Bayer’s lecture treats “Sozialisierung” as a concept requiring theoretical discipline after its postwar political overuse. It is not identical with nationalization, municipal ownership, cooperatives, workplace participation, or the communist abolition of all private production. Such measures can become socialization only when they are subordinated to a coherent economic plan oriented toward the economy as a whole.
Sozialisierung setzt aber einen einheitlichen Wirtschaftsplan, auf den die einzelnen Sozialisierungsmaßnahmen ausgerichtet sind, voraus.
English translation: Socialization, however, presupposes a unified economic plan toward which the individual socialization measures are directed.
This premise lets Bayer criticize the post-1918 German and Austrian experiments as isolated transfers that left capitalist coordination intact. A socialized enterprise placed inside an otherwise market-capitalist order remains exposed to profit pressure, monopoly power, and group egoism. Partial socialization is possible, but only as a functional element within a Gesamtplan.
The lecture’s middle sections oppose two basic principles of economic order: self-regulating exchange and conscious collective decision. Interventionism, solidarist correction, and “guided” markets are not stable third ways unless they already move toward planning.
Der Ordnung der Wirtschaft kann nur zugrunde liegen, entweder das Prinzip der Selbstregulierung oder der bewußten volkswirtschaftlichen Entscheidung.
English translation: The ordering of the economy can rest only on one of two principles: that of self-regulation, or that of conscious economic decision.
Bayer’s critique of capitalism is therefore structural rather than merely moral. Competition may transmit technical progress, but it coordinates through antagonistic private decisions. In monopoly and cartel capitalism even this discipline collapses: prices are raised, output restricted, innovation obstructed, and the public interest made dependent on private power.
Yet Bayer’s Planwirtschaft is not a total command system. It can preserve money, prices, consumer choice, competition, cooperatives, and socially useful private enterprise, provided these are made subordinate to the planned coordination of production and distribution. The contrast is not between all ownership by the state and all ownership by individuals, but between uncoordinated profit and rational organization of the whole.
Planwirtschaft ist kein starres Schema.
English translation: Planned economy is no rigid scheme.
Against Mises and Hayek, Bayer argues that the calculation problem is not decisive. Drawing on Pareto, Barone, Taylor, Dickinson, and Lange, he maintains that planned economies can use prices, trial and correction, supply and demand, and free consumption to register relative scarcities. Capitalist calculation is itself uncertain and distorted by monopoly, speculation, and crisis.
Wirtschaftsrechnung in der Planwirtschaft theoretisch und praktisch möglich ist.
English translation: economic calculation in a planned economy is both theoretically and practically possible.
His answer to Hayek’s freedom objection is similarly conditional: planning becomes coercive only when it abolishes competition, consumer choice, and the disclosure of needs through demand. The deeper danger is not planning as such, but planning subordinated to political, military, or bureaucratic domination rather than to the “pure” economic aim.
That aim is Bayer’s distinctive foundation. Economics, he argues, can derive it from the basic fact of scarce means and multiple ends without imposing an external moral doctrine. Since goods have value only in relation to distributed needs, the goal is not maximum production alone, but production joined to a rational formation of income.
Steigende Erzeugung von Gütern bei möglichst gleichmäßiger Einkommensbildung unter Berücksichtigung der Leistung des einzelnen.
English translation: Rising production of goods with the most even possible formation of income, having regard to the performance of the individual.
Measured by this standard, free exchange fails because it answers purchasing power rather than need, ties income to property and market position, and turns rationalization into unemployment and insecurity. Planning matters because it can connect technical progress, income distribution, employment, and social security in one order. Its social promise is Entproletarisierung: overcoming the existential insecurity of proletarian life.
Bayer closes cautiously. Theory favors planning as the order most adequate to the economy’s own aim, but practice depends on administrative capacity, trade relations, national circumstances, and political discipline. The lecture’s significance lies in this synthesis of marginalist economics, socialist planning theory, anti-interventionist rigor, and social concern: socialization is rational only as flexible, plan-bound organization of the whole economy.
This work was divided into 15 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 15 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian