NIHILIST STRATEGY

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 139, 9 December 1929, Page 10

NIHILIST STRATEGY

"The Guard dies, but does not surrender." This or some other slogan of militarism must have been absorbed by the militants in the New South Wales collieries dispute. The no-surrender policy is not a policy of practical warfare, but it seems to be the policy of those who would add to the prolonged idleness of many coalminers by calling out everybody else in a futile effort to prevent a settlement based on mutual concession. If the coalminers alone were losing something under that settlement, sectional bitterness would be more excusable, but as employers and the Government also contribute their share to the deflating of colliery costs, the no-surrender policy must be considered to be either a counsel of despair or an urge to destruction. If the latter, it ceases to be economic and becomes political, and thus is opened up the kernel of the whole problem—whether labour is to be guided by advisers who seek an economic settlement in the form of a readjusted distribution of the proceeds of industry, or whether labour will follow those wreckers who would create idleness and chaos for the purpose of breaking up the whole property system. An "all-Australian strike," in a time of general depression, and at a moment when "50 per cent, of the workers in the mining industry have had ten bitter months on the grass," can only be the advice of conscious or unconscious wreckers whose plan is not to round the hair- ■ pin bend, but to put the whole outfit s over the bank.