Emil Lederer’s contribution to the conference discussion on capitalism’s transformations challenges Werner Sombart’s diagnosis of “late capitalism.” The individually attributed intervention, originally published in 1929 and supplied here in a republication identified as 2021, proceeds through economic theory, entrepreneurial organization, global expansion, and the possibility of socialism. Its central contention is that changes in capitalism’s organizational forms do not establish the exhaustion of its dynamism. Equally, the persistence of capitalist-developed technology cannot establish that capitalism itself must persist. Lederer separates technical development, organizational structure, and social relations where the discussion threatens to conflate them.
His first objection concerns the inference from changes in surplus value to declining accumulation. Shorter working hours and a falling rate of surplus value do not, he argues, automatically establish an inevitable slowdown. Such reasoning neglects “decapitalization”: technical development rapidly devalues existing means of production, reducing the value of the accumulated capital against which new accumulation and profits must be measured.
Dann sinkt die Profitrate nicht in dem Tempo, in dem das ohne diesen Entwertungsprozeß der Fall wäre.
English translation: The rate of profit then does not fall at the pace at which it would without this process of devaluation.
The qualification matters: Lederer does not claim that devaluation abolishes every tendency toward falling profitability. He argues that it changes the relationship on which the prediction rests. Rising labor efficiency can also permit increasing masses and rates of surplus value despite shorter hours and higher wages, and can sustain constant or temporarily rising profit rates within limits. His empirical counterpoint is the transformation of agriculture, transport, primary production, and construction, alongside new industries such as artificial silk and automobile manufacture. These developments indicate vigorous technical change and accumulation, not a general loss of momentum.
Lederer next questions the historical model underlying Sombart’s diagnosis. If capitalism is defined through the individual entrepreneur, standardization and large-scale organization can appear to signal its old age. But that conclusion makes one European developmental trajectory into the criterion for capitalism everywhere. China and Japan provide his decisive counterexample:
Der Kapitalismus tritt ferner in China und Japan sofort als Konzernkapitalismus auf, weil große Familienverbände ab ovo die Grundlage bilden und nicht persönliches Unternehmertum.
English translation: Furthermore, capitalism immediately appears in China and Japan as corporate-group capitalism, because large family associations form its basis from the outset, rather than individual entrepreneurship.
On Lederer’s account, standardized consumption and production, together with enterprises organized through extensive family groups, can characterize capitalism’s beginnings rather than its terminal phase. The supposed symptoms of lateness therefore cannot reliably identify a historical stage. His comparison also recalls early European companies: individual entrepreneurship is neither capitalism’s sole historical foundation nor its necessary organizational form.
This distinction between organization and exhaustion carries into his treatment of stabilization. Even if capitalism’s fluctuations could be moderated, the removal of cyclical disturbances would not eliminate its upward movement.
Denn die Stabilisierung bedeutet nicht eine Aufhebung der Dynamik.
English translation: For stabilization does not mean the abolition of dynamism.
Lederer makes the point through a spatial analogy. Economic development resembles a staircase; only after removing its trend does it resemble a wave. Stabilization would replace that staircase with an ascending inclined plane, not with a horizontal line. Trusts, especially, can drive rapidly expanding output rather than suppress development. The tendency toward self-organization must therefore be distinguished from a tendency toward stagnation.
The argument then widens to capitalism’s incorporation of previously noncapitalist regions. Lederer expects Asian demographic growth and competition from Asian capitalisms to reshape the European-American economy. His demographic forecast belongs to the intervention’s historical outlook; its argumentative function is to identify further sources of transformation that an inward-looking European periodization overlooks. He also rejects the expectation that this global integration will necessarily reagrarianize Europe. Chinese soybean exports suggest that even densely populated regions can become agricultural exporters, while capitalist farming and industrial inputs alter agriculture itself.
Denn steigende Agrarproduktion und Reagrarisierung ist heute keineswegs mehr dasselbe.
English translation: For increasing agricultural production and reagrarianization are today by no means the same thing.
The distinction extends his criticism of static classifications: greater agricultural output need not mean a return to an earlier social economy. The increasingly blurred boundary between farming and industry makes inherited sectoral categories insufficient guides to structural change.
In his concluding, explicitly abbreviated intervention on socialism, Lederer turns the same analytical discipline against the identification of rational production with capitalism:
Wenn die Produktion auf technisch vollkommener Grundlage dynamisch aufgebaut ist und rationell produziert, so ist das an sich noch nicht kapitalistisch.
English translation: If production is dynamically organized on a technically perfected basis and produces rationally, that in itself is not yet capitalist.
A socialist economy would still require cotton spindles to manufacture cotton yarn. What would distinguish it is its social constitution: who sustains production and what social force operates through it. Neither technical continuity nor the present mixture of economic systems settles the possibilities of a differently organized future. Lederer locates the condition of socialism in working people’s collective capacity for self-organization, flexibility, and intellectual dynamism sufficient to carry production themselves. This is a developmental task, not an instantaneous reversal. The contribution’s lasting conceptual force lies in its double refusal: organized capitalism is not necessarily exhausted capitalism, and modern productive technique is not necessarily capitalist technique.
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