The Yearning for Social Justice

Thesis: In this passage Nikolaus Osterroth explains how the cruel treatment and conditions of working as a clay miner and the indifference of the church led him to be a fervent supporter of the Social Democratic Party.

• Clay mining was a brutal and exhausting work; one couldn't do it for three hours without having their hands become completely exhausted.
• The mine owners responded to hard times by reducing production costs at the expense of the workers' wages.
• They turned to the church, but the priest ignored their pleas, saying that they must accept their employer as an authority sent by God that must be obeyed.
• Osterroth and his fellow workers realized, to their outrage, that the priest was the tool of the upper classes to keep the lower classes obedient through religion.
• The Social Democratic Party appealed to them in a leaflet, explaining to them the injustice of the government and bourgeois parties
• Osterroth realized that the tax system spared the ones who could best pay and plundered those who already despaired of life in their misery.
• Osterroth was greatly attracted to the ideas and company of those in the Social Democratic Party. Their ideas to unite the workers into a union to counter the employers with the power of united action appealed to him.
• Soon Osterroth was making speeches and handing out leaflets, telling workers that the only deliverance would come from the working class itself, and that the working class must not be divided in this effort against the upper classes