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PARTY NEWS
The Socialist Party will be contesting one seat in the elections to the
Greater London Assembly on Thursday 1 May, the same day as the election
for the mayor of London.
The seat is Lambeth & Southwark and our candidate will be
Danny Lambert.
This is the constituency in which our Head Office is situated.
Members and sympathisers who wish to help distribute our election
leaflets, please contact the,
Election Dept at 52 Clapham High St,
London SW4 7UN
or phone
0207 62 3811
or email spgb@worldsocialism.org.
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Picture Credits
cover: Warren Buffet - picasaweb.google.
com/.../CzkQA0zHNA3prVXHmN-VHA.
Trooping the colour - © 2007 Jon. Creative
Commons Attribution 2.5 licence.
p2: Trooping the colour - © 2007 Jon.
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence.
George Soros © 2006 Jeff Ooi. Creative
Commons Attribution 2.5.
p4: Robot - Ngchinfung, 2006.
p9: Hamburger - Eric 2003. Coke - Hariadhi
2007. p14: crowd - Ragessos, 2007.
p15: toilet paper 10 - anyjazz65, 2005,
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.
p23: Symbol - Missionários Passionintas.
p24: ambulances - www.dbh.nhs.uk.
Saddam - US military, 2003.
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So the bread lines and the soup kitchens have appeared again—in the
United States and Canada.
It looks as if the slump that would never come again is now on its way.
At least that is the impression one gets from statements by leading
financiers, here and in America, and from articles that have appeared
in London papers recently.
The Times for March the 4th, under the heading, “World Unemployment
Survey,” gives figures of unemployment in different countries. In the
United States in January the figure was 4,494,000. This does not
include unemployment among the 30 million who are not covered by
unemployment insurance. Since January there has been a considerable
increase in unemployment. The Times gives the unemployment figure for
Canada in January as 520,000. Here also the figure has increased since
January.
The News Chronicle for February 28th contains an article on Detroit by
Bruce Rothwell. From this article it is evident that the huge empty
factories around Detroit, and the empty shops the present writer saw in
Dearborn, when he was there last September, were the expression of
something more than the shift of industry out of Detroit and the
change-over to automation.
The News Chronicle writer has this to say:-
“Signs of the slump are everywhere and this is frightening America.
“For beyond this city millions more jobs depend on the car industry.
One business in six is wholly concerned with it.
“Steel, rubber, glass, leather; they all slump when the assembly lines
slow; and soon it spreads to us all.
“So Detroit, the centre of it, is harder hit to-day than in the
‘thirties.”
The writer states that there are 250,000 unemployed in Detroit now, and
he tells of the soup kitchen run by the Capuchin monks which can only
touch a tiny fragment of the thousands of hungry.
(From front page article by “Gilmac”, Socialist Standard, April 1958)
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This
declaration is the basis of our organisation and, because
it is
also an important
historical document dating from the
formation
of the party
in 1904, its original language has been retained.
Object
The establishment of a system of
society based upon the
common ownership and democratic control of the
means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in
the interest of the whole community.
Declaration of Principles
the socialist Party of Great Britain
holds,
1.
That society as at
present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living
(i.e., land, factories, railways,
etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement
of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
2.
That in society,
therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a
class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those
who produce but do not possess.
3.
That this antagonism
can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the
domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common
property of society of the means of production and distribution, and
their democratic control by the whole people.
4.
That as in the order
of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its
freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the
emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.
5.
That this
emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6.
That as the machinery
of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to
conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from
the workers, the working class must organize consciously and
politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and
local, in order that
this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an
instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the
overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.
7.
That as all political
parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest
of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all
sections of the master class, the party seeking working class
emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8.
The Socialist Party of
Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action
determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether
alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of
the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end
that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives
them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to
comfort, privilege to equality, and slaver to freedom. |
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