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Americans are frightened because the failures of the system
across a wide spectrum of issues that threaten the future of their families but
they are also angry because no one in the financial or political community is
seen to be paying for their misdeeds or misjudgments. Indeed, many of the
culprits have been rewarded and not punished. Trump promises to make the US
great again and Sanders' calls for a new American revolution. Two sides of the
same coin. Each in its own way represents a response to disappointment and
despair that many Americans now feel towards their ruling economic and
political institutions. Both men demand that the institutions be held
accountable. They both argue that traditional politicians - Republican and
Democrat alike - are the source of the America’s woes and the obstacle to their
solution.
The fetters of the wage slave and the scourge of the master
symbolize the reign of capital. Not until slave and master have both
disappeared, and forever, and the equal freedom of all has been established,
can we lay any proper claim to the term civilization. The cooperative commonwealth
is not dream but entirely within the realm of the possible. This new world will
not arrive without the aid of human endeavor. It means hard work. It involves courage.
It presupposes earnest convictions. Its goal is industrial freedom and independence
that the world has never known and can never know until cooperative labor,
solving every problem and surmounting every obstacle in industrial affairs,
achieves emancipation. Under the wages system there is no independence for
those who toil, because independence means exemption from control by others,
the direction of one’s own affairs without interference. There is not in the
United States a wage-worker who is independent. He or she must not only work to
live, but always under conditions dictated by another person. His or her life
and the lives of those dependent upon his work are absolutely under the control
of others. This is not the land of the free but the home of the slave. “Read!
Think! Study!” Working people should be ashamed to follow leaders. They may betray.
Unions should be educational to spread economic knowledge. Ignorance is
slavery. Intelligence is liberty. Socialism is no utopian dream, nor the
product of imagination and not a mirage of the desert to allure and vanish, but
a theory of life in which the humblest individual owns him or herself. The
basis of this new cooperative commonwealth is the brotherhood of man, and the
idea of brotherhood carries with it toleration and toleration means liberty of
thought, liberty of opinion, liberty of action. We do not fear the man or woman
that says I don’t agree with you. The only thing in this world we dread is
ignorance. Think for yourself. If you oppose us – so be it for we will have infinitely more
respect for you than if you support the party without thinking for yourself.
We are not after office, we want socialism. We care little about
office except in so far as it represents the triumph of socialism. Socialists are
not afflicted with the kind of patriotism which makes the slaves of the nation
itch to murder the slaves of another nation in the interest of a plutocracy
that wields the same lash over them all. It seems not a little ironic that millions
are so patriotic in a country in which the only interest they will have is six
feet of dirt in a cemetery.
The World Socialist Party of the United States declares that
life, liberty, and happiness for every man, woman, and child are conditioned
upon equal political and economic rights. That private ownership of the means
of production and distribution of wealth has caused society to split into two
distinct classes with conflicting interests, the small possessing class of
capitalists or exploiters of the labor force of others and the ever-increasing
large dispossessed class of wage-workers, who are deprived of the socially-due
share of their product. Our present system divides society into two classes,
the “have all” and the “have nothing” class, and that it is the great mass of
the people that do all the useful work who belong to the “have nothing. That
capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production, is responsible
for the insecurity of subsistence, the poverty, misery, and degradation of the
ever-growing majority of people. That the same economic forces which have produced
and now intensify the capitalist system will compel the adoption of socialism,
the common ownership of the means of production for the collective good and
welfare, or result in the destruction of civilization. The WSPUS declares its
object to be the establishment of a system of cooperative production and distribution,
through the restoration and repossession to the people of all the means of production
and distribution, to be administered by organized society in the interest of
the whole people, and the complete emancipation of society from the domination
of capitalism. Wage-workers with their historical mission to realize a new world should
sever connection with all capitalist and reform parties. The WSPUS does not
hope for the establishment of social order through the increase of misery, but
on the contrary expects its coming through the determined, united efforts of
the workers of both city and country to gain and use the political power to
that end. American socialism is only a branch of world socialism, as American
capitalism is a branch of global capitalism. A socialist does not hate every capitalist
individually (although many truly deserve our contempt), that some should be
picked out as scapegoats while the economic power and political encroachment of
all the others should be silently submitted to. It means that while we
understand that every individual capitalist is the result of the present system
as much as the wage worker, we still must fight the capitalists as a class,
because the producers cannot reasonably expect anything but exploitation from
the exploiters as a class. To achieve socialism we want to make use of our political
liberty and take possession of the public powers. The WSPUS will fight open and
above-board everywhere and fight all capitalist parties alike. It cannot and
will not assist capitalist politicians of one party in one state and of another
party in a different state. In short, members of the WSPUS will be simply socialists,
and nothing else.
“Each for all and all
for each”
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Consistently advocating a fully democratic society
based upon co-operation and production for use since
1916
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