The National Socialist movement, which aims at the National Socialist State for the People, may enter¬ tain no doubts that every future institution of that State must be rooted in the Movement itself. It is the greatest of errors to imagine that possession of power by itself will allow any definite reorganization to be accomplished, starting from nothing, without the help of a staff of men who have been trained beforehand in the spirit of the enterprise. Here, also, the principle holds good that the spirit is always more important than the form, which can be created very speedily.
Thus no one could propose suddenly dragging out of his portfolio the draft of a new Constitution, and expect to be able to ‘‘introduce” it by an edict from above. It might be tried, but the result would not survive ; almost certainly it would be a still-born infant. I am reminded of the origin of the Weimar Constitution, and the attempt to palm off a new Con¬ stitution and a new flag on the German nation, neither of them having any connection with anything known to our nation during the last half century.
The National Socialist State must avoid all such experiments ; it must grow out of an organization which has already long been working. Hence the National Socialist movement must recognize the neces¬ sity of possessing a Trades Union organization of its own.
What must be the nature of a National Socialist Trades Union ? What is our task, and what are its aims ?
It is not an instrument of class war, but one for defence and representation of the workers. The National Socialist State knows no classes, but, in a political sense, only citizens with absolutely equal rights and similarly equal obligations, and, side by side with them, subjects absolutely without rights in the political sense.
The primary object of the Trades Union system is not to fight in any war between classes, but Marxism forged it into an instrument for its own