THE PURPOSE OF ORGANISATION.

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 17, 18 November 1913, Page 3

THE PURPOSE OF ORGANISATION.

(By A. S. Lave.)

Workers of New Zealand, get up and start doing things. The workers of other countries are on the move; let us move with them ! Our conditions are anything but what they should be, for the hours are too long and the pay too short to permit us to live as human beings should live. There are two classes in New Zealand, as in all other countries, where the Capitalist mode of .production operates, and which enables the one class to live in idleness whilst the other must work hard and long for a bare subsidence —and sometimes not that. Those who do no useful work own and control the machines of production, the natural resources of production, the natural resources of this country, and constitute the ruling class. Those who operate the machines and win wealth from the natural re-

sources constitute tlie working class. The ruling class exploits the workers of twothirds of their product, because the workers must (under Capitalism) sell their labour poweiy (a commodity) to the boss for so many hours per day or week, and are robbed of that portion of their total product, over and above that part of the workday necessary for the production of values (commodities), equivalent to the necessities of life, or sufficient to reproduce them as wage-labourers. The workers, it is true, receive the value of their labour power in the shape -of wages, but wages are only the' monetary, expression of so much food, clothes, and shelter necessary for the labourer to maintain himself and perpetuate his labouring power. Moreover, the proportionate part of labour’s entire product that the wage-labourers receive in the form of wages is a relatively diminishing quantity, and will continue in that direction unless the workers wake up, organise their power, and compel the ruling class to take less of the surplus wealth by reducing the hours of the workday. But some unthinking workers say: “ What about the capital the employers have invested ?, Surely they should have some return?” A perusal of the foregoing; however, will prove beyond doubt that the capital of the Master Class is the unpaid labour of the working class, to whom it rightfully belongs.

The ruling class uses the two-thhds of labour’s product (capital) by re-investing it in purchasing new and more modern machinery, and in buying up other natural resources, such as coal mines, forests, and oilfields, etc. This means that they are gobbling up all the _ resources of the' world with that which labour has Xnoduced, and using it to further enslave and * exploit the workers. The most peculiar part of the matter is that when the wealth producers ask for more of that which they produce with their own hands and activities, the Ruling Class put up a howl that can be heard from the North Cape to the Bluff, to the effect that the workers are going to rob them of the interest on their capital. As I have pointed out, the ruling class plays the part of skinners. All they have has been taken from us, and it is therefore impossible for v us to take anything from them that does not belong to us. All they have has been stolen from the workers, and it can be truly said that they do not intend to divest themselves. It is up to us to organise to take it back. The very first thing we should do is to shorten our horns of work, say, to forty hours a wnek for a beginning, and force a minimum wage right throughout New r Zealand. This can only be accomplished by organisation on sound industrial lines. If the workers of this country are to every better their conditions, they must do it as a class, and the only w-ay to fight as a class is to organise on the basis of the class struggle, and not on craft lines, as heretofore. Let us get busy, and organise the workers into ONE BIG UNION for the purpose of bettering our conditions here and now. Once w r e can get the working class to act together, the ml ling class will have to go to w T ork! Let our slogan be a forty hour week and a minimum wage of 12s per day throughout New Zealand.