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Picture Credits
cover: Footballers - Jaime Ramirez p2: Evo Morales - Agência
Brasil © 2006 Creative Commons License Attribution 2.5 Brazil.
Boris Johnson - Adam Procter © 2006 Creative Commons Attribution
ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.
Las Vegas - Jon Sullivan p4: Test tubes - Erich Schulz. p11: Happy folk
- David Bohrer.
p24: Daniel Craig - wonderferret © 2007 Creative Commons
Attribution 2.0 License.
Rainforest - Phil P Harris © 2001 Creative Commons Attribution
ShareAlike 2.5 License.
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THE
LIBERAL REVIVAL
The
managers of the Tory and Labour Parties, during the past year, have
had to endure a nagging worry of a kind they both thought had gone
for ever, the revival of the Liberal vote. To make it worse they see
that it has happened not because voters particularly like the
Liberals, but because the voters in increasing numbers have had a
lively urge to register their dislike of Labour and Tory.
The
suffering Labour and Tory leaders, as if by agreement, jeered at the
Liberals for having no policy, until Lord Rea, Liberal Leader in the
House of Lords, undertook to tell the readers of the Daily
Telegraph (18th March, 1958) what that policy is.
He
did not make a very good job of it for, like the spokesman of the two
big rival parties, he had the delicate task of steering between the
fault of saying too little to please anyone and the risk of saying
too much and scaring off some potential voters. In this country, with
wage and salary earners making up nine-tenths of the electorate,
competition for their votes is a tricky business and the three
parties have given much thought to working out the best tactics. What
has evolved is the situation in which the Tory, Liberal and Labour
parties each has a list of vague general principles, and the three
lists are almost identical, except for small differences of emphasis.
Thus they all say they are working for Peace, Disarmament, low
prices, high wages, and making everybody happy, and all declare
themselves to be not a class party, but a party of the nation.
(From
editorial, Socialist Standard, June 1958)
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Declaration
of Principles
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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historical document dating from the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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