New Zealand Letter

I recently read a press report on the new BMA booklet Doctors’ Orders.

We in New Zealand have been getting this sort of thing thrown at us for about two or three years. The BMA are only handing these books out in order to get the workers to keep themselves fit for more intensive exploitation.

Think how the military authorities must groan in despair at the number of men who are not in fighting condition at commencement of training! The expense involved in bringing them up to a peak of fitness required for cannon fodder!

The BMA’s little booklet should enable the workers to do their own P.T. at less cost to the master class. Our experience in Australasia has been that as soon as the masters knew they had a good reserve of healthy labour, they increased the pressure on the workers.

Also there has been a coincidental rise in drug trafficking, and, even in Australia, the discovery of several acres of narcotics growing wild on the banks of a big river.

I notice in the BMA’s booklet that people who have to stand up at work are advised to take a few paces every few minutes. The medical reason for this is quite sound, but the trouble is that so many people are unable to put it into effect because of the very nature of their work. Also, where workers do make the effort, other workers who are more fortunately placed, and have healthier jobs, spare nothing in their efforts to ridicule them.

The object, of course, is to get the other bloke to quit or to “keep him down”. This is often encouraged in New Zealand by foremen who find it a convenient way of dealing with workers who “know too much” and are a threat to their own job security.

If you go to a “vocational guidance expert” and tell him your troubles (that you cannot adjust to this sort of thing) he will have the unconscionable gall to tell you that it is in your own attitude to society and life that the trouble lies, and that where there is “competition” of this sort you must simply learn to fight against it and “stick up for yourself.”

This, incidentally, is a favourite one with our psychiatrists, prison psychologists and Bible-bangers at the present time. In the meantime, those worthies are enjoying the best of privileges handed out to them by a grateful capitalist class who find it very convenient to have a large number of trained sophisticates taking care the workers do not get out of hand.

In spite of all the perennial rot they say about us having free speech, if a worker really gets up and has a go at them he is going to get slapped down pretty hard.

Only the Communists can get away with this “free speaking”; they are adept at saying nothing in several sentences and are in any case supporting the system.

I have not yet read the BMA’s little book and I am not especially anxious to do so. When I hear that they have written a book describing the social conditions which give rise to, and help perpetuate, the majority of mental and bodily disorders, and suggesting the means whereby those conditions can be eradicated, then I will be eager to get my copy.
E.W.H., Christchurch, NZ.