Appendix
Official Programmes of the Socialistic Organisations
Social Democratic Federation
Programme and Rules as revised previous to the Annual Conference held at the Labour Institute, Bradford, Easter 1906
Object.—The Social-Democratic Federation is a part of the International Social-Democracy. It believes:—
1. That the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved through the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and their subsequent control by the organised community in the interests of the whole people.
2. That, as the proletariat is the last class to achieve freedom, its emancipation will mean the emancipation of the whole of mankind, without distinction of race, nationality, creed, or sex.
3. That this emancipation can only be the work of the working class itself,1287 organised nationally and internationally into a distinct political party, consciously striving after the realisation of its ideals: and, finally,
4. That, in order to ensure greater material and moral facilities for the working class to organise itself and to carry on the class war, the following reforms must immediately be carried through:—
Immediate Reforms
Political.—Abolition of the Monarchy.
Democratisation of the Governmental machinery, viz. Abolition of the House of Lords, Payment of Members of Legislative and Administrative bodies. Payment of Official Expenses of Elections out of the Public Funds, Adult Suffrage, Proportional Representation, Triennial Parliaments, Second Ballot, Initiative, and Referendum. Foreigners to be granted rights of citizenship after two years’ residence in the country, without any fees. Canvassing to be made illegal. All elections to take place on one day, such day to be made a legal holiday and all premises licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors to be closed.
Legislation by the people in such wise that no legislative proposal shall become law until ratified by the majority of the people.
Legislative and Administrative independence for all parts of the Empire.
Financial and Fiscal.—Repudiation of the National Debt.
Abolition of all indirect taxation and the institution of a cumulative tax on all incomes and inheritances exceeding 300l.
Administrative.—Extension of the principle of Local Self-Government.
Systematisation and co-ordination of the local administrative bodies.
Election of all administrators and administrative bodies by Equal Direct Adult Suffrage.
Educational.—Elementary education to be free, secular, industrial, and compulsory for all classes. The age of obligatory school attendance to be raised to 16.
Unification and systematisation of intermediate and higher education, both general and technical, and all such education to be free.
State Maintenance for all attending State schools.
Abolition of school rates; the cost of education in all State schools to be borne by the National Exchequer.
Public Monopolies and Services.—Nationalisation of the land and the organisation of labour in agriculture and industry under public ownership and control on co-operative principles.
Nationalisation of the Trusts.
Nationalisation of Railways, Docks, and Canals, and all great means of transit.
Public ownership and control of Gas, Electric Light, and Water supplies, as well as of Tramway, Omnibus, and other locomotive services.
Public ownership and control of the food and coal supply.
The establishment of State and municipal banks and pawnshops and public restaurants.
Public ownership and control of the lifeboat service.
Public ownership and control of hospitals, dispensaries, cemeteries, and crematoria.
Public ownership and control of the drink traffic.
Labour.—A legislative eight-hour working day, or 48 hours per week, to be the maximum for all trades and industries. Imprisonment to be inflicted on employers for any infringement of the law.
Absolute freedom of combination for all workers, with legal guarantee against any action, private or public, which tends to curtail or infringe it.
No child to be employed in any trade or occupation until 16 years of age, and imprisonment to be inflicted on employers, parents, and guardians who infringe this law.
Public provision of useful work at not less than trade union rates of wages for the unemployed.
Free State Insurance against sickness and accident, and free and adequate State pensions or provision for aged and disabled workers. Public assistance not to entail any forfeiture of political rights.
The legislative enactment of a minimum wage of 30s. for all workers. Equal pay for both sexes for the performance of equal work.
Social.—Abolition of the present workhouse system, and reformed administration of the Poor Law on a basis of national co-operation.
Compulsory construction by public bodies of healthy dwellings for the people; such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone, and not to cover the cost of the land.
The administration of justice and legal advice to be free to all; justice to be administered by judges chosen by the people; appeal in criminal cases; compensation for those innocently accused, condemned, and imprisoned; abolition of imprisonment for contempt of court in relation to non-payment of debt in the case of workers earning less than 2l. per week; abolition of capital punishment.
Miscellaneous.—The disestablishment and disendowment of all State Churches.
The abolition of standing armies, and the establishment of national citizen forces. The people to decide on peace and war.
The establishment of international courts of arbitration.
The abolition of courts-martial; all offences against discipline to be transferred to the jurisdiction of civil courts.
Independent Labour Party
Constitution and Rules. 1907-8
Object.—An Industrial Commonwealth founded upon the Socialisation of Land and Capital.
Methods.—The education of the community in the principles of Socialism.
The Industrial and Political Organisation of the Workers.
The Independent Representation of Socialist Principles on all elective bodies.
Programme.—The true object of industry being the production of the requirements of life, the responsibility should rest with the community collectively, therefore:
The land, being the storehouse of all the necessaries of life, should be declared and treated as public property.
The capital necessary for industrial operations should be owned and used collectively.
Work, and wealth resulting therefrom, should be equitably distributed over the population.
As a means to this end, we demand the enactment of the following measures:
1. A maximum of 48 hours working week, with the retention of all existing holidays, and Labour Day, May 1, secured by law.
2. The provision of work to all capable adult applicants at recognised trade union rates, with a statutory minimum of sixpence per hour.
In order to remuneratively employ the applicants, Parish, District, Borough, and County Councils to be invested with powers to:
(a) Organise and undertake such industries as they may consider desirable.
(b) Compulsorily acquire land; purchase, erect, or manufacture buildings, stock, or other articles for carrying on such industries.
(c) Levy rates on the rental values of the district, and borrow money on the security of such rates for any of the above purposes.
3. State pensions for every person over 50 years of age, and adequate provision for all widows, orphans, sick, and disabled workers.
