Socialism is the Remedy

 

MUSTER UNDER OUR BANNER

Nationalism has nothing to offer—except a change of masters. Your real enemy is the present system. Capitalism, with its hideous contradiction of mass poverty amid the potential for plenty, is your real enemy. It persecutes you at every level, advertising itself as a world of plenty and then rewarding the wealth-producers with deprivation. For too long workers have suffered under this rotten set-up, when the means are at hand to create a society of production for need in which we can all give according to in abilities and take according to our self-determined needs. The clear duty of a real socialist party is to work for real socialism. It has no justification for existence apart from that. The cause of working-class misery is private ownership of the means of life. The interests of the workers, who do not own the means of life, are opposed to the interests of the capitalists, who do own them. This clash of interests is the class struggle. You have to choose. Either you take action to get socialism or you have to put up with the consequences of capitalism. There is no third choice. This is what socialism really means and its basis would be the ownership of the means of production and distribution by the whole community. The alternative is a social system in which the production of goods and the operation of services are carried on solely and directly for use, without buying and selling, profit-making or the wages system. We all want to get the best the world can offer. 

Our sole object is the achievement of socialism—a social system in which everything that is in or on the earth will be the common possession of all mankind. Everyone will be on an equal footing. There will be no frontiers, no buying and selling, and no privileged groups—except the old, the young, and the infirm.

We hold that capitalism, the system under which goods are produced by the workers for the profit of a relatively small section of owners of the means of production, is now the system that prevails all over the earth; that it breeds wars, slumps, internecine conflicts, and misery for the mass of the people; that there is a constant class struggle going on between the owners of the means of production, and those that operate them—the working class; that all the reforms put forward and fought for by well-meaning people have not touched the fringe of the problem of working class subjection but, instead, though even unintentionally, have pushed further away the day of emancipation; that, so long as the present system prevails there is no remedy for this state of affairs; the only way out is to abolish capitalism and establish socialism in its place; that State-ownership is not socialism, but a particular form of capitalism; that the workers must organise together internationally to attain their freedom from the conditions that oppress and frustrate them.

The Socialist Party has no desire to add itself to the number of your leaders. We are not back-slapping or head-patting to gain supporters. We seek your understanding and cooperation in the biggest of all projects, not to fight for the abolition of this or that or the amelioration of that or the other, but for a complete revolution in our social system. The capitalist system (the private ownership of the means of living) must go, we say. Its place must be taken by a system of common ownership, based on production for use only. This remedy is the only one worthwhile for the workers. Nothing, we say, can be accomplished until this is done.  The Socialist Party seeks the support and understanding of the working class and offers itself as a means by which the workers, through the ballot box, can obtain political power for this purpose. Since 1904, when this Party was founded, socialism has been our sole aim, and for that reason, we are opposed to all other political parties. The only way in which mankind can bring about social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a socialist working class. 

The parties and politicians you voted for stand for capitalism. Those elected are in office now on your mandate; you elected them to preside over your own poverty and exploitation. We would suggest that you consider taking control of your own lives. Instead of electing politicians and parties to run your own exploitation, you can organise your own future. We, the working class, can mandate our own representatives to go into the seats of government, local, national and international, and abolish the entire system of private and/or State ownership of the means of living which gives the accumulation of profits priority over our needs.

We call on all workers to join us to establish a society based on serving our needs instead of the profit needs of the minority class which dominates our lives today We can create a world in which poverty, famine, slums, unemployment and international conflict could not exist. Such a system we call socialism: a moneyless, classless world in which we all share in the ownership of wealth; a world in which we co-operate voluntarily to produce all the things we need and where we will have free and equal access to satisfy our requirements.