on, and indeed all else, is secondary to this.

The test of admission to a Socialist Party must be neither more nor less
than acceptance of the following seven working principles and the policy
of Socialism as a class movement:

1. Society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of
the means of living (i. e., land, factories, railways, etc.) by the
capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the
working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. As in the order of social evolution the working class is the
last to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class
will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of
race or sex.

5. This emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

6. As the machinery of capitalist government, including the armed
forces of the nation, conserves the monopoly by the capitalist
class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must
organize consciously and politically for acquiring 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.[B]

7. 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.

If a man supports the church, or in any respect allows religious ideas
to stand in the way of the foregoing seven essential principles of
socialism or the activity of a Party, he proves thereby that he does not
accept Socialism as fundamentally true and of the first importance, and
his place is outsid