SLAVE LABOR - IMAGINED AND REAL

J’Accuse

Worker’s Weekly, 11 September, 1931.

Stand up, members of the Australian capitalists class. instruct your lick-spittles - Labor politicians, newspaper writers, priests and parson - to stand also while we indict you as Slave-owners, Slave drivers and Race Exterminators! Stand up, you hypocrites, who lyingly screech about slave labor in the timber camps of the Workers’ Fatherland while you carry on a vigorous policy of driving the Australian Aborigines to work on forces indentures, robbing them even of the meagre amounts to which they are entitled under your scabby indentures; you who use chains, whips and guns in order to get cheap labor, dare to slander the Soviet Union!

Before the working class of the whole world we indict you:-

One of the worst examples of forces slave labor in the world exists in Australia. Aboriginal workers, denied even the meagre conditions of “freedom” that the white workers have, live in hourly and daily terror of not only themselves being forced to sign indentures to toil for practically no wages, but a special organisation of crawlers and bloodhounds (the A.P.B.) has been set up by the capitalist class to kidnap aboriginal children and force these mites to slave for Capitalism.

In pursuance of the capitalists’ policy of exterminating the aboriginal race entirely originally carried out by “abo.hunts,” which were better “fun” than kangaroo hunts, poisoning waterholes, doping food with strychnine and other gentle British methods, today the sexes are being segregated with the aid of the Christian dope peddlers and policy through “mission stations.” The women of the aboriginal race are recruited through these cheap labor compounds and sent into the towns and station homesteads as domestics, while the male aboriginals are kept employed miles away from the female species. This present methods is a little slower than the murder campaigns of the past, but is actually more certain. It is racial extermination!

Aboriginal intellectuals - and there are such despite “benevolent” Capitalism’s refusal to allow the aborigines the same opportunities for schooling and training as other races in Australia - are not allowed to accept positions in their profession, and in the case of school teachers who pass all the necessary examinations, they are prohibited from teaching even children of their own race where other school and training facilities are denied them.

ABORIGINES MUST KEEP OFF POLITICS!

Political freedom is denied the aborigines - and woe betide him who is caught taking an active part in politics. Threats (often carried into effect) to take away their children and hire them out as slaves, arrests on false charges with the sentence being commuted to several years’ hard labor at about L4 to L10 per year for some avaricious exploiter - or some other from of terror is adopted to prevent any political activity on behalf of the aboriginal race.

SCULLIN’S MAN HUNTS

Man hunts are still carried out in various parts of Australia, particularly in that portion coming directly under the control of the Federal Labor Government. Troopers are sent into the Northern Territory to arrest tribesmen who are alleged to have speared cattle. The unfortunate aborigines are brought to “justice” and condemned to work on stations, etc. There they are “civilised,” taught how to drink poisonous rum, smoke tobacco encouraged in sexual excesses - diseased, and then they are fit prey for the Mission Stations and the Aborigines “Protection” Boards.

Then Capitalism’s insatiable greed is temporarily satisfied and the capitalist class, its lick-spittles, thugs, gunmen, dope peddlers, kidnappers of children (A.P.B.), and exterminators of the Aboriginal race, do their bit, collectively.

And the ruling class of Australia talks of slave labor in U.S.S.R.!

-H.J.M.

Watch for the next article on this question. We have facts galore.