We Are Not Sheep

The crying demand for the basic necessities of life has thrown millions of people into conflict against capitalism which can no longer satisfy their demands. Millions have to fight capitalism in order to survive. Capitalist production relations block the use of the advanced forces of production to feed, house, and provide for the people. The exploited and oppressed are starting to act and organise in their own class interests. The Socialist Party agitates to politically shake up our fellow-workers. The aim of our education is to draw them into the political struggle for socialism by convincing our fellow-workers that society cannot be organised to meet even their basic needs. The fight for the liberation of the working class is not a fight for new class privileges but for the abolition of classes.

The Socialist Party is part of a great worldwide movement which far overshadows any other movement recorded in history. Its basic idea is the complete and permanent emancipation of labour across the whole world. The Socialist Party is the political expression of what is known as “the class struggle.” The Socialist Party enters the political battlefield of this class war to combat the present ruling class and its control of the state -- the army, the navy, the courts, the police so that the working class can gain possession by virtue of its victory at the polls, whereupon the death knell of private property and wage slavery is sounded. This does not mean that the workers and capitalists will merely change places. It means the beginning of an entirely new system, in which the exploitation of man by man will have no place. It means the establishment of a new economic motive for production and distribution. Instead of profit being the primary motive of manufacture, production and distribution will be for use. As a consequence, the class struggle and economic class antagonisms as we now know them will entirely disappear. The struggle for working class emancipation, which finds its expression through the Socialist Party, must continue, and will increase in intensity until either the ruling class maintains the subjugation the working class, or until the working class liberates itself. There is no middle ground possible, and it is this fact that makes ludicrous those sporadic reform movements typified by the populist and nationalist parties. When the working class gains a new experience pointing to the end of exploitation and oppression it will be a gigantic step toward what society really needs: not a new capitalist paint job but a total socialist reconstruction.

Fellow workers, your real enemy is the present system, which produces commodities to sell on the market with a view to profit. 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. There can be no room for nationalist notions if we are to fight and win against the international ruling class. 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. Socialism is more than simply a great idea; it is an obtainable alternative to the chaos of the system which puts profit before use.

“Sheep cannot be said to have solidarity. In obedience to a shepherd, they will go up or down, backwards or forwards as they are driven by him and his dog. But they have no solidarity, for that means unity and loyalty. Unity and loyalty, not to an individual, or the policy of an individual, but to an interest and a policy which is understood and worked for by all.” - The Miners’ Next Step, 1912