It would be hard to imagine any assortment of lunatics devising a scheme for organising the political and economic affairs of humankind that would be more absurd than the system of world capitalism, currently exposed in all its rottenness.
Outside its appalling boom-slump syndrome (which currently and conclusively demonstrates that it is beyond the control of its alleged experts, its politicians, the capitalists themselves and their agents) it gives us wars, world hunger, insecurity, alienation and the monumental waste which now threatens the entire biosphere.
Historically, capitalism, despite its inherent evils, played a progressive role in that it banished feudalism and made the means of production social. Today its lunacies are simply an embargo on the rational production of goods and services. Real wealth is produced, and can only be produced, by the application of human labour-power to nature-given resources. The claims to ownership of the latter by a relatively small class of money shufflers derive from the historic usurpation of those means.
We, the working class, the producers of all real wealth, now have the power in our numbers to democratically reject the spurious claims of ownership of our means of life. With political will we can create a world where goods and services will be used to provide the needs of humanity rather than accumulating even more wealth for an economically redundant class of parasites.
We’re unlike any other group here today out to reform capitalism, who beg governments to be just a little less horrid, who ask our masters to throw us a few more crumbs from the bread we bake. We are not into the politics of compromise and we certainly are not prepared to be satisfied with crumbs. We demand the whole bakery.
We are here today to urge you to stop belittling yourself and your class by making the same age-old demands of the master class. Demand what until now has been considered “the impossible”! Join us in campaigning for a system of society where there are no leaders, no classes, no states or governments, no borders, no force or coercion; a world where the earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled and where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the benefit of all; a world of free access to the necessaries of life. Wouldn’t such a campaign movement not only address the real root of every campaign and protest currently ongoing?
The choice is yours – the struggle for world socialism and an end to our real problems or a lifetime attached to the ‘pick-your-cause’ brigade and the certainty you will be retracing your footsteps in years to come.
None of the political parties at present represented in Parliament desire the abolition of the private ownership of the means of life. Conservatives, Labour or Nationalists openly repudiate any such intention, while the left-wing by its support of, and endeavours to crawl into the Labour Party, shows its readiness to support capitalism in practice, contradictory though this may be to their theoretical claims.
Only by abolishing the cause of poverty and misery can the workers achieve health and happiness. The workers must give their attention to the abolition of this cause—the private ownership of the means of life.
The master class rule to-day because the workers have voted them into Parliament —the great law-making and force-raising portion of the political machinery. With this power in their hands the masters can dictate terms of living to the workers because, with the forces mentioned above at their disposal, they can not only keep the workers away from the means of production but also from any wealth already produced. The workers' lives are thus under the control of the capitalist class. In other words, the workers are slaves.
And slaves they will remain until they acquire—first the knowledge that they are slaves; then the will to attain freedom; and build up the organisation necessary to capture political power.
The only organisation capable of reaching that object is a socialist organisation. Until that organisation is sufficiently strong to put forward its delegates as candidates, it must continue its educational work of making socialists.
There is a Socialist organisation in this country—THE SOCIALIST PARTY—the only organisation that works for the emancipation of the workers. As a sufficient number of the working class is not yet desirous of establishing socialism to permit any candidates being put forward at this election, we call upon all those who wish for socialism to express their wish by going to the ballot-box and voting for socialism by writing it across the ballot paper. Among other things, this will help to advertise the number who wish to see socialism established.
STUDY SOCIALISM. BECOME SOCIALISTS. THEN ACHIEVE YOUR EMANCIPATION.
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