Learning and Suffering in Vienna
moval of irritations which keep producing dissatisfaction and complaints.
The fact that this is not so must be blamed very largely on those who have managed to obstruct all legal regulation of social maladjustments, or by their political influence have prevented it.
To just the degree that the political bourgeoisie failed to understand the importance of union organization, or rather did not want to understand it, and actively opposed it, the Social Democrats assumed control of the labor movement in conflict. They were far-sighted enough to lay a firm foundation which has already proved to be their last bulwark on several critical occasions. In the process the inner purpose disappeared, to make way for new aims.
The Social Democrats never thought of holding the movement they had embraced to its original assignment. No, that was not what they had in mind.
Within a few decades their practised hands had turned a means of defending human social rights into an instrument for destroying the national economy. The interests of the workers did not hinder them in the least. Even in politics the use of economic pressure always allows extortions, so long as there is sufficient lack of conscience on one side and sufficient stupid, sheep-like patience on the other. In the present case both requirements are fulfilled.
Even by the turn of the century the union movement had long ceased to serve its original purpose. From year to year it was drawn increasingly into the sphere of Social Democratic politics, until finally it served only as a battering-ram in the class struggle. It was supposed by continual blows to make the whole painfully-developed economic structure tumble, so that the state, bereft of its economic foundations, would more easily suffer the same fate. The representation of the working people’s real interests played less and less part; finally political shrewdness made it seem no longer desirable to relieve the social and
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