Editor’s Announcement

Friends will greatly oblige by sending to the Editor Worker Office, Raff-Street, Brisbane, any crisp, brief, brief, bright or otherwise interesting notes on Queensland or other Australian labour matters. Contributors of these notes, or of yarns, paragraphs, poetry or other matter, must not mind if it is necessary to amend, condense, or reject; they may rely on the best being done that can be done.

Labour in Politics

September, 1890

In the delegates to the first annual General Council of the Australian Labour Federation were at all representative, "individually and collectively" if the Worker is felt by its owner-subscribers to express in any way the ideas which float in their minds; if the dominant thought of the organized workers throughout the world has been impressed to any extent upon Queensland; then the unanimous adoption of the political recommendations of the General Council will follow as a matter of course. For the time has passed when intelligent work men could be frightened from the narrow path of Progress by being told that the said path was Altruistic, Socialistic, National Communistic or any other "istic." They recognise everywhere that unless Labour owns the capital it must use to live, Capitalism will own the labourer. They desire everywhere not to be owned. Consequently, they everywhere approve the economic proposal that Capital-that is to say, the plant and stock necessary for production-should be held by the State in trust for all so that all who will may work and that the full fruit of industry may be secured to the producer without rent, interest, profit or any other fleecing going to any private holder of any means necessary for living.

* * *

The recommendation of the General Council of the A.L.F has been received with a wild outburst of abuse and frantic hysteria of terror by the "capitalistic press" and by the employers associations. On the other hand it has been endorsed by many country papers as far as their struggling editors fared endorse it and has been secretly approved by thoughtful employers who cannot all, like "Hop Beer" Marchant, afford to talk out plainly; in the Brisbane District alone half-a-dozen of the most progressive parsons have openly declared for "Christian Socialism" as for the workers, the letters that are pouring into the WORKER OFFICE and the growing enthusiasm reported by organisers and other offices indicates that the General Council delegates were in touch with the crowd. Indeed, what else could be expected? This competitive system under which we live is so unspeakably revolting that every good thought fill us with bitter Discontent.

The possibility of the New order, as propounded in the proposed Federation platform, is so reasonable to all who commence to think over the motives which inspire conduct

and the direction which our present industrial system is taking that it may certainly be considered within the range of practical politics. The socialistic idea has impregnated every phase of modern thought, and is already influencing, though unrecognised, all our public and private acts. It is the acknowledged political creed of thoughtful workers wherever they are throughout the Western world; it is held by many employers heart-sick of the inhumanity of the competitive system; and there can be no harm done by lifting it up to the light so that all may see the goal of the Labour movement, and assist in reaching it by peaceful and constitutional means. Labour can only triumph by the will of the great majority, and therefore can draw nothing by gain even from hysterical capitalistic criticisms and well ladled newspaper abuse. That sort of thing makes men think, and when men begin to think they begin to be with us.

* * *

It is useless to attempt in a single article to reply to the criticisms of critics who really are most lamentably ignorant of the question, and have no inspiration but the very irrelevant one that Capitalism must do all in its power to squelch Capitalism and reduce capital to its proper position as the machine-servant of co-operating hand-and-brain workers. Nor can one well allay the abject terror of a man who believes these disinterested critics when they talk about mob rule and "confiscation" and Anarchy. Only those who are conscious of the unbearableness of the industrial system as we have it, who feel in their hearts the utter wrong of the means of existence being in the hands of a few and of the many being unable to work and live except by asking leave of those whose only object in letting other men and women work and live is to get profit out of them, are in a fit state of mind to discuss the Competitive system, and to consider establishment of "Bellamyism."

* * *

"Bellamysim," by the way, is no new creed, no sudden fashionable fantasy as some would persuade us. Edward Bellamy has assisted in popularizing the socialistic movement by depicting what society would be where the industrial regulations advocated by the advanced economists had been enforced. He is no originator, so little so indeed that carping critics have called him a plagiarist simply because all that he depicts has been advocated theoretically for years. He has caught the spirit of national cooperation, of socialism –that is all.

