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Salient. The Newspaper of Victoria University College. Vol. 20, No. 4. May 3, 1956
The Con Viewpoint
The Con Viewpoint
The policies, methods, and achievements of Dr. Buchman's Moral Re-Armament movement look most impressive as chronicled by Mr. James Baynard-Smith. He even assures us that New Zealand can escape the trammels of "moral apathy, political and industrial warfare, divorce and juvenile delinquency" and "fulfil its God-given destiny as the prototype and beacon-light of a new society" under the banner of Buchmanism.
Analysed coldly, what did the article tell us? That some of the world's most hard-bitten and cynical politicians—Nasser, U Nu, Si Bekkai—say that they approve of MRA, that it has made some rebellious Nigerians be polite to the Queen; and that in general it offers humanity, in combination with God, an answer to Communism.
The article was thus chiefly notable for what it did not tell us about MRA.
The emphasis of stilling class strife and on beating back the ideological frontiers of Moscow explains the enthusiasm for MRA shown by employers, Tory politicians, and Labour "front-benches of the "neither for nor against" breed. It also casts some interesting light on MRA's past, and on where its policies logically lead.
In January 1947, the very pro-MRA president of Australia's Council of Employers' Federations stated that "industrial peace would be established once for all if the Labour movement would only abandon the theory of class warfare." The "Southern Cross" was moved to comment editorially (17/1/47).
"To say that the class war is a theory is to imply that it could be abolished if only the workers would refrain from subscribing to it. . . . Marx did not invent the class struggle, he merely happened to observe that it is inherent in an industrialized society in which one class owns the means of production, and the other much more numerous class works for wages. Since the employer naturally wants to make as much profit as possible, and the workers went to be paid as high a wage as possible, and since these two aims are opposed, a conflict of interests is inevitable. . . .
"An employer's call for the abandonment of the theory of class warfare is an employer's plea for the workers to take what they are given. . . Employers will always seek to have the class struggle eliminated from society. Workers prefer to travel in the opposite direction, and they are as keen to see the end of the class struggle as any employer is."