Emil Lederer’s published conference discussion reply clarifies his position on socialization through a selective response to objections raised against his preceding address. Moving from the relation between political will and economic conditions to productivity, workers’ councils, taxation, and international organization, he argues that socialization requires concrete institutional reconstruction rather than either revolutionary voluntarism or an abstract organizational blueprint. His conclusion gives this qualified argument political urgency: the changed position of labor makes economic reconstruction inseparable from the question of social power.
Lederer begins by correcting the impression that he regards political will as independently decisive. His contrast was between an account emphasizing power and one emphasizing evolution, in which will itself develops under determinate conditions. Marx’s distinctive contribution lies in explaining how transformative purposes arise, rather than assuming the autonomous movement of ideas. Against Bolshevist voluntarism, Lederer maintains that political machinery cannot make every idea realizable at every moment. Yet objective possibility is not historical necessity: sociology assesses opportunities without guaranteeing their realization. Accordingly, he cannot prove that radical socialization would have improved German production, but neither has its omission brought economic recovery.
This conditional reasoning also governs his answer to demands for a positive organizational scheme. General measures can be discussed theoretically; reorganizing coal mining or iron production requires detailed knowledge of each industry’s structure, personnel, and administrative possibilities.
Es ist hingegen unmöglich, einen generellen Weg anzugeben, der für alle Situationen paßt.
English translation: It is, however, impossible to specify a general course that suits all situations.
The refusal of universal prescriptions is a methodological claim, not a retreat from practical reform. Lederer maintains that the Socialization Commission had developed usable proposals, but political obstruction delayed their circulation and prevented publication of the underlying investigations. Allocation of authority among public representatives, interested parties, and territorial governments likewise demands sector-specific judgment. His comparison with German Austria reinforces this insistence on conditions: its fragmented economic structure makes socialization harder than in Germany’s still extensive, unified economic territory.
Turning to productivity, Lederer challenges the assumption that economic efficiency establishes the superiority of capitalism. Both genuinely free competition and a thoroughly organized economy can theoretically maximize production; neither realizes its ideal without friction. Their practical difficulties therefore cannot be settled by comparing an idealized competitive system with an imperfect organized one.
Wenn man also meint, daß diese zwei Wirtschaftsformen, bloß auf die Produktionsmasse hin angesehen, ein Optimum realisieren, wird man die Wahl zwischen diesen beiden Formen nur aus einem außerökonomischen Werturteil treffen können.
English translation: If, then, one holds that these two economic forms realize an optimum when considered solely in terms of the volume of production, the choice between these two forms can only be made on the basis of an extra-economic value judgment.
This argument does not make organizational differences irrelevant. Lederer doubts that a regulated private economy can avoid either bureaucratic continuation of wartime controls or conflict between individual initiative and centralized organization. A unified capitalist trust might also achieve high productivity, but risks restricting output and requires a degree of worker subordination that the contemporary balance of social forces scarcely permits.
Workers’ councils provide his most developed account of institutional change. Responding to Vogelstein, Lederer distinguishes his position from compulsory profit-sharing, which he had opposed because it could turn enterprises into producers’ cooperatives and councils into joint managers of individual businesses. His preferred alternative extends councils across entire industries. Factory-level representation is provisional; industry-wide organization could widen workers’ understanding beyond their immediate workplace, even before full socialization.
Wir werden dazu kommen, daß Schulen für die Betriebsräte errichtet werden, in denen das Interesse der Arbeiter auf die Probleme ihrer Industrie und der Volkswirtschaft gelenkt wird.
English translation: We shall reach the point where schools for works councils are established, in which workers’ interest is directed toward the problems of their industry and of the national economy.
Participation thus has an educational function. Economic responsibility should cultivate concrete judgment and counter schematic doctrines, especially where workers acquire power without corresponding insight into production. Lederer explains Austrian trade-union resistance through fears of organizational competition, while anticipating that a transition from occupational to industrial unions will alter their stance.
The closing sections delimit socialization against two misleading extensions. Taxation alone does not constitute socialization: a wealth levy used to discharge war debts merely redistributes assets within capitalism. Nor can monetary depreciation count as socialization simply because people lose wealth; destruction of value is no substitute for economic reorganization. Equally, socialization should not be identified with national autarky or renewed agrarian settlement. Socialism’s organizing horizon is the world economy, and the persistence of national self-sufficiency schemes indicates the limits confronting radical socialization on a merely national scale.
Lederer finally turns his opponents’ pessimism against their diagnosis. Germany’s difficulties have arisen under capitalism, not under a socialized coal industry that does not exist. Socialization might instead have supplied a mobilizing program for recovery. Although he acknowledges that an earlier opportunity may have been missed, worsening conditions strengthen the need for substantial intervention. Any reconstruction—even an economic dictatorship grounded in a collective national will—must reckon with labor’s transformed position after war and collapse.
Das Problem der Sozialisierung ist nicht mehr Sache einer Partei, sondern die Aufgabe, deren Lösung unserer Zeit geschichtlich gestellt ist.
English translation: The problem of socialization is no longer the concern of one party, but the task whose solution history has set for our age.
The reply’s central contribution is to join institutional specificity with historical urgency: neither political determination nor technical efficiency alone can resolve a reconstruction whose material conditions now include workers’ changed power and expectations.
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