I. Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture, and since universal productive labor is possible only through society, therefore to society, that is to all its members, belongs the collective product of labor. With the universal obligation to labor, according to equal justice, each should have in proportion to his reasonable needs. In the present society the means of labor are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the servitude of the laboring class, which is the outgrowth of this, is the cause of misery and of slavery in all forms.
The liberation of labor demands the transformation of the means of production into the common property of society and the associative regulation of the collective labor with general employment and just distribution of the proceeds of labor.
The emancipation of labor must be the work of the laboring class, opposed to which all other classes are only a reactionary body.
II. Proceeding from this principle the Socialist Labor party of Germany seeks through all legal means the free state and the socialist society, the destruction of the iron law of wages, the overthrow of exploitation in all forms and the abolition of all social and political inequality.
The Socialist Labor party of Germany, though working chiefly in national boundaries, is conscious of the international character of the labor movement and is resolved to fulfill every duty which is laid on the workers in order to realize the brotherhood of humanity.
The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands as a step to the solution of the social question the erection, with the help of the state, of socialistic productive establishments under the democratic control of the laboring people. These productive establishments are to place industry and agriculture in such relations that out of them the socialist organization of the whole may arise.