Emil Lederer’s journal article, published in Der Kampf on 13 September 1919, asks how Bolshevism’s economic system would change if socialism attained power internationally. Continuing a question from an earlier article, it develops a distinction between socialism as a transformation sustained by economic development and Bolshevism as an isolated revolutionary regime struggling against a capitalist world. Its central claim is that Bolshevik coercion and destructive economic measures arise from this isolation, wartime impoverishment, and political conflict, rather than constituting necessary features of socialism. Yet Lederer ultimately argues that the disagreement concerns more than exceptional circumstances: it turns on whether international conditions make national socialism possible, or national revolution can force those international conditions into existence.
The opening establishes two counterfactual paths to socialism without a preceding war. Political victory might spread across modern states while public authority remained sufficiently intact to permit transformation without violent upheaval. Alternatively, socialism might advance through democratic evolution, with capitalism conceding positions while using its reserves to weaken the movement’s force. Lederer even imagines a return to freer competition that would reduce profits but loosen working-class solidarity. These possibilities explain what the war destroyed: not merely capitalist strength, but resources available for socialist reconstruction.
Auch diese Möglichkeit war gegeben, doch der Weltkrieg hat all diese Eventualitäten zerstört, er hat nicht nur die Kraft des Kapitalismus gebrochen, sondern auch die Fonds erschöpft, die moralischen und materiellen Fonds, aus denen die sozialistische Idee hätte schöpfen können.
English translation: This possibility, too, existed, but the world war destroyed all these eventualities; it not only broke the strength of capitalism but also exhausted the resources, the moral and material resources, on which the socialist idea could have drawn.
War also disrupted the shared international environment in which a national revolutionary initiative could spread. Bourgeoisies and proletariats alike became differentiated by their wartime experiences. Against the Bolshevik leaders’ expectation of revolutionary contagion, Lederer argues that renewed unrestricted intercourse would be needed to restore a common platform for international action. The problem is therefore both material and political: spreading socialist convictions does not itself restore the conditions for coordinated transformation.
The article then examines whether postwar socialism must mean an impoverished communism of consumption. Housing requisitions, attacks on accumulated savings and private income, and mechanical equalization of wages redistribute existing consumption goods without substantially increasing their availability. Lederer understands these measures as expedients of poverty, initially directed against the possessions of the rich. Workers soon reject them because redistribution may neither meet their particular needs nor appreciably raise consumption per person. The argument distinguishes socializing production from equalizing scarcity: bourgeois living space, for example, does not necessarily provide suitable workers’ housing.
Bolshevism also breaks economic continuity, particularly through repudiating state debts and ending interest payments. Lederer connects this rupture to the deliberate destruction of capitalist structures and the struggle against capitalist countries. Likewise, he explains Russian coercion through bourgeois and intellectual resistance, expressly qualifying his account by the reliability of available information. Under the hypothetical international victory of socialism, he assumes that such resistance would lose its basis.
Der Terrorismus ist das Mittel einer Durchsetzung des Sozialismus auf nationaler Stufenleiter.
English translation: Terrorism is the means of establishing socialism on a national scale.
This proposition is conditional on socialism’s hostile international setting. Lederer accepts the Bolshevik contention that socialization is a political problem, but specifies that it is especially a problem of foreign policy when attempted within a capitalist world. Under those conditions, socialism appears as the imposed objective of one class rather than the mature outcome of economic development. Its reliance on force narrows its social foundation instead of establishing it across society.
The historical discussion attributes Bolshevism’s distinctive character partly to military defeat and the victors’ demands. Trotsky’s acceptance of Brest-Litovsk rested on confidence that world revolution would overturn the settlement; the resulting hostility of national and bourgeois circles intensified the regime’s dependence on the proletariat. Lederer treats Hungary as a parallel case, where collapse and exploitation by the victors favored a movement capable of reorganizing the masses against an external enemy on a new political basis.
Der Bolschewismus ist ein radikaler Sozialismus in Isolierung, im Kampf.
English translation: Bolshevism is a radical socialism in isolation, in struggle.
Isolation makes revolutionary acceleration intelligible without making it universally valid. If socialism prevailed throughout Europe, Lederer argues, Bolshevik aggression would lack its internal and external targets. Differences between Lenin or Trotsky and Kautsky or Longuet would remain, but would concern tempo and tactics rather than principle.
The conclusion nevertheless refuses to treat their present disagreement as merely tactical. International socialism builds institutions and educates supporters through economic development; its displacement of capitalist power requires constructing socialist power. Bolshevism instead seeks conquest and the forced mobilization of socially immature strata. Its attempt to accelerate historical processes sits uneasily within a doctrine emphasizing their dependence on economic realities.
Und so ist im Bolschewismus die Frage des Tempus und der Methoden doch nicht eine bloße taktische, sondern eine prinzipielle.
English translation: And so, in Bolshevism, the question of tempo and methods is indeed not merely a tactical one, but a question of principle.
Lederer’s decisive conceptual move is to reverse the causal sequence claimed by revolutionary voluntarism. For international socialism, national realization becomes possible when international development permits it; for Bolshevism, an isolated national breakthrough is supposed to create international possibility. The article’s relevance lies in this distinction between building the conditions of socialist transformation and attempting to compel them through revolutionary seizure of power.
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