The Socialist Party Manifesto for Emancipation

The unthinkable is now thinkable. Positions are shifting. Libertarian governments are curtailing freedoms more drastically than wartime leaders. Austerity conservatives are approving trillions of dollars for healthcare and emergency spending. Small-state advocates are being forced into massive interventions. Business commentators are calling for a deep reform of capitalism. Most importantly, the political focus has shifted from individualism to collective well-being. If the pandemic has revealed anything, it’s that many of society’s current social safety net and healthcare system does not protect the majority of in a national emergency.

The vaccine necessary to cure capitalism’s ills is socialism. Socialism is not a complicated doctrine. Capitalism is about creating profits. It has nothing to do with human welfare. If it is profitable to build a shopping mall instead of building a hospital, that is what it will do. Capitalism is at a loss to how reconstruct the world in the wake of the pandemic. There is no realistic alternative except a thorough socialist reconstruction. But it is the impossibility of restoring the old normalcy and business as usual the old system which leads us to believe in the desirability and possibility of a new one. There is no other road. Either chaos and destruction – or socialist reconstruction. The socialist perspective is more valid, more essential than ever because it alone meets the problems of our times. 

In a cooperative commonwealth we can pool our abilities and resources to create more for everyone, and to share it out fairly. That is the whole point about socialism, a democratic system of society where the wealth is owned and controlled by the people who produce it. The Socialist Party is organised to build a society that operates by collective effort, instead of dividing people one from another. In such a cooperative society, production and distribution could be planned to fit everyone’s needs, organised socially. Marx calls the new society the “union of free individuals.” Competition, the controlling principle of capitalism, disappears with the adoption of cooperative society. Not that we in the Socialist Party are any less selfish than another, but that our selfishness is one of enlightened self-interest, that is to say class consciousness and this can, must and will be overcome by revolutionary education and organisation. Experience, long, painful and dearly bought, has taught some of us that craft division is fatal to class unity. To accomplish its mission the working class must be united. They must act together; they must assert their combined power, and when they do this upon the basis of the class struggle, then and then only will they break the fetters of wage slavery.

Socialism encourages cooperation. We in the Socialist Party are no better or cleverer than anyone else. None of us as individuals know more than a little or can contribute more than a little. But by acting together we have far more power to change things. We try to prepare the way for a new cooperative world, based on common ownership of the means of production. The answer lies in ending the separation of economics and politics. It involves people taking control of their workplaces, their neighbourhoods, their communities – directly and without mediators, bureaucrats, and managers standing in the way. Either we find the strength to do this or we will sink further into the morass that is now destroying us. Founded in the bedrock principles of socialism the Socialist Party will finally conquer in the political struggle and secure to the collective people all the means of wealth production, thus achieving industrial democracy and the socialist commonwealth.

In a cooperative world commonwealth, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production requires the appropriation of the means of production by society. Under capitalism the distribution of goods takes the form of a rationing of poverty. Socialism is a system where there is no favoured class, no special privileged elite and it is of a system of economic freedom will be established where the earth and the fullness of its resources becomes the heritage of the common people. Under this system the wage workers own nothing but their labour-power, which they must sell to the capitalist in the open market in order to live, while the lion’s share of labour’s product flows into the pockets of the capitalists who buy and sell labour power for the sake of profit.

The Socialist Party declares for the abolition of the wage and profit system, and for the introduction of the cooperative system of production and distribution. The Socialist Party stands unqualified for the interests of the working class. We appeal to those in sympathy with it and the principles of socialism, to join the Socialist Party in its noble efforts for workers’ freedom and a higher civilisation.