4. Free secular, moral, primary, secondary, and university education, with free maintenance while at school or university.
5. The raising of the age of child labour, with a view to its ultimate extinction.
6. Municipalisation and public control of the drink traffic.
7. Municipalisation and public control of all Hospitals and Infirmaries.
8. Abolition of indirect taxation and the gradual transference of all public burdens on to unearned incomes with a view to their ultimate extinction.
The Independent Labour Party is in favour of adult suffrage, with full political rights and privileges for women, and the immediate extension of the franchise to women on the same terms as granted to men; also triennial Parliaments and second ballot.
The Labour Party has no official programme. A semi-official programme, contained in a statement of its Secretary, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., will be found on page 425 of this book.
The Fabian Society
Basis.—The Fabian Society consists of Socialists.
It therefore aims at the reorganisation of Society by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people.
The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in Land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of Rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites.
The Society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial Capital as can conveniently be managed socially. For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into Capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living.
If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), Rent and Interest will be added to the reward of labour, the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails.
For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon, including the establishment of equal citizenship for men and women. It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and Society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain
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 that society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (i.e. land, factories, railways, &c.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
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.
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.
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.
That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
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 organise 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.
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.
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 slavery to freedom.
Platform of the Socialist Labour Party
The Socialist Labour Party is a political organisation seeking to establish political and social freedom for all, and seeing in the conquest by the Socialist Working Class of all the governmental and administrative powers of the nation the means to the attainment of that end.
It affirms its belief that political and social freedom are not two separate and unrelated ideas, but are two sides of the one great principle, each being incomplete without the other.
The course of society politically has been from warring but democratic tribes within each nation to a united government under an absolutely undemocratic monarchy. Within this monarchy again developed revolts against its power, revolts at first seeking to limit its prerogatives only, then demanding the inclusion of certain classes in the governing power, then demanding the right of the subject to criticise and control the power of the monarch, and finally, in the most advanced countries this movement culminated in the total abolition of the monarchical institution, and the transformation of the subject into the citizen.
In industry a corresponding development has taken place. The independent producer, owning his own tools and knowing no master, has given way before the more effective productive powers of huge capital, concentrated in the hands of the great capitalist. The latter, recognising no rights in his workers, ruled as an absolute monarch in his factory. But within the realm of capital developed a revolt against the power of the capitalist. This revolt, taking the form of trade unionism, has pursued in the industrial field the same line of development as the movement for political freedom has pursued in the sphere of national government. It first contented itself with protests against excessive exactions, against all undue stretchings of the power of the capitalist; then its efforts broadened out to demands for restrictions upon the absolute character of such power, i.e., by claiming for trade unions the right to make rules for the workers in the workshop; then it sought to still further curb the capitalist’s power by shortening the working day, and so limiting the period during which the toiler may be exploited. Finally, it seeks by Boards of Arbitration to establish an equivalent in the industrial world for that compromise in the political world by which, in constitutional countries, the monarch retains his position by granting a parliament to divide with him the duties of governing, and so hides while securing his power. And as in the political history of the race the logical development of progress was found in the abolition of the institution of monarchy, and not in its mere restriction, so in industrial history the culminating point to which all efforts must at last converge lies in the abolition of the capitalist class, and not in the mere restriction of its powers.
The Socialist Labour Party, recognising these two phases of human development, unites them in its programme, and seeks to give them a concrete embodiment by its demand for a Socialist Republic.
It recognises in all past history a preparation for this achievement, and in the industrial tendencies of to-day it hails the workings out of those laws of human progress which bring that object within our reach.
The concentration of capital in the form of trusts at the same time as it simplifies the task we propose that society shall undertake, viz. the dispossession of the capitalist class, and the administration of all land and instruments of industry as social property, of which all shah be co-heirs and owners.
As to-day the organised power of the State theoretically guarantees to every individual his political rights, so in the Socialist Republic the power and productive forces of organised society will stand between every individual and want, guaranteeing that right to life without which all other rights are but mockery.
Short of the complete dispossession of the capitalist class which this implies there is no hope for the workers.
SPEED THE DAY.
The Christian Social Union
The Union consists of members of the Church of England who have the following objects at heart:—
1. To claim for the Christian law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.
2. To study in common how to apply the moral truths and principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties of the present time.
3. To present Christ in practical life as the living Master and King, the enemy of wrong and selfishness, the power of righteousness and love.
The Church Socialist League
Principles.—The Church has a mission to the whole of human life, Social and Individual, Material and Spiritual.
2. The Church can best fulfil its social mission by acting together in its corporate capacity.
3. To this end the members of the League accept the principles of Socialism.
Object.—To secure the corporate action of the Church on these principles.
Method.—1. To cultivate by the regular use of prayer and sacraments the life of brotherhood.
2. Members undertake to help each other in fulfilling the object of the League by speaking and lecturing and in other ways.
3. Members shall co-operate as far as possible to secure the consideration of social questions at their various Ruridecanal and Diocesan Conferences and the election of Socialists on these and other representative bodies.
4. Members shall work for the disestablishment of the patron and the substitution of the Church in each parish in conjunction with the Church in the diocese in the patron’s place.
5. To secure the representation of the wage-earning classes upon all the representative bodies of the Church.
Guild of St. Matthew
Objects.—1. To get rid, by every possible means, of the existing prejudices, especially on the part of “Secularists,” against the Church, her sacraments and her doctrines: and to endeavour to “justify God to the people.”
2. To promote frequent and reverent worship in the Holy Communion, and a better observance of the teaching of the Church of England as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.
3. To promote the study of social and political questions in the light of the Incarnation.
Footnotes
1287 This paragraph is not to be understood as debarring individual members of the possessing classes from participating in the work of the movement.