He has seen the drift of our racial development and has detected that a new order is rising, even while the old is passing, and from this he has woven a future so human and so practical and so possible that not one of all the millions who have read it but have felt that in the Bellamy "State" they could be content, that our modes of thought and better motives for exertion would fit there, as here they never can. Bellamy is not the originator of the National co-operation idea; he is only his foremost apostle. In "Looking Backward" through and see these aims realised in Bellamy’s convert-making book.

* * *

The effect of the "nationalisation of the means of production and distribution" and of the "conduct by the state authority of all production and all exchange" would simply be to enable us to produce for use instead of for profit as is done at present. No matter what the necessities of men may be, no matter what they want, they are practically unable to work until the land and machine holders consent. These holders, commonly called Capitalists, have as capitalists no object in production but to make profit. They will run competitors off by reducing prices below the cost price if thereby they can see their way to lifting prices afterwards and making bigger profits than ever. They will employ kanakas as readily as their own countrymen and will replace men by women and women by children – all for profit. They will deny the right to organise and victimise the leaders of the workers and make the courts of law a mere attachment of the profit-mongering trade. This they do and more- because they cannot help themselves. Competition forces them to trample on others if they would not have others trampling on them; they must either be robbers or robbed, plunderers or plundered; and all the object of their competition is to make profits and die rich.

* * *

It is for profit-making that the land and machinery are being held, for the amassing of wealth by the few, with no care for the wants of the many. The workers are mere packs of labourers, hired for as little as possible, having little interest in the land they live in, toiling all their lives for a bare existence, kept at hand as it were to work the land and the machines when required, and barred out like aliens if they will not accept the pittance which is offered them from the wealth which Labour alone produced. And those who never worked or worked very little, only succeeding by hook or crook in getting into the Capitalistic circle and securing the means which others must use to live and do use at such wretched wages that a big margin of profits is left over and above all payments, these waste and squander or store for themselves alone the wealth which they have been thus enabled to filch from the working mass.

But employers are the directors of industry we are told. Yes, so they are, and as directors earn their money when they are, and as directors earn their money when they are drawing what another man would do their work for. But it is not Messrs. Munro and Bland, working directors of the B.I and Q.A Company, who pocket the profits or earn enough to play the plutocrat; yet they do more directing work than any capitalist in Queensland, and have greater responsibilities and greater anxieties. The quarrel is not with the working manager. The quarrel is with the system which dooms every child born into the community to work for the profit of others unless by lucky chance it succeeds in making others work for it. This is wrong, clearly wrong, and will not be righted until by the common ownership of the means without which none can produce wealth Industry ceases to be for the profit of the few but is carried on for the use and good of all. When Labour is systematically directed to production for use, that is when to need an article is to go to work and make it, and when none are idle because it does not pay somebody else to let them work, and when the reward of a man’s labour is the wealth he produces, whether he be a director or an unskilled labourer, and when we care for weak as we would like to be cared for were we weak, then we shall have Social Justice. And we cannot have these things so long as the land and machinery is held in private hands.

* * *

For Capitalists to talk of robbery is absurd. All that workers want is for themselves not to be robbed any more. The past they are willing to accept as past, to pay full value for the lands and machines, even to buy up the goodwills that evidently only exist by the sufferance of the multitude. This is "nationalisation." And to talk of violence and lawlessness is equally absurd, for the plan proposed is open and constitutional, is the plain-speaking Australian way which is not ashamed to acknowledge its thoughts or to let everybody know its plans. The General Council declares what we all know to be the truth when it speaks of present parliaments as merely registering the will of the capitalistic minority, and there can be no disputing its assertion that before anything whatever can be done for the workers we must have radical electoral reform and a People’s Parliament.

J.M