AIMING AT A SOVIET

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 124, 18 February 1921, Page 4

AIMING AT A SOVIET

GOAL OF THE “ TRADE UNIONISM RUN MAD ” I THE ONLY RATIONAL CURE He inculcates the doctrine that there must necessarily be eternal enmity between the worker and the employer—that there can be no common ground on which they can ever meet. He handles every industrial dispute with an eye to 'his ultimate goal —the abolition of capital and private enterprise. Tn these words Mr. C. P. Skerrett, K.C., president of the New Zealand Welfare League, epitomised his views of the extremist in the course of a trenchant criticism of revolutionary industrialism, in addressing the second annual conference of the league, which opened yesterday morning. Elaborating his point Mr. Skerrett remarked that the extremist aimed to make his arrangements 'between the employer and worker temporary so that he might be essential to the worker. "He has,”' ffio continued, “no time for—indeed, he is the bitterest enemy of —all schemes designed to give the worker a fair sba.ro of the joint production: a direct interest in t'he result of his work, a voi-o in the management of the business in r’hich he works, and under which the worker will, as far as possible, be protected from unemployment. Such schemes if successful would sound the death-knell of revolutionary socialism.” A Common Ground. “The league, on the other hand, has always maintained that the relationship of worker and employer was not necessarily antagonistic; that there was a common ground on which they could meet to their mutual advantage; and that true reform lay in the adoption of some such system as I have indicated .as meeting with the opposition of the extremist . . . We have always maintained that the so-called trade unionism of the militant trade unions is unionism run mad. True trade unionism is always antirevolutionary. It concerns itself only with the existing social and economic systems, and it seeks for the betterment of the conditions of the worker under these systems. If the existing system requires reform or alteration, that is. to be brought about under the Constitution by constitutional means. Time trade unionism is never disruptive—never revolutionary. The trouble we have in the Dominion is that wo have some powerful unions who use the machinery and the funds and shape the acts of trade unions for an illegitimate purpose—the disruption of the existing economic system and the control of the industries of the country by the manual worker over everyeno else. 'The jultimate (goal ot trade unionism to-day under its present leaders is revolution. Voice of Official Labour, “Only the other day a. member of the official Labour Party deliberately used In Parliament this language: I am not going to offer apologies for saying that as soon as possible I want to get rid of Parliament as it in now constituted, and institute in its place an industrial Parliament that will retieet t'he useful people of the Dominion. . • . But I put on record the fact that I am uu against your system—a system that causes my fellow worker to go down on his belly and crawl to get assistance in this country. "What does this mean ?” continued Mr. Skerrett. “AVhat does an industrial Parliament that will reflect the useful people mean? It means plainly the gov•ernanee of the country and the control of the means of manufacture, exchange, and production, and perhaps of every form of activity, by the manual worker to the exclusion of everyone else. It means, in short, the so-called Soviet system of Bolshevism. AVe know authoritatively the effect of the adoption of the system in Russia. In the language of a theoretical Socialist who visited Russia it means 'ruin, disaster, disease, misery, starvation, chaos’! A Gloomy Picture. “These are not my words. We now know authoritatively the conditions which now obtain there. Private trading is prohibited and shops are closed. Trade unions havo been made departments of the Soviet administration; no voluntary organisations are permitted; the great co-operative organisation, which, had developed so remarkably in Russia before the war has been entirely subordinated to the State; political parties are persecuted, and driven underground; the free Press has ceased to exist; the labouring masses in the town and in the country, sii far as the Soviet. Government has control over them, are in a state of abject slavery. “It is it system winch produces these results which is the goal of the extremist and revolutionary in this country. And yet want of knowledge and the result of a. vigorous propaganda have given them- a substantial following amongst a certain class of the community. The league, on the other hand, does not say that the. capitalist system is perfect, but it believes that .tne only rational and sane method of curing grievances and remedying evils and abuses is not by the revolutionary destruction of systems, hut by judicious nmendmente, briwing them into accord with the changes of time and the evolution of thought. Nothing but disaster and chaos can come from the disruption of die whole system on which all our institutions are based.”