| <headline><p> <Back to the Abyss. The Mailed Fist and> 
| <its Effect.> </p></headline>
| <p> Five aspects of social phenomena mark the later 
| development of Capitalism.  They are industrial 
| monopoly, militarism, the problem of the increased cost 
| of living, the universality of social unrest, and the 
| remarkable advances made in the economic and political 
| organisation of the wage workers.  For the whole of the 
| last decade, world-politics has been dominated by the 
| driving force of economic chaos.  Everywhere production 
| has outgrown the assimilative capacity of the market.  
| Each influential business interest has <mdash>-</mdash> in 
| pursuance therefore <mdash>-</mdash> steadily sought to 
| find for its surplus productions a dumping-ground 
| outside the limits of the exhausted area.  For years 
| prior to the war Germany, France, Britain and America 
| relentlessly pursued a definitely planned policy of 
| colonization <mdash>-</mdash>not in order to meet any 
| pressure of population at home, but to ease the 
| increasingly urgent economic problem begotten in the 
| inherent contradictions in the laws governing capitalist 
| economy. </p>
| <p> The mad fever for armaments has been derived from and 
| nourished by the competition for oversea markets, made 
| necessary by the advent of monopoly at home.  In 
| proportion as success attended the efforts of particular 
| groups in this connection influence was brought to bear 
| on the national foreign, and colonial policy of each 
| country, so that support and protection would be assured 
| against hostile trade competitors, and, further
| <mdash>-</mdash> and equally important <mdash>-</mdash> 
| facilities given to enable difficulties in the new area 
| being effectively met.  That is why America fought Spain 
| and Britain the Transvaal Republics.  It explains why 
| Belgium despoiled the Congo, and why the Australian 
| Parliament enacted native labor ordinances in Papua. It 
| is the reason, the sole and only reason, why the 
| professions of universal peace, made by every 
| responsible statesman in the world during the pre-war 
| period were confirmed by the most staggering, aggressive 
| preparations the wit of man could devise. </p>
| <p> It was the inexorable procession from cause to 
| effect, which threw an ever-increasing power into the 
| hands of the men who operated the machinery of 
| capitalist industry.  To the extent that large scale 
| manufacture rose up from the ruins of the multitude of 
| small shops, civilisation evolved an economic despotism 
| more absolute than is to be found in all the records of 
| the race. In every field of industrial enterprise, the 
| joint-stock corporation gradually separated capital 
| <q> 
| </q></p>
| <p> These Napoleons of finance have thus gathered under 
| their control the entire available investments of 
| society.  They decide where and when new industries 
| shall commence, when dislocation or cessation shall 
| occur.  They bull, bear and hammer on Stock Exchanges, 
| give advances and foreclose, gamble in futures, corner 
| wool and wheat, determine the success or failure of 
| national loans, and, in short, sit enthroned monarchs of 
| the world, ruling with an icy sceptre, and decreeing 
| disaster and death to all who say them nay. </p>
| <p> It is this class of monetary experts who have 
| controlled the cabinets of Europe.  Another decade of 
| peace with its uninterrupted working-class progress 
| would have witnessed their political annihilation.  
| Capitalism was drifting towards the rapids of 
| revolution.  In each country the social democracy was 
| building up from the base the foundations of a new 
| society.  Strike on strike, agitation on agitation, and 
| growth in the number of powerfully compacted industrial 
| organisations was surely and persistently making the 
| multitude an invincible force.  In Germany and France 
| the Socialist parties were the largest separate 
| political entity in the Parliament.  In Great Britain, 
| Home Rule <mdash>-</mdash> the last of the issues left to 
| an expiring Liberalism <mdash>-</mdash> was disappearing.  
| The whole future was to be given to the discussion and 
| determination of social problems. </p>
| <p> Thus 'twas the beginning of the end.  Only a vast 
| human fratricide could meet the emergency and drive the 
| populace back to its hole.  It was as though a voice 
| cried:  <q> 
| </q>  Thus has humanity retired toward the chasm 
| out from which it climbed with bleeding feet and 
| staggering steps.  It is as though the day turned back 
| to the night, even as our eyes were fixed on the 
| noontide sun.  But Labor will learn its lesson, and will 
| not forget.  Governments that know no method but that of 
| musketry, must find in it uncompromising hostility.  The 
| political state has been the instrument of the great 
| financiers.  They have used it to our discomfiture and 
| their own gain.  It remains for the Social Democracy to 
| realise definitely and decisively that the indispensable 
| condition to the orderly progress of economic 
| organisation and industrial solidarity is the conquests 
| by the workers of the coercive authority of the law. </p>
| <p> Meanwhile all the countries <mdash>-</mdash> and they 
| are few enough <mdash>-</mdash> outside the actual theatre 
| of conflict are experiencing the economic paralysis 
| inevitably due to the stoppage of commercial exchange.  
| Australian wheat, wool, and minerals are not sold in 
| Europe for money <mdash>-</mdash> they are exchanged for 
| machinery, textiles, metals, apparel of all 
| descriptions, paper, timber, etc. Immediately Europe 
| ceased exporting exchangeable products <mdash>-</mdash>
| more particularly the products constituting the 
| raw materials of Australian manufactures <mdash>-</mdash>
| our trade and our industry pulled up with a full 
| stop.  There was a feverish effort at re-organisation, 
| but the paralysing grip of capitalism has left the 
| Commonwealth without any approach to economic security.  
| Prices are dear for the articles the country imports 
| such as cloth and iron.  They are also dear for the 
| commodities we export such as meat, wool and wheat.  War 
| is not only the assassin's trade, it is the exploiter's 
| auxiliary.  The condition of Europe after the Napoleonic 
| wars was horrible. Following on the Franco-Prussian 
| conflict ensued an epoch of working-class disaster, 
| marked by penal legislation and unrestrained social 
| tyranny.  More recently the aftermath of the South 
| African upheaval was but a confirmation of the 
| retrograde influence war has on the social 
| condition. </p>
| <p> Bad as the position is now it has all the appearance 
| of being worse when the war ends.  The industrial 
| dislocation following on the stoppage of war-output will 
| be but a multiplication of that which ensued on the 
| outbreak of hostilities.  We are face to face with a 
| period of dire distress.  Wages will go down in 
| proportion as work becomes scarce.  All the 
| characteristic associations of social impoverishment 
| will become accentuated.  The streets will echo to the 
| tramp of the hungry men, while wives and children weep 
| in silence and sorrow for the misfortunes of peace even 
| as they wept in silence and sorrow at the agonies of 
| war.  Private enterprise is about to add to the 
| innumerable demonstrations it has given of its 
| incapacity to serve popular needs. </p>
| <p> Yet there are alternatives.  Even in the midst of the 
| worst that will occur, there will be food and homes and 
| clothing, provided there is insistence that the 
| organised State shall be responsible for their 
| production.  The States have complete control over 
| domestic requirements.  They can produce coal in 
| abundance, for there are mines undeveloped and men 
| ready; they can take over the boot factories, the 
| flour-mills, the bakeries and slaughter yards, and use the 
| equipment private enterprise is unable to employ, in 
| order that starvation and want may be effectually 
| prevented. </p>
| <p> So all is not yet lost.  There still remains the 
| power of a united and alert democracy to save itself 
| with courage and resource.  There are not two ways.  We 
| have to choose finally, once and for all, between a bold 
| and determined policy, negativing the interests of 
| Capitalism, or continuing to hold to the timid ways 
| monopoly would have us travel in its service. </p>
| <trailer><p> <September 6, 1918>	
| <The Westralian Worker> <Friday, September 6, 1918>
| </p></trailer>