Change the world

In a strike the employers in order to defeat you, takes the food from your table, the clothes from your body, and as far as it is in them to do, they condemn you to hunger and misery. They calculate that you will submit to their terms rather than see those near and dear to you suffer. During a strike the employers wants for nothing while the workers are in want of everything. Yet at the ballot box where the boss would only count as one against his workers; the workers’ vote could, if properly used, ensure the triumph of labour as certainly as on the industrial field the power of the master’s purse will nearly always win. Yet it is upon the industrial field alone that the workers end up fighting. In the factory and offices they fight the bosses – in elections they cast their vote for the employers’ lackeys to rule them. Yet it is those elected at the ballot box who make the laws which govern the industrial struggle.

When will the workers learn that the political power they could wield is the greatest weapon in their hands, that the field of politics is the only field upon which the workers can win emancipation from the domination of capital? When will the workers do as the employers do and not content with their  economic power,  strive to secure political power in order to entrench their class in its position of supremacy?

 Let the working class organise to take political power and take the ownership and control of industry from the hands of the robber class. The reformers only propose to better our lot as slaves, but never to the point that we might proceed to abolish our status as slaves, and gain for ourselves the dignity of economic freedom. But it is not only freedom of labour but freedom from labour that socialists seek. There can be no liberty in economic  subservience and dependence. The man or woman who is in want or in the fear of want is not free.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain claims that the wealth of society is created by the workers. It claims that the workers as a whole must own and control all the processes of wealth production to be run in the interests of the entire community. The Socialist Party carry this struggle on to the political field in order to challenge the power which the present ruling class wields through its domination of the State which it wins at the ballot box. By its victory at the ballot box, and its consequent political domination, the capitalists are able to enslave working people.  We cannot leave political control in the hands of the ruling class. We have seen what power the conquest of the State gives to the capitalist class in its struggle with workers. It is through its political strength that the capitalists can deprive us of every shred of civil liberty the loss of which makes the peaceful agitation for the revolution impossible. The moment the  industrial movement becomes more powerful so the employing class will resort to the use of the armed forces and other violent methods of suppression. The control of these forces flow directly from their control of the State which it secures at the ballot box.  Therefore, in order to achieve a peaceful revolution socialists must capture the powers of the State at the ballot box and prevent the capitalist class from using the military against the emerging new society.  The political purpose of capturing the State machine is the preservation of civil liberties and the destruction of the coercive State.

 All other questions placed on the election programmes are merely traps to catch the unwary workers and to persuade them to vote to preserve capitalism. To think that Parliament can be used as the means of permanently improving the conditions of workers by passing a series of acts and reform is to believe in parliamentarism. The Socialist Party is not a parliamentary party. It believes in entering Parliament only as a means of sweeping away all antiquated institutions which stand in the way of the common ownership and control  of the  means of production. The Socialist Party urges the workers to use their ballots to capture political power—not to play at politicians or pose as statesmen, but to use their votes to uproot capitalism.  The task of the social revolution can only be accomplished by men and women with a clear understanding of capitalism. Let us make the hustings a platform from which to proclaim and explain our principles. Let us demonstrate at that ballot-box the strength and intelligence of the socialist idea.  There is nothing which can be gained by the rifle which cannot be as effectively gained through the medium of the ballot box, if only voters know what they want and are determined to have it.

Well, you know
We all want to change the world — The Beatles

At the Vassall by-election for the  Lambeth council - Vote Danny Lambert of the Socialist Party(GB) candidate