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Saturday, June 11, 2022

An Appeal to Fellow-Workers

 We address you as socialists and that may well be the reason many of you will have for not listening to us. Socialists, some will say, are impractical visionaries holding mistaken theories. Yet it is forgotten that our fellow workers hold to theories not their own but those of the mainstream media, ideas proven false and found useless.

 

The great goal of socialism is the abolition of capitalism and its protector, the State, and the aim is the transformation of society  into a socialised communal world. We know it requires a mental effort to envisage such a future because you are contemplating a society in which all share rule and all are free. A complete collective ownership of the means of production and of distribution will necessarily deprive  governing and governed, rich and poor, master and wage slave of distinction. In place of the present miserable existence everyone shall receive all that one requires, not only food, healthcare and shelter, but leisure and cultural arts. This can be done by associated effort only – call it communismor socialism, as you will. 

 

It is a question of human freedom versus wage slavery. The Socialist Party offers the only remedy, which is world socialism. The overthrow of capitalism—that is a DEMAND—it is THE demand. It advocates men and women to think for themselves and have convictions of their own.

 

Anti-capitalist parties  may initially aim to follow a different course, but if they gain strength, they tend to be assimilated by the State that they set out to reform and to become buttresses of capitalist rule. Three factors come into play:

• The party acquires an apparatus of well-paid staff and elected officials with a stake in the existing political system, and this bureaucracy gradually takes control.

• The party dilutes its programme by giving political support to the  government in return for minor reforms.

• The party takes office, but finds itself the prisoner of the surrounding capitalist state (ministerial department, courts, the police and army, mechanisms of financial control, all backed up by the capitalist media), and is forced to abandon almost all of its programme as the price of “power.”

What is needed to challenge their power is a party with a different class foundation, one rooted in the struggles of working people. Building such a party is today the common task of all who seek an alternative to the misery and exploitation of the present capitalist order.

We are committed socialists out of conviction–because we see capitalism as harmful to the vast majority of  the world’s people. This system we live under, by its very nature, grinds the poor and working people, sets one group against another, and acts violently against people at home and around the world when they resist.

 

We see in socialism the seeds and the method of achieving a more just, more cooperative and more peaceful society. The Socialist Party can offer an alternative which can meet basic needs of people and which is based on cooperation. The alternatives which capitalists will propose will be based on hatred or fear of particular groups. Socialists will inspire confidence among working people and win them over. Socialism offers a future free from the fears of poverty, sexism, racism, dog-eat-dog competition, joblessness, and the loneliness of old age.

 

As our movement grows, we will be nearer to creating a society that allows each person to create and produce according to her or his ability and to obtain what she or he needs.

 

We see the primary task of the Socialist Party to assist in the building of a mass movement of the working class to fight for socialism. People are our most precious resource.  We see capitalism tas a destructive system that hurts, divides and exploits the vast majority of our people for the sake of profits and power for the few. We advocate and work for socialism–that is, common  ownership and collective control of the means of production (factories, fields, utilities, etc.) We want a system based on cooperation, where the people build together for the common good.

 

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