Emil Lederer: Commercial Character and Cooperatives (1921)

Emil Lederer’s recorded intervention on pages 129–131 belongs to a commission discussion of municipalization, cooperative enterprise, and the legal meaning of gewerbsmäßig—conducted on a commercial basis. Its immediate occasion is expert testimony about protecting cooperatives under proposed socialization legislation. Lederer moves from clarification of the agreed wording to a defense of municipal provision, distinguishes compulsory associations from voluntary cooperatives, and concludes by asking how a cooperative exemption could be protected against abuse. His central concern is to preserve room for genuine cooperative development without allowing cooperative legal status to obstruct economically and socially justified municipalization.

Lederer begins by treating the wording formulated in the Reich Ministry of the Interior as substantially settled. The experts, he reports, accept it and regard reference to the relevant constitutional provision as sufficient protection for cooperative interests. He then separates this agreement from a broader claim advanced by consumer cooperatives: that socialization of food supply is impossible or inappropriate. The recorded interjection qualifying this objection as applying “at present” matters to his response. Present organizational limits do not necessarily justify a permanent legislative exclusion. Nor, he argues, do the activities municipalities particularly wish to municipalize invariably conflict with existing cooperative operations. Milk supply offers his example: municipal representatives have identified it as a major social, sanitary, and hygienic concern.

His next move is to challenge the evidence used against municipal food provision. Bästlein’s objections, like those of other experts, largely concern wartime administration. Reinforcing Lindemann’s point, Lederer argues that municipalities then operated under arrangements imposed by state administration and the requirements of warfare:

Es handelt sich hier um ein den Gemeinden durch die staatliche Verwaltung, durch die Interessen der Kriegführung aufgezwungenes Verfahren, welches die Gemeinden gezwungen hat, Jahre hindurch alle ökonomischen Gesetze zu zerbrechen und eine Wirtschaftsordnung durchzuhalten, gegen welche nicht nur die Interessenten, sondern auch die Konsumenten, selbstverständlich jeder aus seinen egoistischen Interessen heraus, Sturm laufen mußten.

English translation: What is involved here is a procedure imposed on the municipalities by the state administration and the interests of warfare, which forced the municipalities for years to break all economic laws and maintain an economic order against which not only the interested parties but also consumers, each naturally acting out of their own self-interest, had to rise up.

Unsatisfactory provision therefore cannot simply be attributed to municipal operation as such. Municipalities had to maintain stocks and intervene in prices under the compulsion to supply their inhabitants; their hastily established administrative apparatus had also become worn out. Lederer’s distinction is between emergency administration under imposed constraints and municipalization under the normal conditions envisaged by the commission. His argument does not establish that every municipal undertaking will succeed. It contests the inference that wartime failures settle the question against municipal provision.

The discussion of Zwangsgenossenschaft, or compulsory cooperative, likewise turns on distinguishing institutions that a shared word can misleadingly assimilate. Lederer argues that the proposal does not transform the established cooperative movement into a compulsory organization. It concerns compulsory associations or syndicates of enterprises, subject to rules governing their business and to public supervision. He invokes section 4, point 2, to establish this institutional meaning. Such arrangements remain one possible method:

Ob das eine zweckmäßige Art zu kommunalisieren ist — es ist nur als eine Modalität bezeichnet, nicht als Notwendigkeit —, wird nur von Fall zu Fall zu entscheiden sein.

English translation: Whether that is an appropriate way to municipalize—it is described only as one possible form, not as a necessity—will have to be decided case by case.

This insistence on individual assessment prevents a general authorization from becoming a universal prescription. Compulsory associations are not intended to perform the same function as cooperatives sustained principally by their members’ private interests. Conversely, genuine cooperatives need not be treated merely as institutions to shelter from public intervention. Lederer presents them as potential agents of an enlarged system of food provision.

That prospect depends on capacity and consent. If a cooperative declares itself unable to undertake the proposed responsibilities, municipalization cannot be imposed upon it. Yet the legislation is intended to provide a lasting framework, not simply accommodate the current year:

Aber dieses Gesetz ist nicht für heute und für das heutige Jahr gemacht, sondern es soll einen definitiven Rahmen bieten, und es geht ja auch aus den Ausführungen des Herrn Bästlein hervor, daß er mit einer Entwicklung des Genossenschaftswesens rechnet, die in kurzer Zeit, wenn sich das Wirtschaftsleben allgemein günstig gestaltet, die Genossenschaften befähigen würde, Träger des Wirtschaftslebens zu sein.

English translation: But this law is not made for today and for the present year; rather, it is intended to provide a definitive framework, and Mr Bästlein’s remarks also show that he anticipates a development of the cooperative movement which, within a short time, if economic life generally develops favorably, would enable cooperatives to become agents of economic life.

The closing question exposes the difficulty created by cooperative protection. Cinema enterprises, Lederer suggests, could organize a city’s audience as a consumer cooperative, encouraging membership through discounts and thereby escaping municipalization under the proposed wording. The issue is not whether cooperative activity deserves protection, but whether legal form reliably identifies the activity that deserves it:

Es handelt sich um die Frage: Wenn die Genossenschaften aus der Kommunalisierung ausscheiden, wie können wir uns dann bei wirtschaftlich, sozialwirtschaftlich gerechtfertigten Kommunalisierungen dagegen schützen, daß die Interessenten die Rechtsform der Genossenschaft wählen, um der Kommunalisierung zu entgehen?

English translation: The question is this: If cooperatives are excluded from municipalization, how can we protect ourselves, in cases of economically and socioeconomically justified municipalization, against interested parties choosing the legal form of a cooperative in order to evade municipalization?

Lederer asks whether a safeguard, such as a cutoff date, could prevent this evasion; the intervention records no answer. Its significance lies in this unresolved legislative tension. Cooperative autonomy and expanded public provision are compatible in his account, but only if protection for cooperatives does not become an indiscriminate exemption available through organizational relabeling.