room in a capitalist world for rival powers, each seeking profit through the capture of markets, the conquest of raw materials and the control of trade routes and strategic points for their strategic protection. For all of them, the watchword is “grow or shrivel.” it is the law of capitalism, the law of the jungle. The only programme the ruling class will maintain is one that is calculated to save their own skins.

We do not venture to cast the horoscope; we cannot inform our readers what the stars foretell. When the working class understand their class position they will establish socialism and in doing so remove all barriers to world unity, but they will do it in their own way, not according to any leader’s plan but in a manner that will surprise all leaders and would-be leaders.

Workers aspire to real changes, not illusory ones. This does not mean replacing one government with another. It means getting rid of the government of the capitalists. The political power we want, workers' power, will grow from the upsurge of mass struggles. It must be based on the organs of struggle the workers create for themselves – plant and neighbourhood committees supervising production, expropriating the bosses and managing a planned economy directly, a society radically different from the sinister caricatures of socialism provided by the former USSR. The socialism we want will be international. It will be built by the workers of the entire world. Workers' power is not the power of a party but the exercise of power by the workers themselves organised in their own councils and factory and neighbourhood committees.

We are against violence in general and want to build a socialist society and socialist world free of violence. Violence is inherent in capitalist society-not only in its police and army, and not only expressed in the horror of war, but also in the daily, continual violence done to individuals in the exploitation of man by man. We want to eliminate the source of this massive violence: capitalism.

 Real socialism has nothing to do with reforming capitalism, making it run better. We enter the elections, applying the democratic rights that are part of the electoral process. These rights themselves were wrested from the ruling powers by the people in past struggles. We do not create illusions in the electoral process, but, unfortunately, the vast majority of the people still hold such illusions. Since these illusions do exist, however, the working people take the elections seriously. To abstain from them would mean to allow the reformists, who do reinforce illusions in the elections and in capitalism, to go unchallenged.

The Socialist Party knows that the working class, being the lowest in the social system, cannot emancipate itself without as a result emancipating all others. Is it always necessary for one generation to wade through oceans of blood and heap up mountains of human sacrifice that the next generation may learn a grain of truth from it all? It is not enough to join the pacifists, who proclaim peace among the nations while helping to perpetuate the war among the classes, a war which in reality, is at the bottom of all other wars.

It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities.