STOCKTON NOTES

Grey River Argus, 31 March 1932, Page 7

STOCKTON NOTES

(Our Own Correspondent. } The mine will work four days this week, making a total of eight for the coming pay. Mr and Mrs J. Martin were presented with a baby boy during the week. Mr J. Morgan has returned front Wellington, where he has been undergoing medical treatment. Mr Sidney Payne will attend the Westport Hospital to receive electrical massage for his injured leg. Mr R. Parfitt is about again after a spell of three weeks at home through sickness. Mr W. Morgan his been laid up through rheumatism for tho last two weeks. Miss E. Murray, Plunket Nurse, was a visitor to Stockton on Wednesday last. Mr Charles Roberts is on the sick list, and has been off work for a week. Mr P. Fogarty is at present a pat ient in the West port Hospital, undergoing an operation. The latest news is that Mr Fogarty is progressing favourably. Mr J. de Bordieu is also a patient in the Westport Hospital. Mr de i Bourdieu has undergone an operation and is on the mend. Stockton has had I its share of sick and injured during the last three mouths. Mr and Mrs C. Steele aro spending the Easter holidays with relatives nt. Denniston. Miss C. Dickson went to Cape Fotuwind for the past week-end on a visit, to her pa rents. The many friends of Mrs J. Hately. late of Stockton, will, be pleased to learn she is on the mend after a very serious illness. A special combined meeting of the Sick Fund. Medical Association and the Union will bo held in Sunday. April 10th, at 10.30 a.m., in the Hector Hall, for the purpose of selecting a nominee from the. three organisations to contest a seat on the Westport Hospital Board. As represents tion on the Board will mean quite a lot to all concerned, it behoves everv member to make an earnest endeavour to be present on April 10th. It is an old saying that we can only travel as fast as we care to make tho pare. Our own efforts alone can make the proposed suggestion an actual climax to a most worthy idea—direct representation. There may be objections to tho proposal, but, to be able to know the strength of the opposition gives one a great advantage in tho fight. According to the latest reports wo are going to be taxed five per cent of our earnings towards the unemployed. Well, forty hours for 37/6 works out at a fraction over eleven pence per hour. “The labourer is worthy of his hire’’ has no meaning under presentday capitalism. How we are to determine the worth of a labourer’s hire lies at the very crux of the problem the world has to solve. But, as in politics the surest way to deceive is to tell the truth; and in philosophy the way to make sure of being called “abstruse” is to be quite simple and direct, so it is when dealing with tho world problem of unemployment, or in other words, the robbery of the world’s wealth producers. Wage-slavery is the worst form, of slavery the world has ever seen! Now that the exalted members of European nations are compelled to stoop to pick up the pieces of china in the shop after tho bull’s visit, it will not be amiss to give, from the conclusion of Mutual Aid, the following extract: —

“To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all, which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the cause of the rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle. ” But to-day we arc witnesses of a wild capitalist i competition on the question of who can lower the standard of life of the masses most rapidly, who can most quickly reduce the workers to the. condition of Chinese coolies. Some of the proposed methods of dealing with sick capitalism are-, planned distribution of wages, planned distribution of gold, control of banks and trusts and the distribution of raw materials! But who will distribute the raw material: among whom will the gold be distributed; who will control the banks and trusts? The public, reply the reformists. What public? The public as expressed by the “democratic government”. This means that control will be set up by McDonald and Baldwin. Laval and Hoover, Brucning and Mussolini; and the workers are. in the same position as ever. The general attack on the working class raises a number of very serious tasks for the trade union movement. The economic struggle is more difficult under conditions of crisis. It melts away many additional difficulties which have to be studied and understood in order to learn how to overcome them. But tho main difficulty is not objective, but subjective. Everything depends on the degree of organisation and solidarity of the workers. Some people maintain that this serious depression has weakened capitalism. If this is really so, how do they explain the growth of fierce attacks of capital at the present time. The working • class the. world over has never been subjected to such cruelty, starvation, poverty and degradation as they are at the moment. The capitalist class are using every weapon they possess —parliamentary and non-parliamentary —in their efforts to crush the workers’ movement. In the writer’s opinion the retreat has gone far enough; it is time to stop the rot.