What Revolution Implies.

Maoriland Worker, Volume 3, Issue 51, 1 March 1912, Page 8

What Revolution Implies.

We are Revolutionists. Our plan and our purpose is to inaugurate a Social lie volution. In this universe nothing is permanent; everything is subservient to the Law of Change. Nowhere is this fact more noticeable than in the forces at work in modern civilisation. Methods and ideas have been revolutionised within our own ken. To-day the person who says that continual change ia not a fact is regarded as ill-informed in the extreme. We recognise it, because it has been so vividly brought under our own notice, and we call it evolution. Evolution has been at work from the very beginning of all things. We have seen this force at work, changing form and species, slowly or rapidly as the case may be, till tho change has resulted in a complete transformation. Then it is that revolution takes place. "Webster" defines revolution as a complete change. That is why we are Revolutionists; wo recognise that anything short of a complete change socially will not be permanently beneficial to us. Marx describes a revolution as being "a more or less rapid transformation of the juridical and political superstructure of society arising from a change in its economic foundations." Quite true. Certain people speak of evolution as apart from revolution; this but revivals their lack of knowledge of both words. There can be no evolution without revolution, and likewise there can be no revolution without evolution. One is necessary to the other; one makes tho other possible. Revolution and evolution have played their parts in animal and vegetable life, in social sytems and in solar systems. It is to hasten the forces of evolution that the Socialist seeks to accomplish. Recognising that the present social system is based upon wage labor, ho attempts by intellectual endeavor to hasten the passing of such a system, even as chattel slavery passed away. Knowing that the cessation of exploitation—a natural corollary to wageslavory—can only be possible by its being wiped into oblivion, he strives continuously for that end. When that is an accomplished fact, when the wagesystem is abolished, society will exist upon an entirely new basis. A complete change will have taken place. A revolution will have been accomplished. The outcome of this revolution will be that a class hitherto regarded as inferior will have a voice in the administration of the industrial machinery. Instead of being used as a profitmaking machine, as is the case to-day, the worker will possess the value of that which his labor has produced. Following upon this will be the abolition of all social inequalities and that degradation and despair which is such a blasting indictment of present-day society. From a revolution all things are possible, and from Revolutionists will tho Revolution come. Be a Revolutionist. Fight for the Revolution—that way lies liberty and life.