Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

a rare willingness to make sacrifices, of loyal comradeship, astonishing frugality, and modest
reserve, especially among the older workers. Even though these virtues were steadily
vanishing in the younger generation, if only through the general effects of the big city, there
were many, even among the young men, whose healthy blood managed to dominate the foul
tricks of life. If in their political activity, these good, often kind-hearted people nevertheless
joined the mortal enemies of our nationality, thus helping to cement their ranks, the reason
was that they neither understood nor could understand the baseness of the new doctrine,
and that no one else took the trouble to bother about them, and finally that the social
conditions were stronger than any will to the contrary that may have been present. The
poverty to which they sooner or later succumbed drove them into the camp of the Social
Democracy.
Since on innumerable occasions the bourgeoisie has in the clumsiest and most immoral way
opposed demands which were justified from the universal human point of view, often without
obtaining or even justifiably expecting any profit from such an attitude, even the most selfrespecting
worker was driven out of the trade-union organization into political activity.
Millions of workers, I am sure, started out as enemies of the Social Democratic Party in their
innermost soul, but their resistance was overcome in a way which was sometimes utterly
insane; that is, when the bourgeois parties adopted a hostile attitude toward every demand of
a social character. Their simple, narrow-minded rejection of all attempts to better working
conditions, to introduce safety devices on machines, to prohibit child labor and protect the
woman, at least in the months when she was bearing the future national comrade under her
heart, contributed to drive the masses into the net of Social Democracy which gratefully
snatched at every case of such a disgraceful attitude. Never can our political bourgeoisie
make good its sins in this direction, for by resisting all attempts to do away with social
abuses, they sowed hatred and seemed to justify even the assertions of the mortal enemies of
the entire nation, to the effect that only the Social Democratic Party represented the interests
of the working people
Thus, to begin with, they created the moral basis for the actual existence of the trade unions,
the organization which has always been the most effective pander to the political party.
In my Viennese years I was forced, whether I liked it or not, to take a position on the trade
unions.
Since I regarded them as an inseparable ingredient of the Social Democratic Party as such,
my decision was instantaneous and-mistaken.
I flatly rejected them without thinking.
And in this infinite]y important question, as in so many others, Fate itself became my
instructor.
The result was a reversal of my first judgment.
By my twentieth year I had learned to distinguish between a union as a means of defending
the general social rights of the wage-earner, and obtaining better living conditions for him as
an individual, and the trade union as an instrument of the party in the political class
struggle.
The fact that Social Democracy understood the enormous importance of the trade-union
movement assured it of this instrument and hence of success; the fact that the bourgeoisie
were not aware of this cost them their political position. They thought they could stop a
logical development by means of an impertinent 'rejection,' but in reality they only forced it
into illogical channels. For to call the trade-union movement in itself unpatriotic is nonsense
and untrue to boot. Rather the contrary is true. If trade-union activity strives and succeeds
in bettering the lot of a class which is one of the basic supports of the nation, its work is not
only not anti-patriotic or seditious, but 'national' in the truest sense of the word. For in this
way it helps to create the social premises without which a general national education is
unthinkable. It wins the highest merit by eliminating social cankers, attacking intellectual as