Industrial Union Party, Declaration of Principles

Declaration of Principles
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The Industrial Union Party
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This is the text of a summary that was reprinted in
each issue of the IUP periodical, the Socialist Republic,
which is no longer in print.
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The IUP was an antecedent of today's organization
People for a New Society, PeopleForANewSociety.org

Declaration of Principles

As a scientific socialist organization, the Industrial Union Party of America has been influenced by the work of the many great socialist theoreticians. However, the primary influence on our theory, apart from that of Marx and Engels, has come from the American socialist theoretician, Daniel De Leon.

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WE, the overwhelming majority of citizens in this country are slaves -- wage slaves.

As members of the working class, we produce all of the wealth of America, and we get in return -- a wage. It is just enough to maintain us and enable us to breed replacements, who, in their turn, will give up their lives, bone, nerves and muscles, their joy and love and generosity and kindness, and every natural human grace -- for a wage.

So long as capitalism lasts, there is no escape for us from the grinding need to sell ourselves.

Our capacity to labor is all we have to sell, and we must sell it to the capitalists. That's how the capitalists make a profit -- by exploiting the working class. That is, the working class produces all the wealth, from which the capitalist ruling class takes the largest portion, in this process of exploitation, and, in return, gives its slaves a wage.

The fact that some workers have color TV's, automatic dishwashers, two or three automobiles, and their own homes, does not alter the fact that they are exploited. Indeed, the debts usually connected with such ownership fastens the chains of wage slavery even more securely.

Every single degrading aspect of capitalist society is in decay -- wars for profit and plunder abroad, race hatred dividing the working class, the slums we live in, the ruin of our environment, expensive, poor or nonexistent medical care, inadequate education, the second-class status of women, drug abuse, riots, crime -- in short, every one of those brutal, callous, cruel, and desperate things which goes on every hour, every minute, in capitalist society, grows out of exploitation.

If we want to stop the degradation, we must end exploitation.

If we want to free ourselves from wage slavery, we must abolish the profit system.

If we want to live decent lives of freedom and fulfillment, we must build a Socialist Economic Democracy.

The rock on which capitalism -- and every other system of profit and poverty -- is built is exploitation, and its utter, final, irrevocable abolition must be our goal. We must never be sidetracked, never be drawn aside by other, seeming more attractive goals. We must never waste ourselves on reforming symptoms. The goal, the abolition of the system of wage slavery, is ALL.

To reach that goal in a modern industrialized country, we cannot use the methods of the past.

We will accomplish nothing but our own suicide by attempts at armed insurrection.

We must build not on our weakness, but on our strength, our strength as the working class, that holds in its hands the source of all power in capitalist society. Our hands and our brains operate all the facilities of production, communication, and distribution -- under capitalist orders. If we take, hold and operate our workplaces in our names, and for ourselves, locking out the capitalists, the ruling class will be helpless.

Then we can reap the full abundance of our social product, realizing humanity's great dream: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

To accomplish that revolution, we must organize on the political and economic fields. Politically, we must use every forum open to us, from the soapbox to the ballotbox, to spread the idea of revolution. On the economic front, we must organize as a class at our workplaces into Socialist Industrial Unions, in order to disarm the ruling class, and render it powerless to thwart our revolution.

And Socialist Industrial Unions will foreshadow our future form of government, because the present form, the political state, is a weapon of the ruling class, while the SIU administration proposed will be an administration of things, not coercion of our fellow workers.

We need a government which will be no more than an agency for planning production and services, which must therefore be derived from our workplaces, where we will elect our own representatives to decide the kinds and quantities of production and services to satisfy our needs.

Since the means of operation of the ruling class, its private control over what in effect must be public property, will be abolished, our socialist commonwealth will be a classless society.

Since our revolution will be the first in history of, by and for the working class, with no elite "Party" leading us by the nose into a bureaucratic "Worker's State" so it can climb on our backs like any ruling class, we must be conscious of what we are doing and where we're going, conscious to a degree never before seen in a revolution.

Just to begin to organize and develop Socialist Industrial Unions, in the fact of the ruling class's ferocious hostility, will require the kind of strength and determination that can spring only from thorough knowledge, leading to this consciousness.

Given the consciousness of wage slavery, given the knowledge of how to end it, our second task, organization, will inevitably follow like the beginning of the dawn of a new day.