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DEAR COLLEAGUES, LA DIES AND GENTLEMEN! 105
sections) has the presumption to assert: 'Outside in Nature's kingdom,
the insanity of the capitalist mode of production in hurrying and
chasing after profit becomes obvious to us.' As has already been
mentioned, a supposed natural law is erected against the present-day
economic system without it being realized that precisely Nature, which
is also embodied in capitalistic desires, is one of that system's most
powerful allies; and that its perpetual glorification, moreover, conflicts
with the planned organization of economic life. The attitude embodied
by the sport business leads to ideologies not in accord with the demands
of the employee unions, and a movement that should be guided sweeps
its conquerors away. Sometimes they even become willing vassals. In the
reports of the GdA's education section, the Neumiinster local branch
justifies its invitation to the celebrated sportsman Dr Otto Pelzer as
follows:
The local branch committee held the view that one could best draw close to
employees of younger generations, who are only feebly represented in our
membership, if one responded to their overriding interest in sport and asked
some particularly renowned sportsman to speak in a broad context about the
connection between the sports movement and a modem employee union.
At the end of the report comes this summary: 'Everybody was talking
about us, and many people will have regretted not being there on the
evening of the lecture. Such a lot going on, just so the connection will
not be missed. Rather than getting to the bottom of enthusiasm f()r
sport and perhaps restraining it, you pander to it uncritically f( )r
publicity purposes. Everybody is talking about you, but you have lost
your own power of speech.
'Since, for today's working man, a collapse of psychic energies is taking
place inexorably at work and on the job', writes Richard Woldt in his
study 'The German Trade Unions in the Post-war Period' (see Strukturwandlungen
der deutschen Volilswirtschaft, vol. 1), 'a collectivist association
with the life of the trade unions must be achieved and maintained
out�ide the workplace.' But a community is never formed as a substitute
for the collapse of psychic energies - it consists of human individuals
whose existence is crucially defined by true knowledge. Many things
indicate that the employee unions tend to regard collectivism in itself
as a source of their energy. I once attended the performance of a Free
trade union's speech-and-movement chorus. The young people, girls
and boys, with drooping arms and shoulders bemoaned their lot as
slaves to the machine, then drew themselves upright and r�joiced in a