AIMING AT A SOVIET.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 March 1921, Page 10

AIMING AT A SOVIET.

GOAL OF THE IMMODEBATES. “TRADE UNIONISM RUN MAD.” THE ONLY RATIONAL CURE. He inculcates the doctrine that there must necessarily be eternal enmity between the worker and the employer—that there can be no common ground on which they can meet. He handles every industrial dispute with an eye to his ultimate goal—the abolition of capital and private enterprise. In these words Mr. C. P. Skerrett, K.C., president of the New Zealand Welfare League, epitomised his views of the extremist in the course of a trenchant criticism of revolutionary industrialism, in addressing the second annual conference of the League, which opened at Wellington this week. Elaborating this point Mr. Skerrett remarked that the extremist aimed to make his arrangements between the employer and worker temporary so that he might be essential to the worker. “He has,” he continued, “no time.for—indeed, he is the bitterest enemy of—all schemes designed to give the worker a fair share of the joint production ; a direct interest in the result, of his work, a voice in the management of the business in which he works, and. under which the worker will, as far as possible, be protected from unemployment. Such schemes, successful, would sound the death-knell of revolutionary socialism.” A COMMON GROUND. “The league, on the other hand, has always maintained that the relationship of worker and employer was not necessarily antagonistic ; that there was a common ground on which they could meet to their mutual advantage ; and that true reform lay in the adoption of some such system as I have indicated as meeting with the opposition of the extremist We have always maintained that the so-called trade unionism of the militant trade unions is unionism run mad. Thus trade unionism is always anti-revolutionary. It concerns itself only with the existing social and economic systems, and it seeks for the betterment of the conditions of the worker under these systems. If the-' existing system requires reform or alteration, that is to be brought under the Constitution by constitutional means. True trade unionism is never disruptive—never revolutionary. The trouble we have in the Dominion is that we have some powerful unions who use the machinery and the funds and shape the acts of trade unions for an illegitimate purpose—the disruption of the existing economic system and the control of. the industries of the country by the manual worker over everyone else. The ultimate goal of trade unionism to-day under its present leaders is revolutioif VOICE OF OFFICIAL LABOUR. “Only the other day a member of the official Labour Party deliberately used in Parliament this language : I am not going to offer apologies for saying that as soon as possible I, want to get rid of Parliament as it\is now constituted, and institute its place an industrial Parliament that will reflect the useful people of the Domiinion. . . . But I put on record the fact that I am up against your system — —a system that causes my fellow worker to go down on his belly and crawl to get assistance in this country. “What does this mean?” continued Mr. Skerrett. “What does an industrial Parliament that will reflect the useful people mean? I means plainly the governance of the country and the control of the means of manufacture, exchange, and production, and perhaps of every form of activity, by the manual worker to the exclusion of everyone else. It means in short, the so-called Soviet system of Bolshevism. We know authoritatively the effect of the adoption of the system in Russia. In the language of a theoretical Socialist who visited Russia it 'means ‘ruin, disaster, disease, misery, starvation, chaos’ 1 A GLOOMY PICTURE. “These are not my words. We now know authoritatively the conditions which now obtain there. Private trading is prohibited and shops are closed. Trade unions have been made departments of the Soviet administration ; no voluntary organisations are permitted ; the great co-operative organisation which had developed so remarkably in Russia before the war has been entirely subordinated to the IStatq; political parties are persecuted, and driven under ground ; the free Press has ceased to exist ; the labouring masses in the town and in the country, so far as the Soviet Government has control over them, are in a state of abject slavery. “It is a system which produces these results which is the goal of the extremist and revolutionary in this- country. And yet want of knowledge and the result of a vigorous propaganda have given them a substantial following amongst a certain class of the community. The league, on the other hand, does not say that the capitalist system is perfect, but it believes that the only rational and sane method of curing grievances and remedying evils and abuses is not by the revolutionary destruction of systems, but by judicious amendments, bringing them into accord with the changes of time, and the evolution of thought. Nothing but disaster and chaos can come from the disruption of the whole system on which all our institutions are based.”