Lederer’s review essay examines wartime transformations of socialist thought through Karl Renner, Paul Lensch, and Johann Plenge. Its central question is whether capitalist coordination and expanding state economic power realize socialist aims or reorganize existing relations of domination. Lederer accepts the need to reconsider Marxist theory but disputes the conversion of historical developments into guarantees of emancipation.
Renner receives the most extensive and differentiated treatment. Lederer situates his work within a movement to revise socialism in response to economic and political transformation:
Das Buch Renners ist als der vorerst letzte und schärfste Ausdruck dieser Bewegung anzusprechen.
English translation: Renner's book is to be regarded as the latest and sharpest expression of this movement thus far.
Renner’s importance lies in his recognition that monopoly, finance capital, and wartime regulation challenge inherited categories. Yet describing these changes does not establish that Marxist economics can explain them unchanged. Renner retains the labor theory of value without adequately resolving the difficulty posed by monopoly prices. Lederer distinguishes altered conditions, which a theory may incorporate as data, from changes requiring reconsideration of its explanatory foundations.
The stakes become clearest in the account of wartime state capitalism:
Der Krieg aber brachte als Steigerung dieser ganzen Entwicklungslinie die staatswirtschaftliche Epoche: der Staat wird Träger der Wirtschaft in größtem Umfang, der Privatkapitalismus verwandelt sich in Staatskapitalismus.
English translation: The war, however, brought, as an intensification of this whole line of development, the epoch of state economy: the state becomes the bearer of the economy to the greatest extent, private capitalism is transformed into state capitalism.
This diagnosis raises a question rather than supplying a socialist conclusion. The integration of Marx’s economic and social theories means that difficulties in value theory also affect the conceptual relation between economic processes and class structure. Lederer therefore considers whether economics and sociology must be distinguished more explicitly. His demand is not fidelity to an untouched orthodoxy, but clarity about the scope of revision.
Also jedenfalls auch und sogar in erster Linie eine Revision der theoretischen Fragestellung.
English translation: So in any case, and indeed in the first place, a revision of the theoretical formulation of the question.
Renner’s political interpretation does not, in Lederer’s judgment, meet this demand. Social reform and state organization may improve workers’ circumstances while stabilizing capitalism and strengthening cooperation between capital and public authority. They cannot simply be counted as socialism already in progress. Renner’s confidence in the state’s development leaves unresolved how proletarian interests are secured without proletarian power. His movement toward pacifism likewise fails to settle the relation between workers’ economic interests, territorial arrangements, and support for national victory.
Lensch turns these ambiguities into a historical mission for Germany. Industrial organization and Germany’s restricted colonial position supposedly make it the revolutionary force confronting an older world order. Lederer identifies a decisive substitution: relations between states take the place of relations between classes. War may generate revolutionary conditions without itself transforming the social relations at issue. A redistribution of colonies changes possession without abolishing the colonial system.
Lederer tests Lensch’s construction against developments that resist it. Economic organization advances outside Germany, while Germany’s alliance complicates any identification of the military camps with successive historical stages. German policy toward revolutionary Russia further exposes the distance between interstate struggle and social revolution. Treating the state as a unified actor obscures its internal divisions and transfers the language of class struggle to national power politics.
Plenge carries the identification of socialism with organization still further. Against his celebration of constructive revolution, Lederer emphasizes wartime destruction, deprivation, rationing, and disrupted wealth. Coordination under compulsion or for destructive purposes does not become socialist merely because it is systematic. Plenge’s theoretical alternatives also confuse technological description and organizational prescriptions with economic explanation.
Nevertheless, Lederer finds genuine problems beneath these misconstructions. Organized capitalism might avert collapse while intensifying concentration, making socialist transformation dependent on opposition to an intolerable order rather than automatic economic breakdown. State expansion may also develop dynamics not immediately reducible to class interests. A socialist party must distinguish policies compatible with its principles from actions that actually advance socialism. The essay’s governing distinction is between explaining a transformation, accommodating it politically, and recognizing it as emancipation. Thoroughly organized capitalism cannot be declared socialism simply by changing its name.
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