Grey River Argus and Blackball News SATURDAY, JULY 1, 1922. HOURS AND CONDITIONS

Grey River Argus, 1 July 1922, Page 4

Grey River Argus and Blackball News

SATURDAY, JULY 1, 1922. HOURS AND CONDITIONS

Delivered every moaning In Gr mth. K -x, H '• "-d. Tay;.. .ille. Cr< Ngahere EL-ci-LaU, Nelson Creek, Brunner, Te Kingha kutomanu, Poerua, Inchbonnie, Patara. Rum, Kanuata, Kotukv- Moina, Aratika, Bunanga, Dunollie, Cobden. Baxters, Kokiri, Ahaura. Ikamatua. Stulwaler, Waiuta, Reefton. Ross. Ruatapua, Mananin, Hari Hart. Waiho Gorge, Weheka, Rewanul, Otira, Imingahua Junction, Westport, Waimangaroa, Denniston, Granity. Millerton. Ngakawau. Hector* ScxidonvilLj, Cape Foul wind, and Karamez

i It is inevitable that employers will declaim against the manifesto just isi Sued by the New Zeeland Workers’ Unibn in favour of a six-hours working • day, but it is coming all the same. The union pointedly says why, by briefly Outlining the influence of machine production. Compared even with a decade a&p, the employer of to-day can got just as much production with half the labour in a largo number of industries. “More production” is the camouflage of capitalism for “more profits,” but despite the increases of production, labour i\ getting a smaller ; share. Some the tales that things are goingimprove for everybody when wagesYdrop, and yet cannot fail to see th a A any improvement in trade is going to lip monopolised by the men who own the qbeans of production—the machines am| the means whence come the raw materials. Apart altogether from the famineis, plagues, destitution, and dislocation lirought by the war, a general displacement of labour was in progress before, lifcul up-to-date machines, modern organisation, and mass production, were nwking it possible for capitalists in all to fill warehouses more quickly, Ihe production from labour has also been t.alist competition. And a • mployud arise side- by Of unsa le.-i bio prodn.-is, Colo, jn tlo> Engii.-h reviews o book on this \. ,1. ’Po?yy. a thlnlwr Tim roofs of r-om.'il ' it L of S’'Oei:i i no ’Ttiludo on the di vision of labour industrialism. ■ki.E,,.!.; (who

me occasion) the moclern socialist, says ‘ Peaty, does not hate and war against j ndustrialism, but accepts it and desires i mly to change the form : nd manner ot its. administration. Mr Penty’s first Li.esis is that modern industrialism has . b- en a wandering of humanity in the | -vilderness, and that the task of ; those who would re-make Society is not ; to place industrialism on a democrati< ! basis,, but to replace it : Itogether by I the regulation of machinery, the aboli tion of the sub-division (not the divi- I sion) of labour, and the revival of ’ agriculture and craftsmanship. His ; second thesis is that, whether we like- ■ it or not, industrialism is doomed. The i ideal of Britain as the “workshop of’ the world” is a bad dream that car | not come true; the present unemployment is the result, not of any mere flue- I L-uation of trade, but of a permanent dislocation of the industrial system. Industrial expansion has reached its limits; productive power has outstrip ped the power to consume; agriculture is being neglected and the world’s stock of raw materials depleted; the search for exploitation is reaching its nemesis Under these conditions, Mr Penty hold.that the attempt to reorganise society merely by changing the form of industrialism is doomed to failure. It is both wrong and impossible. Industrialism means unregulated machine-production displacement and subdivision of labour, a worsening condition of economic crisis for which Socialists have hardly a more effective remedy than the three wise men of Genoa, who went to sea in a Treaty. We must, he s i iys. put things first. We must reconsider the moral and human basis of our society, and recognise that industrialism, in any form, is inconsistent with the idea or the practice of the good life. Of course, it should be said, that in Penty’s conception, the precise forum of organisation, the precise sphere of machine production, the exact way of reviving agriculture and handicraft, are secondary matters, the knowledge of which will come to us when we have made our groat choice, and not before. It is :« choice between fundamental ideals he wants the working class to make. It is a choice between the work state and the leisure state.