AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORKERS.

*THE WORKER*

Brisbane August 11, 1894

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORKERS.

Fellow Workers, Parliament is sitting again. For the next six months or more we may expect to hear a lot pompous talk and to see the usual consignment of legislation made in favour of wool, sugar, and gold, but precious little in favour of you who produce it. There will be as much twaddle over indulged in regarding the rights of capital, and a lot of hard work will be done maintaining and securing these rights, but at the end of the session your rights will still be where they are to-day – in the air. When Parliament goes into recess again none of you will be any better off than you are now. I tell you straight; and if you want to know why, I can tell you also.

Since ever this colony has been a colony you have been legislated for by two parties, representing two classes – the owners of capital and the owners of land.

Of the population of the colony these classes do not number 20 per cent, even including absentees. Until very recently you, who form the other 80 per cent, have not had one single representative in Parliament, not one single direct voice in the making of the laws that bind you hand foot and tongue. You have left the making of the law – the most serious business on earth – to your masters, naturally enough they have made them to suit themselves, and any fool knows that every law made in their interest has been a law against yours. Again and again you have sent them back to power to carry on the same old pernicious jobbery, and still you wonder because your lot is bad. Good heavens! You have allowed them to monopolise Parliament – the great source of national power – and to apply all its force in the enforcement of the “rights” of their classes; you have allowed them to interpret what shall be these rights; which interpretation in their devilish audacity they term laws.

You have allowed them to fence themselves in politically until they have fenced half of you out, until they had begun to forget almost about your very existence as a political power; and when at last the shoe begins to pinch, you make a slipshod kind of effort and send a handful of men of your own class into Parliament whom they ridicule and abuse, and whose mission they decline to take seriously even now. You have been and are governed by nobody else but land owners and capitalists and their representatives and sycophants since ever the colony has been a colony. They have consisted of men of various shades of opinion; they have divided themselves into various factions, and have fought each other bitterly for the right to hold the reins of power, but they could always be reckoned upon to join hands and present a united front whenever their common interest were in danger. They have called themselves Conservatives, Liberals, Nationals, Democrats, and what not, but at best they have never been anything else than what they still are – your masters; and they never had any interest but their own under it all.

They have entrenched themselves so securely that they have become a tremendous organisation whose real strength none of you have any conception of. Nothing but a tremendous force can ever hope to reckon with the power your masters have obtained. They will never suffer themselves to become disorganised, nor to renounce one iota what they believe to be their rights without putting forth all their giant powers of resistance – their police, their spies, their sycophants, their newspapers, and their armies. Rather than yield up one jot of the value they fitch from the product of your labour they will try to pull the roof of the world down upon your heads. They are the strongest force in all society – except one other – yourselves united.

Aye, even the Democrats, whom so many of you look hopefully and kindly upon, belong to the same class. They only represent the more radical of the members of the law and order party after all. They are upholders of the constitution , with perhaps a few unimportant trimmings, and the first plank in the constitutional platform is the right of the capitalist to the fleecings of the labourer. They would give you universal suffrage, payment of members, protection, conciliation councils, Factory Acts, federation, Republicanises, and so on. Well and if they were to capture Parliament and you were to get all of them, where would you be! Just where you were before. Then as now we would have poverty and luxury, millionaires and unemployed. For none of these things would alter the relationship of the labourer to the capitalist or prevent to any appreciable extent the robbery of former by the latter. If anything they were to do would better your condition a little it would be more harm than good in the long run. It would only mean a prolongation of the old agony and nothing more.

Look at America. It has Factory Acts, conciliation councils, universal suffrage, payment of members, federation, Republicanism, and what better is the worker of it all. None at all. Absolutely none. Outside of your own party then there is not one particle of hope for you or your children. It is the only party that recognises the right of the labourer to the full product of his labour – the right of a man to own all that he earns. This is the first principle of the Labour movement. Whoever will not recognise it, in whatever way he disguises his non-recognition of it, is your enemy prima facie. The modern developments in the science of political economy prove beyond all question that the filching from the labourer of the earnings of his labour by the capitalist class is the great source of all social evils. Whoever recognises this and will labour for its uprooting is your friend. But none other. The Democrats won't. Ask them and see. There is only one plank in the Labour platform. It is this: That the Labourer is entitled to the full product of his labour. There is only one system of society ever promulgated on this basis. Its name is Socialism.

Yours fraternally,

John Smith.