LISTEN, FAT!

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 18, 20 November 1913, Page 2

LISTEN, FAT!

Just now we, the workers, are engaged in a struggle with you—the shirkers —for the right to organise as we think fit. You think you can dictate terms to us; you tried your damnable pin-pricking tactics, thinking Labour was asleep, but Labour Solidarity has dumfounded you, and in your haste and ignorance you have tried the out-of-date tactic of arresting prominent workers. Your class elsewhere has long ago discovered that it does not pay to attempt to stifle free speech by inflicting long terms of imprisonment, and if you are too thickheaded to see this we will have to teach you. The outcome of the present conflict, so far as a basis of settlement is concerned, has the odds on our side. But for actual advance made it is already a victory—for has not Labour flung your would-be compulsory arbitration system right in your teeth? But it is of the arrests that we wish to speak. You have arrested several of our number, thinking, in your short-sighted folly, that your action would help to break the strike or terrorise the workers.

But you have really reckoned without your host. Or it may be that you are trying a game of bluff. But we here intimate to you that we have a weapon that you have not fully felt yet; a weapon that will penetrate to your fat-encased heart; for there enshrined is your God —profit. Our weapon destroys profit. Just now the I.W.W. has two thousand staunch adherents sprinkled over New Zealand. At least two-thirds of this number are prepared to use that weapon—Sabotage—and use it well. It will be no use you trying to stop it, for every fresh arrest made will call forth more frequent and more deadly use.

It is a weapon that defies you and all your specials,” your pimps, your strike-breakers, your batons, and your machine guns. It is secret and deadly. It does not mangle men, as you would do rather than be thwarted. But it destroys that which is more important TO YOU than life—it mangles, plays havoc with, your PROFITS.

Rest assured that it will touch your sympathy. It will worry you, exasperate you, terrify you, make you cry—but it will get results. The more you try to check it the more it will grow. You have arrested some of our number. You have chosen terrorism. We accept your challenge. You will get such a shower of Sabotage for every week of our Fellow-Workers live spent in gaol that you will be glad to cry “Stop.”

Take this, then, as an ULTIMATUM. Labour may doze, but the militant minority never sleeps.