Learning and Suffering in Vienna
social ills it sowed hatred, and apparently justified the claim of the deadly enemies of the whole people that the Social Democratic Party alone represented the interests of the working people.
Above all the bourgeoisie in this fashion furnished the moral excuse for the existence of the unions, which have always been the greatest feeders for the political party.
During my Viennese apprentice years I was forced to adopt some attitude, whether I would or no, toward the union question.
As I considered them an inseparable part of the Social Democratic Party in itself, my decision was swift—and wrong.
As a matter of course I unhesitatingly rejected them.
In this infinitely important question, too, Fate itself instructed me. The result was an overturn of my first judgment.
At twenty I had learned to distinguish between the union as a means to defend the employee’s general social rights and to win better living conditions in detail, and the union as a tool of the party promoting the political class struggle.
The fact that the Social Democrats realized the enormous importance of the trade-union movement assured them of this instrument, and thus of success; that the bourgeoisie did not understand, cost it its political position. The bourgeoisie believed they could sweep aside a logical development by an impudent “denial,” only to force it in reality into illogical paths. For it is nonsense and an untruth to say that the union movement is in itself hostile to the fatherland. The contrary is nearer the truth. If union activity envisages and attains the goal of improving the position of a class that belongs to the pillars of the nation, its effect not only is not hostile to state or fatherland, but is “national” in the truest sense of the word. It is helping, after all, to lay the social groundwork without which no generally national education is thinkable. It deserves the highest credit for destroying social cancers by attacking both intellectual and physical bacilli, and thus contributing to the general health of the body of the people.
The question of the unions’ necessity, therefore, is really superfluous.
So long as there are among employers persons with little
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