Emil Lederer: Discussion contribution on coal mining (1920)

This recorded commission speaking turn addresses the boundaries of the proposed Kohlengemeinschaft, or coal-sector organization. Lederer argues that the problem concerns both his group’s proposal and Dr. Rathenau’s. Returning to his group’s proposal from the previous year, he grounds his clarification in its acknowledgment that industrial boundaries cannot simply follow natural divisions:

Soviel ist klar, daß jede Abgrenzung des Wirtschaftszweiges bis zu einem gewissen Grade willkürlich sein muß, da weder die technische, noch die kommerzielle Verflechtung irgendwo einen natürlichen Einschnitt zeigt.

English translation: This much is clear: any delimitation of the sector of the economy must be arbitrary to a certain degree, since neither technical nor commercial interconnection reveals a natural dividing line anywhere.

The conceptual move is to distinguish unavoidable boundary-setting from indiscriminate inclusion. The proposal would place coal mining, briquetting, coking, and the recovery of coking by-products within the organization. Yet it draws a further boundary between producing chemical inputs and processing them:

Damit fällt die Gewinnung der wichtigsten Ausgangsprodukte für die chemische Industrie in das Gebiet der Kohlengemeinschaft, hingegen nicht deren Verarbeitung.

English translation: Thus, the production of the most important starting materials for the chemical industry falls within the sphere of the coal-sector organization, but not their processing.

Lederer presents this distinction as avoiding the disadvantage Wissell had identified, without explaining that objection further. He concludes by clarifying that the wording im Werk was intended only to prevent compulsory inclusion of coking undertaken for a municipality when it no longer had an economic and organic connection with mining. The intervention’s significance lies in this limited institutional clarification: technical and commercial interdependence makes sectoral boundaries partly discretionary, but does not justify extending the coal organization to every downstream activity.