Emil Lederer: „Die Umschichtung des Proletariats“ (1928)

This file is a single conference-style address: Lederer speaks as sociologist and socialist theorist to an organized employees’ milieu, building on AfA-Bund materials and Suhr’s preceding statistical report. Its scope is the changed class composition of capitalism in Weimar Germany. The main thesis is that Marx’s structural insight remains indispensable, but the proletariat can no longer be understood as a homogeneous mass of industrial workers. It is a stratified class of wage- and salary-dependent groups whose unity must be politically produced.

Lederer begins from Marx as a discipline of social vision rather than as a fixed formula. Marx’s lasting force lies in showing capitalism as conflict, not harmony, and society as historical construction:

Der gesellschaftliche Zustand ist das Werk des Menschen, er ist gestaltet, ist gestaltbar und umgestaltbar.

English translation: The condition of society is the work of man; it is shaped, it is shapeable and reshapeable.

From this premise Lederer retains the core Marxian criterion: separation from the means of production. But he immediately complicates it. The old estates have disappeared; insertion into the production process has replaced corporate status. Yet the modern working population is internally divided into skilled and unskilled workers, employees, officials, technicians, and intellectual occupations. These differences of title, habit, office, and prestige are real, and were deliberately deepened by the old authoritarian order through “teile und herrsche.” Still, beneath them lies a common dependence:

Trotzdem ist diese riesige Massenschicht einheitlich in bezug auf den einen Gesichtspunkt, daß ihre Glieder von den Produktionsmitteln getrennt sind, daß sie keine Verfügungsmacht über die Produktion haben, daß sie sich einordnen müssen in den Produktionsprozeß und daß ihr persönliches Schicksal, soweit es sich aufbaut auf ihrem Einkommen, von der kapitalistischen Wirtschaft und von deren Leitern abhängig ist.

English translation: Nevertheless, this enormous mass stratum is unified in one respect: that its members are separated from the means of production, that they have no power of disposition over production, that they must fit into the production process, and that their personal fate, insofar as it rests on their income, is dependent on the capitalist economy and its directors.

The address then revises a simple Marxist expectation that industrial workers alone would become the overwhelming majority. Mechanization expands output without proportionally expanding factory labor, while sales, distribution, administration, and office work grow because circulation cannot be rationalized like machine production. The political consequence is decisive: in a democracy, workers alone are not enough.

Nur wenn wir die Schicht der Arbeiter im strengen Sinne des Wortes zusammenfassen mit der Gesamtmasse der Angestellten und Beamten in eine einheitliche Arbeitnehmerschicht, kommen wir zu einem Gesamtbild des kapitalistischen Prozesses, in welchem die Arbeitnehmerschicht die überwältigende Mehrheit der Bevölkerung hat.

English translation: Only when we group the stratum of workers in the strict sense of the word together with the entire mass of salaried employees and civil servants into a unified employee stratum do we arrive at a comprehensive picture of the capitalist process, in which the employee stratum comprises the overwhelming majority of the population.

Lederer’s sharpest conceptual move is to relocate proletarianization from manual labor alone to the whole salaried condition. Against romantic complaints that factory work alone has lost content, he argues that office labor can be even more subordinated, routinized, and powerless. The employee’s ideology of superiority often compensates for objective dependence. Hence his deliberately cautious but forceful formulation:

Es ist vielleicht zuviel gesagt, wenn man heute behauptet, die Angestellten sind schon ein Teil des Proletariats, ich glaube aber, es ist eine objektive Tatsache, wenn man behauptet, daß die Angestellten das Schicksal des Proletariats teilen. (Sehr richtig!)

English translation: It is perhaps saying too much to claim today that salaried employees are already part of the proletariat; but I believe it is an objective fact to state that salaried employees share the fate of the proletariat. (Quite right!)

The structure of the speech moves from Marxian foundations, to social stratification, to statistics and economic function, to labor experience, and finally to strategy. Lederer’s politics is neither passive reformism nor revolutionary rhetoric. He rejects mere post-factum state control of prices and imagines influence within production itself: works councils, economic bodies, supervisory representation, expertise, and organization as instruments of gradual transformation.

Es gibt den Weg der Gewalt und den Weg der Entwicklung; es gibt den Weg, der in Rußland versucht wurde und den viele in Deutschland für gangbar halten, und es gibt den Weg der allmählichen Umformung, des Eindringens in den kapitalistischen Körper, um ihn von innen her umzugestalten.

English translation: There is the path of force and the path of development; there is the path that was attempted in Russia and that many in Germany consider viable, and there is the path of gradual transformation, of penetrating the capitalist body in order to reshape it from within.

Its relevance lies in diagnosing the “new middle” salaried strata as central to modern class politics. Lederer neither abandons Marx nor repeats him; he historicizes the class concept through employees, civil servants, mass purchasing power, bureaucracy, and democratic organization. The proletariat has been recomposed, and its emancipation requires unity without denying internal differentiation:

Die Klasse des Proletariats ist keine einfache Klasse, sondern sie ist eine geschichtete Klasse, aber sie muß einheitlich in ihrem Ziel sein und mit verschiedenen Mitteln diesem Ziele zustreben.

English translation: The class of the proletariat is not a simple class but a stratified one; yet it must be unified in its goal and strive toward that goal by various means.