One of the basic fundamentals of the socialist movement is the fact that it is a world movement. This doesn’t mean that socialists are internationalists in the widely accepted interpretation of that word. In the world of our times the term ‘internationalist" has grown to mean one who advocates such developments as "United Nations" or even "World Federalism." The difference between such concepts and that of the scientific socialists is that socialism envisages a world without nations and without governments, a world without economic class divisions, a world in which government over man as we know it becomes an administration by men over things. Only in this sense are socialists internationalists.
As things exist, however, socialists are compelled to operate within national boundaries. We are ticketed from birth or through naturalization as American or English or German and so on. Whether we like it or not we are compelled to build our organizations within this type of world, attempting to gain political control from the class that now controls it and introduce a classless society. So the members of the Companion Party movement are composed of individuals from many different nations and we speak in the tongue and in the particular accents of the countries and the sections of those countries from which we come. But although our language may differ, our object and our principles are one for despite all differences in language, in customs, or even in dress, the conditions which cry out for the abolition of capitalism in America are basically no different than those that exist throughout the world, generally. Nor are the confusions that fill the minds of most people on the subject of socialism any different elsewhere than they are in America. Take, for example, the situation in Great Britain.
Our sister party in Britain is the Socialist Party of Great Britain. That organization was founded in 1904 prior to the establishment of the British Labour Party and has continued, ever since, to publish its journal The Socialist Standard and to disseminate information on the subject of socialism in various ways. — Nevertheless, the British Labour Party, which has never in its history advocated the abolition of the wages system, is widely regarded throughout Great Britain and the rest of the world as a party of socialism. For more than sixty years the British Labour Party has advocated nationalization of industries. Furthermore they have actually instituted such nationalization. During all of this period the Socialist Party of Great Britain have maintained that nationalization of industries is in no way analogous to socialism and that the contradictions of capitalism would operate just as freely within a Labour regime as they would in any other regime. Scientific socialists have continued to contend that no political organization — regardless of label — can make capitalism operate in the interest of the majority of the population. We have continued to point out that poverty on a wide scale would continue under Labour government, that strikes on the home front and wars on the international front would continue to be the order of the day regardless of who runs the government — avowed capitalist or professed labour politicians. That nothing short of the abolition of capitalism and the introduction of a system of production for use rather than for sale on the market would solve the problems that threaten to destroy us all.
Yet we still hear the friends of reform politics advocate labor parties as governments and we still have the enemies of socialism pointing to Britain as a horrible example of socialism in action.
The time will come, we feel, when the workers in their millions will understand that labor party politics have nothing to do with socialism but are just another scheme to make capitalism somehow become more palatable to the majority who reap no benefits from it. The time will come when the program of the Companion Parties of Socialism will become the order of the day
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