THE BRITISH COAL STRIKE.

Auckland Star, Volume LII, Issue 158, 5 July 1921, Page 6

THE BRITISH COAL STRIKE.

a cause: not fully realised. revolutionists axd the MINERS. (Supplied by the Welfare League.) Amongst a batch of literature which we have received from the British "Economic Study Club" there is the following relating to one aspect of the coal strike which probably bears a lesson for our people in this Dominion, as well as for those in the Homeland. We have known of such "unofficial moves in Australasia as are here referred to, though not on so great a scaleMany people have been led to think that the present stoppage in the coal mining industry is mainly, if not exclusively, a question of wage reductions. As a matter of fact, it is the result of deliberately organised action on the part of a body of determined Revolutionists, who openly avowed their intention of realism™ Industrial Syndicalism. Nearly ten years ago a pamphlet entitled "The Miners' Next Step" was published by the so-called "Unofficial Reform Committee of the South Wales Coalfields." This pamphlet set forth a programme which included the formation of an alliance of trade organisations, "with a view to steps being taken to amalgamate ail workers into one national and international union, to work for the taking over of all industries by the workmen themselves." In other words, the objects detailed in the pamphlet meant the realisation of Revolutionary Syndicalism by means of a gigantic industrial union.

Some of the fruits of this revolutionary propaganda are to be seen to-day in the diminution of output, in the increased cost of working, and in the high price of coal. Clause 13 of the programme called for "a continual agitation

until we have extracted the whole of the employers' profits." Their confessed aim was "to take over the mining industry and carry it on in the interests of the workers," and one of the means advocated to this end was "a militant agressive policy."

It is by such means that'the British coal industry, so vital to all the other industries in the country on which the national life depends, has been brought to the brink of ruin. Such are the theories which are behind the relatively moderate claims expressed to-day by Mr. Herbert Smith and Mr. Frank Hodges. Thej- are not British theories, but doctrines of foreign origin, promulgated by alien influences under —ie cloak of benefits to be conferred on the British wageearner. Relentless class warfare, the elimination of the employer, the expropriation of the shareholder, the shattering of public and private credit, the forcing up of the cost of production until British commodities became unsaleable — these are the precious methods whereby the Revolutionists seek to build the' New Jerusalem for the British wage earner of to-morrow. Unhappily for tnem, the experiment has already been tried in Russia on a colossal scale by their comrades, Lenin and Trotsky, and'has reduced that vast country of "a hundred and thirty million w-orkers to a state of abject misery and want.