[Rezension zu] H. Domack: Der Genossenschaftssozialismus

Emil Lederer: Review of H. Domack’s Der Genossenschaftssozialismus (1913)

Lederer’s brief review assesses a Tübingen dissertation claiming to present a “system” of cooperative socialism. His criticism moves from its lack of theoretical originality to the institutional obstacles it overlooks, then states what an adequate theory would require.

Sie bietet jedoch weder im theoretischen, noch in den praktischen Ausführungen irgend etwas Neues.

English translation: It offers, however, nothing new whatever, neither in the theoretical nor in the practical expositions.

Domack’s purported innovation—that labor creates value only insofar as commodities find buyers—is, Lederer argues, already present in Marx’s third volume. The practical proposal fares no better: consumers’ purchase of all national production encounters both monopolized industries and industries structurally unsuited to consumer-cooperative organization. Domack also treats agriculture’s incorporation as unproblematic, envisaging producers’ cooperatives as a transitional form toward attachment to consumer organizations.

Er sieht also nicht, daß der Genossenschaftssozialismus keine auf »bloß ökonomischem« Wege zu realisierende Wirtschaftsform ist.

English translation: He thus does not see that cooperative socialism is not an economic form to be realized by "merely economic" means.

This is the review’s central conceptual move: cooperative expansion cannot by itself establish the feasibility of a transformed economic order. Lederer distinguishes the economic nature of consumer organizations, their theoretical capacities, and the actual means of realizing those capacities. A genuine system would have to connect all three, rather than assume that cooperative acquisition resolves the problem of transformation.

He further challenges Domack’s unclear account of the law of value, rejecting the assumption that cooperative socialism would make commodities exchange simply according to embodied labor time. The closing acknowledgment is limited: the dissertation assembles historical material on English and German cooperatives and discusses the German movement’s relations with unions and the socialist party. The review’s significance lies in its demand that cooperative socialism explain both organizational limits and the conditions of practical realization.