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At first sight it may seem that, after all, the experiment in syndicalism was on a small scale, and that its lesson can hardly be of great value to a country like America. A little consideration may correct such a misapprehension. New Zealand was deliberately selected by the Syndicalists as a test case, for two reasons.
The conduct of many of the Labour Party leaders during this strike, as during the railway strike, fully justified the confidence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. MacDonald, for example, spoke of syndicalism in much the same terms as those used by Mr. Lloyd George.
The book was published in 1894, two or three years before the theories of the French school were born. Nevertheless, their critique of Owenism expresses as succinctly and forcibly as anything yet written the attitude of the socialists toward the economics of modern syndicalism. "Of all Owen's attempts to reduce his socialism to practice," write the Webbs, "this was certainly the very worst.
Brocklehurst had been upsetting; she had an uneasy feeling of having made a fool of herself in Insall's eyes; she desired his approval, even on that occasion when she had first met him and mistaken him for a workman she had been conscious of a compelling faculty in him, of a pressure he exerted demanding justification of herself; and to-day, because she was now pledged to Syndicalism, because she had made the startling discovery that he was a writer of some renown, she had been more than ever anxious to vindicate her cause.
Thus it happens that Auckland and Wellington are at present the chief shipping ports of the Dominion, and it was to them that the Federation of Labor turned its chief attention when its leaders had definitely decided to undertake the campaign of syndicalism against the system of arbitration which had prevailed for sixteen years.
You may hear the older men explaining that the country is going to absolute ruin, and the younger ones explaining that the country is forging ahead as it never did before; but chiefly they love to talk of great national questions, such as the protective tariff and the need of raising it, the sad decline of the morality of the working man, the spread of syndicalism and the lack of Christianity in the labour class, and the awful growth of selfishness among the mass of the people.
The idea tickled their national vanity; and though it was all put in a very amateurish way, many of them saw well enough that for war to be retained as a solution of international problems something on these lines would have to be done for it. Syndicalism was merely a showing of the way.
Strikes and lockouts, trades unions and employers' associations as they are now constituted and as they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence, propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them.
Whether the Guilds would, sooner or later, adopt the principle of equal payment for every member, is open to discussion. Guild Socialism accepts from Syndicalism the view that liberty is not to be secured by making the State the employer: ``The State and the Municipality as employers have turned out not to differ essentially from the private capitalist. Guild Socialists regard the State as consisting of the community in their capacity as consumers, while the Guilds will represent them in their capacity as producers; thus Parliament and the Guild Congress will be two co-equal powers representing consumers and producers respectively.
And how were these, who still believed themselves to be dwelling under the old dispensation, to comprehend that environments change, and changing demand new and terrible Philosophies? When night fell on that fateful Tuesday the voice of Syndicalism had been raised in a temple dedicated to ordered, Anglo-Saxon liberty the Hampton City Hall.
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