SYNDICALISM AND POLITICS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1529, 27 August 1912, Page 6

SYNDICALISM AND POLITICS.

At the Socialist Hall on Sunday night, before a fair audience, Mr. R. S. Ross lectured an "Syndicalism and Political Action." Syndicalism being anti-political, Mr. "Ross said his object was to present the- syndicalist position as stated by its foremost theorists, and then to attempt to establish the casts that in. < the Australasian Dominions, at all events, political action was <"-,sential to working-class advancement. Syndicalism, said the speaker, was act the thing popularly depicted. The popular authority on the subject appeared to be Mr. Arthur Clay's "Syndicalism and Labour," but this was a book written to _ destroy and not to expound syndicalism. Clay said that "the fundamental precept of syndicalism is that success must be obtained by violent means," but tho syndicalist theorists and actionists themselves said that violence was as much an excrescenco or an accident as with any other method, including the strike and the vote. Mr. Ross emphasised Levinc's definition that "revolutionary syndicalism is an attempt to fuss revolutionary Socialism and trado unionism into one coherent movement. Its aim is to do away with existing institutions, and to reconstruct society along new lines." The campaign, said Mr. Ross, was "for the direct control of tho industries by the workers employed in them." Tho lecturer insisted that, as the workers could not escape law, and were willy-nilly in its clutch every day of their lives, they would be wise to write tho law. This'was to be done by using th'a vote. Economic power was sanctioned and protected by Parliament, and Parliament had to be \ised to fight existent economic power and alter it. If imperfect, the vote was the most workable known method of securing government of any port; and government had to be. In concluding, the lecturer was careful to make it clear that he by no means disparaged industrialist action, which had its plice in the social scheme, and which indeed was the foundation of political action. The two activities were complementary, and one-sided adhesion to cither would be irawiso- and doubtless danger-