THE LABOUR WAR IN NEW ZEALAND.

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 12, 6 November 1913, Page 2

THE LABOUR WAR IN NEW ZEALAND.

REFLECTIONS.

New Zealand is ablaze with strike and talk of strike. Never before in New Zealand’s working class history has the spirit of conscious revolt and industrial solidarity been so manifest.

From north to south and from east to w-est the same feeling and purpose is to the fore. Unions, bodies, and groups of workers who appeared as sleepy as the owls at night have throwm the economic bandage from their eyes, and stepped forth to take a hand in the grim fight of the working class against tyranny, despotism, and exploitation. To the student of proletarian science this is not to be wondered at in the least. The Old World features (capitalistically speaking) are so glaringly and preponderantly manifest that the w T onder is New Zealand’s working class have not long since made a mighty kick at Capitalism’s cruel yoke. The scene changes, how r ever. What was yesterday, will not be to-mor-row^.

As the masters of bread increase in wealth and power, so, too, do the show their arrogance, and assert their fiendish propensities, till their victims and slaves can withstand no longer. So, then, in New r Zealand to-day the workers are faced with the self-same proposition as the wmrkers in other countries. The same issue is at stake, the same fight has to be faced. AND NEW ZEALAND’S WORKERS ARE FACING THE ISSUE NOBLY AND GRANDLY AGAINST TERRIBLE ODDS. And wdiat of the swinish bourgeoisie? They, like all other ruling classes who have battened and fattened upon the fruits of other men’s labour, are drunk with riotous living and wasteful, useless lives.

it is these wtio own and control the newspapers that poison the minds of our country brethren, w ho dictate the school ourriculums, hire preachers to ladle out slave ethics and preach a creed pregnant with superstition. It is they who cry “ We must maintain law and order,” and at the same time resort to the lowest and vilest methods to cause bloodshed and misery, chaos and even murder. There Is nothing too vile and mean and sordid for the bourgeoisie of New Zealand. Their god is surplus value; their ambition to live without wnrking.