Emil Lederer’s journal essay appeared in two installments in 1920, with a note stating that it had been written in January 1919 and printed unchanged. Its question is therefore situated within the unsettled German revolution: are the ongoing conflicts class struggle, and, if so, which classes are fighting? Lederer distinguishes identifying events, explaining their social forces, and judging their historical significance. Contemporary reporting cannot reliably establish even the first; the revolution’s ultimate significance remains unknowable because its consequences have not yet unfolded. His narrower task is to explain why workers fight other workers and what this reveals about the transformation of class society.
The first installment reconstructs the prewar order to challenge the expectation that industrial growth necessarily produces revolutionary polarization. Unlike English capitalism, German industry developed alongside surviving feudal powers, accepting their protection against the workers and accommodating agrarian interests. Tariffs, cartels, bureaucracy, and policies supporting intermediate social strata stabilized both markets and society. Capitalism appropriated socialism’s organizational principle without accepting its emancipatory purpose. Electoral gains and proletarian growth consequently did not imply that the established order was approaching collapse.
Das Proletariat ist auch keine einheitliche Klasse.
English translation: The proletariat is not a homogeneous class either.
This qualification carries much of the essay’s argument. Occupational divisions and opportunities for modest advancement linked workers to foremen, employees, officials, and other petty-bourgeois groups. Military service reinforced habits of obedience and command that continued inside industrial workplaces. Workers could aspire to these neighboring strata while remaining excluded from the genuinely ruling circles. Lederer’s recurring figure of the noncommissioned officer names this combination of discipline, delegated authority, and restricted initiative. Trade unions reproduced aspects of the same structure. Revolutionary language survived, but the aspirations sustaining it increasingly concerned security and advancement within bourgeois society.
Der Kapitalismus, wie er sich in Deutschland bis 1914 entwickelte, wäre also „von selbst“ nicht zusammengebrochen.
English translation: Capitalism, as it developed in Germany up to 1914, would therefore not have collapsed “of its own accord.”
Lederer does not equate stability with tolerability. Rather, stabilization changes the grounds on which socialism must appeal: away from the expectation of catastrophic crises and impoverishment, toward capitalism’s psychological effects and the conscious will to replace it. Syndicalism expressed resistance to regulated wage bargaining and the experience of dependence on production, but lacked adequate economic understanding and practical programs. The war, meanwhile, does not disprove his diagnosis of prewar stability. He attributes its origins not to capitalist economic rationality as such, but to the operation of surviving feudal forces within capitalism.
The second installment turns from stabilization to dislocation. War destroyed markets, disrupted prices, subjected finance to state intervention, and severed accustomed relations between production and consumption. Every class lost its established position. Workers gained collective leverage because the war machine depended on them, yet higher wages could not readily become better housing, clothing, leisure, or durable possessions. Monetary income ceased to secure a definite social standard as goods grew scarce. Class location must therefore be understood through actual forms of life, not nominal earnings alone.
The revolution initially gathered the population into a rudimentary democracy around workers’ and soldiers’ councils, while bourgeois and feudal groups temporarily lacked the organization to exercise power. Coalition government subsequently restored bourgeois political participation. Yet resistance to this development divided the workers themselves.
Wir haben das Beispiel einer tiefgreifenden Auseinandersetzung innerhalb derselben Klasse, aber keinen Klassenkampf.
English translation: We have an example of a profound conflict within the same class, but not a class struggle.
The distinction is analytical, not an attempt to minimize the fighting. Shared social ground can intensify antagonism, as in struggles between religious sects. Nor does describing government-supporting workers as deceived by their leaders explain their allegiance. Socialist ideas had already reached them; the question is why different ideas could attract people belonging to the same class. Lederer answers by treating ideology as the symbolic expression of lived circumstances, expectations, and moods rather than as doctrine accepted simply for its truth.
Sie kann nur zünden, wenn sie auch aus der Masse allein herauswachsen könnte, ihrer Interessenlage sowohl als ihrer Stimmungslage entspricht.
English translation: It can ignite only if it could also grow out of the masses themselves and corresponds both to their interests and to their mood.
The sentence concerns the effectiveness of a revolutionary slogan. Intellectual formulation becomes politically powerful only when people recognize their own desires in it. Conflicting socialist slogans thus disclose a divided historical situation. “Central” socialism inherits the prewar confidence that organized production and a functioning state apparatus can be taken over and redirected. Its watchword is organization; its carriers include established parties, unions, and workers whose loyalties were formed before the war. “Activist” socialism treats the collapse as a rupture demanding immediate action. Councils offer a space for workers to develop power, and rapid socialization would prevent capitalist interests from reconstituting their hold.
Lederer presents this opposition as a struggle over the adequate conception of the present, not merely a dispute between moderation and radicalism. He sees the activist wing gaining strength, but declines to pronounce its program the objectively valid self-understanding of the working class. His conclusion remains provisional: classes have not yet found themselves or their corresponding slogans. Only when this post-collapse interlude is overcome will class struggle become the decisive issue. The essay’s lasting conceptual contribution is this separation of class membership from unified class action: economic position, institutional habits, lived aspirations, and historical disruption together determine whether a class can recognize and act upon a common purpose.
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