Emil Lederer on Otto Bauer’s Die Teuerung (1910)

Emil Lederer’s review assesses Bauer’s explanation of rising prices as both workers’ political education and economic analysis. Its movement from emphatic praise through a technical monetary objection to a political conclusion makes clear that Lederer’s support does not imply theoretical agreement.

Die Schrift Bauers, für Arbeiter berechnet, sowie sie auch aus Vorträgen für Arbeiter hervorgegangen, wirkt revolutionär.

English translation: Bauer's work, calculated for workers, as it has also grown out of lectures for workers, has a revolutionary effect.

For Lederer, this revolutionary effect rests on the conjunction of accessible explanation and a systematic political alternative. Bauer first examines international causes of rising prices, then state policies that enable domestic price increases under pressure from interested groups. Each section confronts readers with a choice between capitalism’s irrationality and workers’ suffering, and socialism understood as planned production for collective benefit. Lederer particularly values the concrete material through which Austrian conditions become intelligible within European and world-economic relations.

The review’s principal reservation concerns Bauer’s account of cheaper gold production. Lederer rejects the claim that production costs, ultimately miners’ wages, directly determine gold’s value and thereby commodity prices. Gold differs from ordinary commodities because its owner possesses a legal right to conversion into a generally valid means of payment at a fixed relation. Its valuation therefore cannot be explained simply through ordinary commodity-market competition.

Seine Produktionskosten sind nur eine Grenze für die Goldgewinnung, und insofern vielleicht indirekt ein Bestimmgrund für die Menge des gewonnenen Goldes — und so käme auch Bauer zur Anerkennung der Quantitätstheorie, die er leugnet (S 40).

English translation: Its costs of production are only a limit upon the winning of gold, and to that extent perhaps indirectly a determining ground for the quantity of gold won — and thus Bauer too would arrive at a recognition of the quantity theory, which he denies (p. 40).

Lederer shifts the explanatory emphasis from production costs to the quantity of gold produced. Given contemporary technical improvements, he argues, higher mining wages would not substantially reduce output. They would chiefly redistribute the proceeds between employers and workers, potentially producing local effects without changing world-market prices. The distinction between distribution and monetary valuation is the review’s central analytical intervention.

The closing passage returns from theoretical disagreement to practical convergence. Lederer notes that Bauer’s concrete proposals and much of his explanation of rising prices closely coincide with those of Myrbach, whose work is mentioned for review elsewhere.

Ein bemerkenswertes Symptom, daß eine ehrliche Konsumentenpolitik zur Unterstützung sozialistischer Gegenwartsforderungen drängt.

English translation: A noteworthy symptom, that an honest consumers' policy presses towards the support of socialist demands of the present.

This convergence matters because it suggests that serious consumer advocacy can lead toward immediate socialist demands independently of agreement on every theoretical premise. The review thus combines appreciation of socialist pedagogy with critical monetary reasoning, locating the book’s political significance in both its explanatory force and the wider support its practical programme might attract.