Emil Lederer: Discussion Contribution on Coal Mining (1920)

This official commission speaking turn concerns the reorganization of the coal industry and the political feasibility of consolidating it into a trust. Lederer responds to Professor Weber, addresses an objection from Vogelstein, and proposes a practical direction for the Socialization Commission’s work. His central distinction is between the desirability of economic integration and the means available to achieve it. He accepts that trust formation could advance rational economic organization under either private-capitalist or social-economic ownership. Yet he doubts both the controllability of a capitalist trust and the political prospects of compelling private interests to establish one. His immediate recommendation is to reform the existing organization without abandoning the possibility of subsequent consolidation.

Lederer first corrects the impression that he regards trust formation as ineffective. The disagreement concerns ownership, control, and implementation, not the potential benefits of unifying production. Expropriation, he argues, would directly establish the unified economic body that a social-economic trust requires:

Ein sozialwirtschaftlicher Trust könnte nun sofort gemacht werden, wenn man enteignet. Mit der Enteignung wäre ja selbstverständlich die Bildung eines einheitlichen Wirtschaftskörpers da.

English translation: A social-economic trust could now be created immediately if expropriation were carried out. Expropriation would, of course, itself establish a unified economic body.

This is a conditional argument about an institutional mechanism, not evidence that expropriation is politically imminent. Without it, Lederer expects formidable resistance from private interests. He recalls that the experts heard at the preceding Saturday’s discussion had presented arguments against the trust, depicting it as uneconomic and inappropriate. He interprets the form of those objections as suggesting that industrial interests resist consolidation because they recognize it as a preliminary stage toward socialization. The distinction matters: resistance to a potentially more rational organization may arise from its implications for ownership rather than its economic disadvantages.

The recorded interruptions expose the disagreement over feasibility. Weber invokes the American example and consolidation according to capital value. Lederer nevertheless doubts whether a private-capitalist trust can be imposed under the prevailing political balance of power. When Vogelstein asserts that this would be easier than establishing the socialized trust Lederer proposes, Lederer answers:

Es ist nicht leichter, weil Sie ja für die privatkapitalistische Vertrustung nicht die starke Kraft der radikalen Parteien haben.

English translation: It is not easier, because you do not have the strong force of the radical parties behind private-capitalist trust formation.

The conceptual move is to assess economic proposals through their possible political support. An arrangement that appears less disruptive to private ownership need not therefore be easier to realize: it may lack the mobilizing force available to socialization. Lederer also doubts that private-capitalist consolidation could become an effective political rallying cry, while allowing that others may judge the matter differently.

His final move separates this contested prospect from the reform of the existing coal organization. Making that organization more appropriate, simpler, and more transparent would not obstruct further private-capitalist consolidation, even if the reformed arrangements subsequently proved ineffective. He therefore proposes asking the government to give the organizing principle already embodied in the coal economy its proper institutional form, while continuing to pursue the trust question:

Diese beiden Anträge brauchten nicht in einer Konkurrenz miteinander zu stehen.

English translation: These two motions need not compete with one another.

The contribution closes with a request to return to the organizational issue discussed earlier in the sitting and reach a position that could be presented to the government. Lederer treats this as the question most susceptible to immediate practical work; a direct success on trust formation seems unlikely for the moment, though he does not rule out submitting a proposal. The passage’s significance lies in this distinction between rationalization as an economic objective, political power as a condition of implementation, and organizational reform as an available next step. It offers a strategy for commission action without claiming that incremental reform resolves the underlying questions of ownership and control.