E. Lederer, Planwirtschaft (1932)

Lederer’s Planwirtschaft presents planning as a historically forced transition rather than an abstract doctrine. Written in the Depression, it begins from the claim that capitalism has already ceased to be a purely “free” economy: tariffs, cartels, subsidies, guarantees, emergency decrees, public works, and banking interventions have altered circulation and investment. The issue is therefore not whether planning should enter an untouched market order, but whether the planning already present will remain defensive, partial, and irrational, or become conscious social coordination.

Freie Wirtschaft und Planwirtschaft sind eben nur prinzipielle Gegensätze, aber sie schließen einander in der Wirklichkeit nicht aus.

English translation: Free economy and planned economy are opposites only in principle; in reality they do not exclude one another.

This refusal of a simple opposition structures the essay. Lederer treats “free economy” and “planned economy” as limiting principles that in reality interpenetrate. Public roads, schools, water supply, railways, housing policy, and crisis relief already belong to organized social provision; at the same time, a planned economy could still use prices, money, and formally independent enterprises if their activity were subordinated to a wider plan. Planning thus does not begin with total nationalization. It begins wherever the market mechanism fails to connect labor, capacity, and need.

The clearest example is unemployment. Lederer proposes that idle workers, unused factories, and available materials might be combined to produce necessities for the unemployed, distributed outside ordinary sale so that existing markets are not simply displaced. The proposal is not a complete solution to crisis, but it reveals the absurdity of a system in which labor and means of production stand unused while needs remain unmet.

eine partielle Naturalwirtschaft der Arbeitslosen für sich selbst

English translation: a partial barter economy of the unemployed for themselves

Such partial planning would increase the real income of the unemployed and the social product without pretending to abolish capitalism at once. Its deeper significance is diagnostic: depression is not mere scarcity but a breakdown of mediation. The price-profit-credit mechanism cannot bring together resources that are physically present and socially needed. Planning becomes legitimate precisely where spontaneous circulation has ceased to perform its coordinating function.

Lederer then moves to the institutional core of modern capitalism: credit. Traditional monetary policy, especially manipulation of the discount rate, is inadequate in an economy dominated by cashless payments, bank-created purchasing power, and international short-term capital. The crisis has already forced the state to rescue banks, guarantee liabilities, and assume private losses. The real question is whether credit will be controlled blindly after collapse or deliberately before further misallocation occurs.

Damit wird dann die Kreditkontrolle zur Produktionskontrolle

English translation: Credit control thereby becomes production control.

This sentence condenses Lederer’s main institutional argument. To control credit is not merely to regulate liquidity; it is to decide which branches expand, which overbuilt sectors are restrained, and where purchasing power is directed. In depression conditions, “sound” banking cannot mean neutral adherence to past rules. It must distinguish socially useful investment from wasteful continuation of excess capacity, especially in heavy industry, railways, coal, and iron. Banks already select economic futures; planning would make that selection explicit and socially answerable.

For this reason Lederer sharply separates planning from simple socialization. Nationalizing one industry may change ownership, but if the enterprise remains embedded in market relations it must still obey the pressures of competition, profitability, and capital service. Planning requires organs capable of acting upon the economy as a whole, especially through investment, credit, and the coordination of demand with productive capacity. Ownership matters, but it is secondary to the organization of control.

The final problem is economic calculation. Against critics who claim that planning abolishes rational accounting, Lederer argues that a planned economy can retain prices, money as a unit of account, cost comparison, and consumer choice. What changes is not the possibility of calculation but its social meaning. Errors in investment would still have consequences, yet they would not automatically produce bankruptcy, unemployment, and cumulative crisis through the private compulsion to valorize capital.

Das Problem der „Wirtschaftsrechnung“ in der Planwirtschaft ist also ein Scheinproblem.

English translation: The problem of "economic calculation" in the planned economy is thus a pseudo-problem.