A socialist message to India's voters.

A General Election is on-going and all parties are doing the utmost to persuade our fellow-workers that one or other of the programmes put forward will soften the difficulties they face to-day. The contesting political parties offer only to remedy the most glaring evils whilst leaving unaltered the basis of society. Some of the parties have had their turn of control of social affairs of India, and in turn have failed to make any appreciable difference in the poverty, unemployment, and general insecurity and misery of the workers of India.

An examination of their manifestos leaves the worker bewildered with the intricacies concerning taxation, banking, etc. Yet it is not so complicated and actually relatively simple choice to opt for when not deliberately fed with useless information and unnecessary arguments.

Broadly speaking, the whole of society is made up of the two classes—employers and employees. The worker owns little other than the power to toil. The employer owns everything. When a worker sells his or her labour-power to an employer he or she is in effect selling themselves as wage-slaves. Without employment the worker is without the means of living and must endure hunger. No matter how it may be disguised, the ultimatum the employing class present to the working class to-day is “ Work under the conditions we decide or die.” The workers are therefore slaves. They are slaves to the employing owning class who determine how, where, and why they shall live.
Apart from unemployment, the boss-class and their goondas are interested in always keeping down and defeating the workers’ demands for any improved standard of living with the threat that there are other workers waiting at the factory-gate waiting to take their jobs. 

Are you satisfied to let things go on in the same old way? You are slaves to-day because you allow your masters to own the things you produce and thereby control in the main your lives. You associate and cooperate socially together to produce all things, the good and the bad. Your masters take no part in production, yet they take what you have produced. In return for the labour you spend in the field, the factory and the workshop you receive, at the best of times, only a beggarly pittance that does little more than keep you alive and enable you to bring up children to replace you in slavery. Even when in work you are always insecure lest, that you lose your job. Out of work, your condition is miserable indeed— frequently a rapid journey to the grave. In numbers you are the overwhelming majority of the nation, and yet you hand over to a relatively small group of masters the products of your toil.

There is no absolute law of Nature decreeing that one person shall have and another shall not have. The land of this country was never given by Nature, nor by any god, as a free gift to anyone. Those who hold it to-day inherit what their forerunners had stolen. And those who hold the means of producing wealth obtained possession in a like manner though the possession is sanctioned and sanctified by the law. Between you and the ownership of the means of production stand the laws of capitalism, and behind these laws stands the State—the oppressive power of the ruling class. Before you can obtain control of the means of production you must, as a first step, capture the power of this State machine. This State power is centred in Parliament and the group in a majority in Parliament has the power to control society.

There is no common interest between you and your masters within the present social conditions. It is their interest to extract from you as much wealth as you can produce for the lowest outlay in wages, as by this means they accumulate wealth. It is your interest to obtain possession of the means of production with which you produce wealth in order to produce wealth for your own benefit. It is our class who organise the whole of production to-day. It can be organised to-morrow for the equal benefit of all by the same class that organises it to-day—our class.

Do not heed the smooth-tongued orators and slick-operating politicians who would tell you to work in harmony with your masters for your mutual benefit. The capitalist lives by the exploitation of the worker. Between exploiter and exploited there can be no harmony of interest.  Capitalism and all the political parties that accept it, have no solution for the workers' troubles. It can only dabble here and there with some of the minor evils. When exploitation as a system is done away with, then there will be neither exploiter nor exploited.

Circumstances therefore compel you, if you wish to be free of slavery, to send delegates to Parliament to capture the control of affairs. In choosing your delegates, you must remember it is servants you seek, not masters nor leaders.

The World Socialist Party (India) is a small group of working people, organised for the purpose of gaining control of political power in order to introduce socialism. Its members control the party throughout and determine, by majority decisions, the policy of the organisation. This policy is set forth in all the literature the party publishes. The party is, controlled entirely by its members and is not at the beck and call of careerists.

If you are tired of the chains of slavery, join the party and thereby give us your help in the task of eliminating the system that oppresses us all. The earth and its fullness is not for one person's private possession. Let the workers of the world determine that it shall be for the benefit of all. Everything for Everybody.

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