Der Tag, 1915, No. 93 (edition A), April 22, 1915.
Article: “The Free Trade Unions and the Government” by Dr. Hugo B\"ottger, Reichstag deputy.
The author begins with the fact that the managing director of a mining company (in Gelsenkirchen), Kirdorf , reproached Minister Delbr\"uck (Minister of the Interior) for maintaining “close contact with the trade union leaders”.
This was dangerous for the workers would become more restless.
The author replies that there is no harm in this, that workers and employers are standing side by Bide in the trenches, that “if they (= the free trade unions = the Social-Democrats) are enlisted for joint work on certain labour and general national questions in the Ministry of the Interior, that is just as much a recognition of the need, || N.B. as it is an obligation, for the duration of the war, to renounce certain provisions of the Social-Democratic programme which belong to the sphere of the International and, in common with all other sections of the population, to do their duty and defend the fatherland”....
An article by the same author in No. 82 (April 9) “The Development of Our Policy”, in which, inter alia, it is stated:
“It is surprising that even in Social-Democratic discussions the opinion clearly emerges, against the back ground of Marxist thinking, that now one has to reckon with the further development of imperialism, the development of large world powers, externally sovereign, as far as possible independent. Some reject this, others try to include imperialism in socialist development, || and, of course, there can be no doubt as to which of these two trends is the wiser and has the greatest prospect of success”....
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