Industrial Workers of the World

Conscription by Starvation

Fifty thousand more men are needed from Australia for the war. Conscription in its most insidious form is to be used for the purpose of raising them. The military authorities are not called upon to act and force the unwilling worker to the trenches at the point of the bayonet. That might cause some workers to think that after all there is not much difference between the boasted “freedom” of Australian democracy and that which exists in Prussia. Governments that call themselves

Labor must do things in a less open manner. Instead of the Iron Heel we are to have the cold whip of want. It is an open secret that governments and other large employers of labor are preparing to refuse employment to those men of military age who answer the recruiting committee’s questions unsatisfactorily.

Who will blame the worker if stranded and penniless, he decides to face the bayonets instead of the infinitely more cruel weapon of starvation? Another satisfactory aspect of this conscription scheme is that it only applies to those who are dependent on wages for their daily bread, and excludes from service those whom Holman recently referred to as the “intellectual elite.” The Universal Service League, of which Holman is a member, has been quick to see the advantage of this compared to other forms of conscription, and has now dropped its agitation for straight-out compulsion in favour of the “voluntary system.”

A scheme which drives the common herd into the firing line and leaves the sons of the “elite” – whom Holman thinks so necessary tour welfare at home – to show their patriotism in growing fat on “4½ per cent gilt-edged securities” is surely superior to anything that could be conceived in the brain of a mere German Junker.

Meantime unionism throughout Australia is congratulating itself upon having such stalwart foes of conscription at the head of the Federal Government as Billy Hughes.

“If the unions assist the Government, there will be no need for compulsion,” said Hughes lately to a deputation in Queensland. This is a plain hint that the unions also are expected to take a hand in victimising men of military age who have a different interpretation of what constitutes patriotism to Hughes and his good union lieutenants.

Hughes has mad use of the unions for many vile purposes in the past, and no doubt he will get a good deal of support from this source in pushing the workers into the European shambles.

The spokesmen of Australian unionism have displayed a too keen anxiety to justify the “voluntary system” – as if there were any difference in principle between the various systems of militarism – and their effusive loyalty may be expected to exhibit itself in co-operating along the lines which Dictator Hughes suggests.

All of which shows to what dire depths the so-called labor movement has degraded itself.

Reared in the lap of Parliamentarism, accustomed to look to other sources rather than to their own direct action in their struggles of the past, it is no wonder that the Australian workers find themselves to-day absolutely at the mercy of the boodlers and politicians, treated not as men who are supposed to have any ideas of their own, either of war or other matters pertaining to their welfare, but as things, mere automations, to be ordered about at will, or starved at the whim of those whom they themselves raised out of the gutter and placed in the lap of luxury.

If labor organisations today had a spark of the genuine spirit by which a working class movement should be animated, Hughes and the blood-thirsty capitalist crew whose interests he is serving, could be made fawn at the feet of those fifty thousand men whom they now intend to starve or indirectly murder.

Direct Action December 12 1915