Sequence 3
Facsimile
Transcription
Forward to Socialism
Made increasingly desperate in the face of their inability
to solve the vast economic and social problems created
by private enterprise, the Capitalist forces have gathered
in a universal effort to save themselves. Fascism and War
threaten the workers. The Labor Movement of Britain is now
the last main bulwark within Capitalist countries againt the
wave of reaction the has swept across the world.
In this country, as in every Capitalist country, millions of
workers are unemployed; real wages have been brought down
to new low levels; social services have been ruthlessly cut;
unemployment pay is near starvation level; the family and the
individual have had thrust upon them the responsibility for
maintaining the unemployed; the Means Test and the Anomalies
Act bring misery to thousands; the Government still further
penalises and divides the workless in its Unemployment Bill;
deaths and ill-health from malnutrition accumulate; rationalisa-
tion drives men and women into compulsory idleness while long
hours are the lot of their comrades; large section of the "middle
classes" are being pressed down to poverty level; university
trained men and women are unable to find employment;
machinery is used not to lighten the labour of both clerical and
manual workers but to increase unemployment; land is misued
or goes out of cultivation; pits are empty and factories closed.
The mass of the people demand a sufficiency of food, shelter
and warmth; they demand security of employment; leisure
without financial anxiety; increased opportunities for cultural
development; they cry out for peace between the nations; they
ask that the great potential wealth of this country shall be
harnessed to social advance. Increasingly they receive as their
portion poverty, insecurity, unemployment, hunger, intensified
exploitation; daily they are conscious of the imminence of Wars
so terrible that the civilisation they know may well go down in
disaster to barbarism.
Poverty or Plenty?
Right at the roots of this crisis, which brings such suffering
and oppression in its train, lies the maintenace of the
private owenership of the means of production at the very
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