POLITICAL ACTION AND THE
NEWER UNION.
By V. GORDON CHILDE.
Il
While I repeat that I hail with enthusiasm the advent of the new movement,
I feel that he would be but a poor student of our own history who could regard it
wholly without misgivings. The very fervor of the idealism inspiring its pro-
moters is a danger. It walks confessedlysomewhat in the clouds, but we Australians,
in common with other branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, are painfully practical people.
To the rank and file, I suspect, the project will commend itself chiefly as a more
economical and efficient weapon — as indeed it is — for wresting from the master
class higher wages and better conditions. But if these alone are the objects of the mass of its
constituents, the new organisation, for all its paper strength and solidarity, will forget its ideals
in the struggle for those very palliatives which its preamble condemns as aiming at mending
and thereby perpetuating — the capitalist system instead of ending it.
The mere forging of a potent weapon will not win the class war. The bone-head rank and file will
be ever dragging us backward to the old vicious circle. I would then remind those industrialists
who, after a long spell of Holmanism, are inclined to be contemptuous of the Labor Party,
that the latter was launched with like high ideals (which, despite traitors, it has never quite forgotten),
that it has an objective embodying, though in less explicit or scientific terms, very similarideals.
Yet since William Lane launched the A.L.F. into the political ocean to establish ''Socialism in our day,'' despite 20 years of untiring propaganda, through no inherent weakness of machinery or dishonesty of politicians, but through the dulness of the masses and the preference of the majority for tangible ameliorations in the present to more lasting advantages in the future, the A.L.P. has been driven
to water down its programme to achieve the small modicum of success that some critics so
unreasonably disparage. It would then be well if industrialists, instead of censuring the
political servants of Democracy for not driving their master, nolens volens, into the
Socialist State, would learn not to leave their ideals quite out of touch with the real, but to try, in
union with the politician, to give to some at least concrete shape. Not that I do not want to aim at the Revolution and go ''the whole hog,'' but I fear that the race that produces Wells and Webb as itsprophets, instead of Marx or Kropotkin, will always want its ''hog'' very solid and well defined, while ''the Revolution'' is left by its staunchest advocates alluringly vague as far as its initial stages are concerned.The most promising method of translating the ideals of the preamble into an immediate programme lies, I believe, in persuading the Labor Party Conference to revise the Party's platform, whose principles are over twenty years old, so as to bring it into line with the latest developments of constructive Socialism which are included in the preamble of the O.B.U. The reformers would make a serious mistake if they disregarded the splendidly democratic machinery of the political organisation of the workers, but they must re- member that the Democracy moves slowly. Hence they would be wise to aim not at the adoption of a too inspiring idealist programme more suited to an industrial organisation than to a political party, but simply at securing from Conference a mandate for the democratisation of State industries. The present machinery of Arbitration, as far as State-owned industries are concerned, might well be replaced by permanent committees representing on the one hand the organised workers, on the other the State — not as one among other employers, but as the representative of the organised consumers. On such bodies the workers must have real power, not the shadow offered by capitalist proposals for similar workshop committees which still leave the economic dominance of the private capitalist untouched. This is, in fact, guaranteed by the role assigned to the State as the representative of the consumers. On the other hand, the workers must be willing to accept real responsibility, and justify the trust placed in them by loyal recognition of the interests of the community — not by trying to do the ''Government stroke.''
Provided we can democratise our State industries, albeit by instalments, by pledging the Party to sucha policy and then returning them with a thumping majority at the polls, we shall have made a substantial step in the direction of abolishing wagery. A working example of an industry — even if it be only the Bombo quarries — successfully run by its employees under the direction of the State, will go much further with the Australian temperament than endless fulminations against Capitalism in the abstract.
It is only by such an objective propaganda as this that the Industrial Workers of Australia can be roused from a slumber of remote ideals or an aimless militancy to a resolute and definite effort "to take and hold the means of production.''
If supporters of the Newer Unionism face the facts wisely and honestly, they will do nothing to imperil the union of the political and industrial wings of the Labor Movement, wherein, as Mr. Theodore says, the peculiar strength of the Movement in Australia lies.
