Public ownership and the socialisation of production in the German Revolution of 1918-19.
| Author | Vrousalis, Nicholas |
Labour's current discussion of 'public ownership' has much to learn from early twentieth-century debates about the 'socialisation' of production and the relationship between economic and political democracy.
The debate about public ownership--the socialisation of the means of production, as I shall call it--is once again in full swing. (1) This provides occasion to reconsider its lineage and justification. The concept of socialisation has a long and complex genealogy, branching across a century of socialist politics: from Karl Kautsky and Karl Korsch in 1918-19, through Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Herbert Morrison in the 1930s, to Tony Benn and Rudolf Meidner in the 1970s, and from there to Mitterrand's 1981 election manifesto and Corbyn's in 2017.
This essay focuses on the origin of the concept in the socialisation programme of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during and after the revolution that followed Germany's defeat in the First World War. It focuses on the ideas presented by two key figures involved in formulating the party's approach: Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) and Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941). Kautsky was an executor of Marx's literary estate, the author of the SPD's 1891 Erfurt Programme, and editor of the SPD newspaper, Die Neue Zeit. Hilferding was the famous author of Finance Capital, published in 1910, and later minister of finance under the Weimar Republic.
These thinkers were interested in resolving two significant problems that have not received enough attention from champions of public ownership, including from within the Labour Party: the problem of 'statism'--private capitalists being replaced by an unauthorised and undemocratic bureaucracy--and the problem of a 'labour aristocracy'--privileged groups of workers managing dominant firms in ways that undermine the common good. The novel Kautsky/Hilferding proposal for resolving this dilemma was the creation of a 'labour parliament' that would work in parallel with a conventional legislature to manage the diverse complexity of a fully democratised economy.
The November revolution
November 2018 was the centenary of the German revolution, a fateful moment in twentieth century history. The revolution promised Germany a double liberation: from the shackles of Prussian militarism, on the one hand, and from those economic buttresses of militarism, the 'great German industrialists', on the other. Given the centrality of that struggle to Europe's fate, it is no exaggeration to say that a successful popular revolution in 1918 in Germany could have spared humanity the horrors of both fascism and the gulag. (2)
The revolution was sparked by spontaneous synergy between revolutionary workers and radicalised soldiers, a few weeks before the end of World War I. Following the Kiel sailors' mutiny of 3 November 1918, spontaneously-created workers' and soldiers' councils began spreading all over Germany; railways carried the revolutionary fire to Berlin, where the sailors telegraphed the onset of revolution to Kronstadt, Barcelona, Paris and Turin. After the abdication of the Kaiser, power fell into the hands of the Berlin executive of the workers' and soldiers' councils. Friedrich Ebert, the conservative leader of the Social Democratic Party, was appointed the new Chancellor of the German Reich. The appointment was irrelevant: on 9 November, the soldiers and workers were de facto rulers of Germany. They had put an end to world war, they controlled the guns and factories of the world's most industrialised economy, and they carried the socialist aspiration for human emancipation. All power had passed to the councils.
On 10 November, some 3000 workers and soldiers gathered at Circus Busch, in Berlin, to decide the future of the revolution. They set themselves two tasks: to break the power of the military and to socialise the conditions of production. Destroying militarism meant doing away with the imperial High Command, and establishing democratic control over the army. Socialising production meant dispossessing the great industrialists--Hugenberg, Stinnes, Siemens, Thyssen--while extending worker control to every nook and cranny of the economy. By way of implementation of these two tasks, the councils decided to delegate executive authority to a Provisional Government of Peoples' Representatives. Headed by Ebert, it united three representatives from the SPD and three from the USPD--the Independent Social Democratic Party, which had split from the SPD in 1917 over the party's parliamentary votes in favour of additional credits for Germany's doomed war effort. (3)
The socialisation dilemma
Confronted by the titanic task of socialising the German economy, Ebert appointed Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, two stalwarts of social democracy, to a Socialisation Commission that also included, for a time, Joseph Schumpeter. Kautsky was immediately confronted by a dilemma between what he called a 'bureaucratic autocracy' and a 'labour aristocracy'. (4) Deeply affected by the creeping bureaucratisation of the Russian revolution, Kautsky wanted to guard against taking power from the capitalists, only to pass it on to the state. But he also worried about entrusting exclusive ownership and control of the means of production to isolated islands of producers, who could proceed to maximise profit against the requirements of the general good. Kautsky assumed that capital-intensive industries, if left unregulated, would remain inefficient and inimical to the welfare of the rest of the producers and the bulk of consumers, through a combination of...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
