Hans Bayer · 1956
Hans Bayer’s 1956 lecture intervenes in an already extensive Mitbestimmungs debate by shifting its ground. He does not ask first how codetermination improves morale, but how it relates to the economic constitution of an industrial society whose tensions are sharpened by automation, atomic energy, concentration, and advertising. His thesis is institutional and macroeconomic: plant-level participation is necessary but insufficient; without over-company organs it risks becoming producer egoism, while with them it can help make technical progress serve the whole economy.
Die Mitbestimmung soll nicht, wie dies überwiegend geschieht, von sozialpolitischen und sozialpsychologischen Überlegungen aus untersucht werden, sondern von der Wirtschaft her.
English translation: Codetermination should not, as is predominantly the case, be examined from the standpoint of social-policy and social-psychological considerations, but rather from that of the economy.
Bayer’s first move is anti-mechanistic. Against the liberal image of an autonomous market mechanism, he defines the economy as a responsible human order. Its purpose is not profit as such, but the creation of durable material foundations for the development of personality. Since humans shape economic life, responsibility cannot be displaced onto “invisible” laws of the market; Mitbestimmung follows as both economic ethics and policy.
Die Volkswirtschaft ist weit eher einem Organismus zu vergleichen.
English translation: The national economy is far more aptly compared to an organism.
From this organic view Bayer derives the need for a graduated structure. No central economic council can be adequate if it floats above the economy without links to enterprise, branch, regional, and national levels. The work’s first part builds this theory through the concept of “Spannungsverhältnisse”: tensions within the enterprise, between production and consumption, between individual and totality, and between absolute and relative values. These tensions are not abolished; they must be bridged and directed.
die aus ihnen entspringende Dynamik in den Dienst der Gesamtheit zu stellen.
English translation: to place the dynamism arising from them in the service of the whole.
The analysis of these tensions gives the lecture its central claim. Private rentability can conflict with national productivity, producing overinvestment and crisis. Consumer sovereignty is largely a “Scheinsouveränität,” manipulated by advertising and short-lived products. Concentration, holdings, and finance create anonymity and a new class line between the economically strong and weak. At the deepest level, Bayer sees modern capitalism turning means into ends: power, profit, and consumption become absolute values, producing “Wirtschaftsdämonie.”
The “second industrial revolution” makes the problem urgent. Bayer welcomes technical progress in principle, because it could raise productivity, shorten working time, and expand personality. Its tragedy is that competition forces each entrepreneur to adopt innovations regardless of the aggregate result. Automation can therefore intensify disproportions, unemployment, capital concentration, and intellectual domination.
Die Peitsche der Konkurrenz zwingt den einzelnen, die Dynamik der Technik voll in die Wirtschaft zu übernehmen.
English translation: The whip of competition compels the individual to absorb the dynamism of technology fully into the economy.
The model section distinguishes isolated enterprise codetermination, integrated enterprise codetermination, and over-company codetermination. The first is Bayer’s negative case: if workers participate only from the standpoint of “their” firm, partnership, profit-sharing, or co-ownership may bind them to monopoly rents and producer interests against consumers. Integrated enterprise codetermination is better when union or public representatives connect the firm to wider purposes, as in the Montan model. But even this works only when supported by institutions above the firm.
The second part surveys such institutions. Bayer sees West Germany moving away from strong over-company safeguards after the Montan law: the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, Personalvertretungsgesetz, and holding-company supplement narrow parity or external guarantees. Foreign examples show alternatives: Austrian Arbeiterkammern with consultation rights, Dutch public-law economic bodies, Swedish competition policy including unions and cooperatives, and the Montanunion’s advisory structures. These examples matter less as models to copy than as proof that economic democracy requires both bottom-up organization and pressure from above.
The closing section places the argument within the German labor movement’s struggle for Wirtschaftsdemokratie, from nineteenth-century chamber proposals to the DGB’s 1949/1950 plans for equal representation in economic organizations and a Bundeswirtschaftsrat. Bayer rejects sentimental talk of partnership when it ignores power. Over-company codetermination also requires trained representatives, broader education, statistical knowledge, and national budgets. Its relevance lies in this synthesis: modernization is not rejected, but must be democratically organized if productivity is to become freedom rather than domination.
Nur im stufenmäßigen Aufbau kann Mitbestimmung ihre Funktion erfüllen.
English translation: Only in a graduated structure can codetermination fulfill its function.
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