Emil Lederer, Von der Wissenschaft zur Utopie (1916)

Emil Lederer’s journal article examines the socialist debate over “Mitteleuropa,” the proposed economic association of Germany and Austria-Hungary, potentially extended to the Balkans and Turkey. Its subject is not simply the merits of a customs union: trade policy becomes a test of whether wartime socialism still possesses a coherent theory of capitalist development and an independent political purpose. Lederer reconstructs Marx’s position, traces the changes introduced by cartels and imperialism, and scrutinizes socialist arguments for and against economic association. His central charge is that its supporters mistake capitalist organization for progress toward socialism. Their supposedly realistic policy ultimately depends on an unexplained future transformation of an increasingly stable system of domination.

Lederer begins by explaining why trade policy occupied a peripheral place in classical Marxism. Within its model of commodity exchange, free competition, and nationally bounded economies, tariffs principally redistribute surplus value among possessing classes rather than change its total magnitude. Neither protection nor free trade can therefore constitute a socialist principle. Yet practical choices must still derive from the proletariat’s independent aims. Marx could support free trade in industrial England and industrial protection in Germany because each accelerated capitalist development under different conditions, not because workers shared the purposes of the bourgeois groups advocating those measures.

Die Realpolitik darf nicht aufhören, prinzipiell zu sein oder prinzipielle Bedeutung zu haben.

English translation: Realpolitik must not cease to be principled or to have significance in terms of principle.

This distinction supplies Lederer’s standard throughout the article. Agreement on a measure does not establish solidarity between classes. He interprets Marx’s support for free trade as acceptance of the greater immediate evil because it hastened revolutionary clarification. The apparent contradiction with Marx’s enthusiasm for the ten-hour working day disappears once improvements that strengthen workers’ capacity for action are distinguished from concessions that merely reconcile them to existing society.

The historical premise changes when protection fosters capitalist self-organization. Industrial tariffs cease to operate merely as temporary assistance to emerging industries. Cartels can maintain domestic prices above production costs, restrict output, and appropriate the benefits of technical improvement. Protection consequently threatens workers both as producers seeking employment and as consumers living on wages.

Nicht Intensivierung der Produktion, sondern Rentenbildung in der Industrie, ist dann die Folge der Schutzzollgesetzgebung.

English translation: The consequence of protective-tariff legislation is then not the intensification of production, but the formation of rents in industry.

Capital export, colonial expansion, and the establishment of foreign subsidiaries further transform the situation. National capitals become interwoven rather than merely exchanging commodities across borders. Drawing critically on Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, and Rosa Luxemburg, Lederer argues that socialist opposition to imperialism cannot simply repeat Marx’s earlier preference for whatever intensifies capitalism’s contradictions. Organized capitalism may mitigate crises and strengthen its own durability.

Die automatische Weiterentwicklung der Wirtschaft stabilisiert diese, macht sie widerstandsfähiger, stärker.

English translation: The automatic further development of the economy stabilizes it, makes it more resilient, stronger.

This is the article’s decisive conceptual move. Economic development no longer guarantees capitalism’s self-abolition; it can produce a regulated state-capitalist economy. Socialist agency must therefore become more deliberately interventionist. Workers cannot merely prepare for a distant collapse: they must exert their own influence on development in the present. Opposition to imperialism also protects international solidarity against a war that places workers in opposing armies.

Against this background, Lederer examines the arguments advanced for Mitteleuropa, particularly at the January 1916 discussions between German and Austrian social-democratic representatives. Supporters invoke larger markets, specialization, food security, and a higher organizational form. But an argument about the territory needed for capitalism’s initial emergence does not settle what happens when already developed economies merge. Nor does territorial size establish lower prices: the external tariff and the internal structure of production remain decisive.

Lederer exposes recurrent contradictions. Advocates promise immediate benefits while accepting increased exploitation as preparation for socialism; identify agricultural self-sufficiency with movement toward free trade; and demand preferential treatment while hoping to preserve most-favoured-nation relations. Exclusive preferences disadvantage outsiders. A protected bloc coordinating cartels, dividing markets, and facilitating dumping would continue the economic policy socialists previously condemned as imperialist. Calling the association purely economic cannot remove its political consequences.

The opposing position, represented especially by Kautsky and Hilferding, preserves greater continuity with prewar socialism. It prioritizes employment, inexpensive food, international exchange, and resistance to cartel protection. Lederer nevertheless refuses to treat it as theoretically complete. Its reconsideration of large economic territories requires specific investigation, while its attribution of economic arrangements to autonomous power politics unsettles older economic explanations of imperialism. Neither wing has adequately researched the proposed association’s concrete effects.

His concluding judgment is asymmetrical. Opposition retains a scientific standpoint because it confronts facts with principles, even where inherited theory needs revision. Supporters instead dissolve socialist criteria into accommodation to existing tendencies.

Er sieht nur die Tatsache der Organisation, nicht den Gehalt derselben, sieht nur, daß eine Ordnung geschaffen wird, nicht, welche Kraft und welches Ziel dieser Ordnung innewohnt.

English translation: It sees only the fact of organization, not its content; sees only that an order is being created, not what force and what aim inhabit that order.

The title’s movement “from science to utopia” thus names an inversion: professed realism becomes utopian when it assumes that an organized imperialist economy will eventually change its governing spirit almost by a lever’s movement. Lederer’s lasting question is whether organization strengthens emancipation or consolidates domination. Socialism cannot answer it by celebrating organization as such.