The idea of the general strike, of general strikes, is invincibly suggested to proletarians by the growing magnitude of working-class organization. They do not desire violence, which is very often the result of an insufficient organization and a rudimentary education of the proletariat; but they would make a great mistake if they did not employ the powerful means of action, which co-ordinates working-class forces to subserve the great interests of the workers or of society; they must group and organize themselves to be in a position to make the privileged class more and more emphatically aware of the gulf which may suddenly be cleft open in the economic life of societies by the abrupt stoppage of the worn-out and interminably exploited workers. They can thereby snatch from the selfishness of the privileged class great reforms interesting the working-class in general, and hasten the complete transformation of an unjust society. But the formula of the general strike, like the partial strike, like political action, is only valuable through the progress of the education, the thought, and the will of the working-class.
The Socialist party defends the Republic as a necessary means of liberation and education. Socialism is essentially republican. It might be even said to be the Republic itself, since it is the extension of the Republic to the régime of property and labor.
The Socialist party needs, to organize the new world, free minds, emancipated from superstitions and prejudices. It asks for and guarantees every human being, every individual, absolute freedom of thinking, and writing, and affirming their beliefs. Over against all religions, dogmas, and churches, as well as over against the class conception of the bourgeoisie, it sets the unlimited right of free thought, the scientific conception of the universe, and a system of public education based exclusively on science and reason.
Thus accustomed to free thought and reflection, citizens will be protected against the sophistries of the capitalistic and clerical reaction. The small craftsmen, small traders, and small peasant proprietors will cease to think that it is Socialism which wishes to expropriate them. The Socialist party will hasten the hour when these small peasant proprietors, ruined by the underselling of their produce, riddled with mortgage debts, and always liable to judicial expropriation, will eventually understand the advantages of generalized and systematized association, and will claim themselves, as a benefit, the socialization of their plots of land.
But it would be useless to prepare inside each nation an organization of justice and peace, if the relations of the nations to one another remained exposed to every enterprise of force, every suggestion of capitalist greed.
The Socialist party desires peace among nations; it condemns every policy of aggression and war, whether continental or colonial. It constantly keeps on the order of the day for civilized countries simultaneous disarmament. While waiting for the day of definite peace among nations, it combats the militarist spirit by doing its utmost to approximate the system of permanent armies to that of national militias. It wishes to protect the territory and the independence of the nation against any surprise; but every offensive policy and offensive weapon is utterly condemned by it.
The close understanding of the workers, of the proletarians of every country, is necessary as well to beat back the forces of aggression and war as to prepare by a concerted action the general triumph of Socialism. The international agreement of the militant proletarians of every country will prepare the triumph of a free humanity, where the differences of classes will have disappeared, and the difference of nations, instead of being a principle of strife and hatred, will be a principle of brotherly emulation in the universal progress of mankind.
It is in this sense and for these reasons that the Socialist party has formulated in its congresses the rule and aim of its action—international understanding of the workers; political and economic organization of the proletariat as a class party for the conquest of government and the socialization of the means of production and exchange; that is to say, the transformation of capitalist society into a collectivist or communist society.
II.—Program of Reforms
The Socialist party, rejecting the policy of all or nothing, has a program of reforms whose realization it pursues forthwith.