Will there be? Won't there be?

As our lords and masters engage in constitutional wrangling over Brexit, the Socialist Party judges it to be much ado about nothing. It will be the capitalist class who, through their political nominees, who shall decree that a General Election be called to permit you to cast your votes. 

Many candidates will be put forward, each claiming to serve the interests of the people. And of course there will be innumerable remedies prescribed to cure all our social ills. These palliatives are designed with the purpose of attracting your vote, because we are the majority and can put in or put out whom you wish. So beware of promises, and do not accept assertions as evidence, nor be bamboozled by the juggling of statistics by artful politicians. The control of society resides in Parliament, the centre of State power to-day. To get this power the workers must send delegates to Parliament in sufficient numbers to obtain their majority. The capitalists know this, and use their utmost resources to ensure that their nominees shall be returned. Where they fail they buy over the workers' representatives by promises and privileges.

The Socialist Party position is simple and is clear if you will but give a little time and thought to certain basic truths. Briefly our position is:

You are poor to-day .and haunted with the dread of unemployment because you do not own the means for producing wealth. In consequence you depend for your living upon the wishes and the whims of employers.

1. The employers take no active part in the work of production, yet its fruits are reaped by them.
2. The employers pile up great riches for themselves by paying you less as wages and salaries than the value of what you make by your work. This must be true, otherwise they could not enjoy the good things of life without working whilst you are hard put to it to live at all though spending your lives in toil. .
3. There is no natural or supernatural law that gives to any one the power to take land or the things on the land from his fellows. Social laws are made by man, and in civilised society by the rulers, and these rulers have been and are the owners of property, the employers. The laws they have made have spread a mantle of rightness over their exploitation of the worker. To use the labour of another in order to achieve riches for oneself is to exploit that other, and the employers, or capitalists, live by the exploitation of the workers.
4. The capitalist are one class, owning the means of production, and having them set in motion only when profit is expected either immediately or at a later date. The workers are another class, owning in the main nothing but their power to work, and compelled to sell this working power to the capitalist in order to live. These two classes make up the vast bulk of the population.
5. The interests of these two classes are opposite interests. The capitalist aims at securing as much production as possible with the least employment of labour—that is with the smallest expenditure of wages. The interest of the worker, on the contrary, is to obtain as much work as possible and as high wages as he can. The ultimate interest of the capitalist is the obtaining of secure and peaceful control of the whole of society by a small group living in magnificent style and employing the minimum amount of workers. What then is to become of the rest of the population is the problem that has so far eluded the politicians. The ultimate interest of the workers is to remove from their backs the useless drones they have fed for so long. In other words, to obtain control of the means of production they operate, and, along with that, the control of all social machinery.
6. Between capitalist and worker, therefore, there is not and cannot be an identity of interests. One is an exploited, the other an exploiting class. The remedy for the social troubles that no soft words can hide does not lie in the direction of a harmony of interests. The interests conflict at the base and, consciously or not, there is in society a struggle between the two main groups of the population which, in a minor way, breaks out in the form of strikes, that are met by ruthless repression. Neither by holiness nor by hellishness is there a way out, leaving untouched the fundamental cleavage into classes based upon the private ownership of the main resources of wealth production.
7. The way out then lies in one direction only, the revolutionising of society; the overturning of its base; the converting of the means of production into the common property of society, commonly owned and democratically controlled by and in the interests of the whole people. The emancipation of the wage slaves from their age-long thralldom.

This is where the Socialist Party stands. We do not advocate reform, we advocate revolution. Reforms in the main are an effort to hide and not to get rid of evils. At the best they have only a temporary effect, and the more determined the workers show themselves in the movement to take from the capitalists their power, that is to say, the more dangerous to the capitalist regime the workers become the more ready will the capitalist be to put forward reforms in the effort to stem the revolutionary flood. The Socialist Party are puts forward candidates whose object is to work for the ushering in of socialism as speedily as possible; to remove the capitalists from power, not to compromise with them.

The wealth of the capitalist world is in the hands of a few. They own the factories, and they alone decide whether and when those factories shall be used for the production of goods. The luxurious living and sheer waste of the capitalists and their governments are far outstripped by the ever-growing powers of production. The capitalists are the small minority, but they own and control industry. The working class are the majority of the population. They produce the wealth and organise industry from top to bottom. They provide the muscles and the brains of industry.

We stand for Socialism, which means the transfer of the means of production from the hands of the few to society as a whole, involving the ending of the whole system based on a class of owners who enjoy but do not produce, and a class of producers who do not own. 

The method of doing this is for the working class majority to understand Socialism, organise in the Socialist Party and vote their delegates into control of the House of Commons. Nothing short of Socialism will abolish working class poverty and unemployment. Socialism will solve all the economic problems which are the subject matter of the long and intricate programmes about which the big parties are disputing. They fight every election on plans to remedy some of the effects of capitalism. The Socialist Party fights for the abolition of capitalism. Our candidates run only on a socialist platform, not on a manifesto of reforms.

We are a group of working men and women. We publish a monthly paper, the “Socialist Standard," in which the position of the Party is set forth month by month with views and criticisms on various matters that arise.

Remember no Moses can lead you to the Promised Land. That task is yours alone, and you must do so for yourselves.