"Welfare State, Labor Advocacy, and Democracy: the Unfinished Business of Franz L. Neumann."

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"Welfare State, Labor Advocacy, and Democracy: the Unfinished Business of Franz L. Neumann." In “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” the opera by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill that opened in Leipzig and was disrupted by Nazi storm troopers a few months before I was born in that city, the principal protagonist sings, “Wenn man an einem neuen Strand kommt, ist man zuerst etwas verlegen.” [“When one lands on a new shore, one is always a little embarrassed at first”] Yet Vienna is not an alien locale, when it comes to my topic. My point of departure is the labor regime and social constitution of Weimar, with special emphasis on Franz L. Neumann, whose work on that construct will pose our questions about contemporary developments. Karl Renner [the first President of the Second Austrian Republic after 1945] is the first familiar face upon my arrival on this coast because his concept of the change in function of law played an important part in the thinking of the Weimar intellectuals who hoped that the new relationships shaped by collective agreements between employers and unionized 1

Transcript of "Welfare State, Labor Advocacy, and Democracy: the Unfinished Business of Franz L. Neumann."

"Welfare State, Labor Advocacy, and Democracy: the

Unfinished Business of Franz L. Neumann." 

In “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” the opera

by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill that opened in Leipzig and was

disrupted by Nazi storm troopers a few months before I was

born in that city, the principal protagonist sings, “Wenn

man an einem neuen Strand kommt, ist man zuerst etwas verlegen.” [“When

one lands on a new shore, one is always a little embarrassed

at first”] Yet Vienna is not an alien locale, when it comes

to my topic. My point of departure is the labor regime and

social constitution of Weimar, with special emphasis on

Franz L. Neumann, whose work on that construct will pose our

questions about contemporary developments. Karl Renner [the

first President of the Second Austrian Republic after 1945]

is the first familiar face upon my arrival on this coast

because his concept of the change in function of law played

an important part in the thinking of the Weimar

intellectuals who hoped that the new relationships shaped by

collective agreements between employers and unionized

1

workers would lead in time to a transition from private to

social property and constitutionalized dealings among the

agents in economic activity.

There is also a more recent Austrian connection to my

topic, which extends to the relations between the dynamic

labor regime characterized above and the secure

institutionalization of the basic social rights that were

until not so long ago conceptualized in the notion of the

welfare state. In 2002, as I recently learned, there was an

attempt by way of a Volksbegehren [popular initiative] to

anchor the norm of a “Sozialstaat” [social state] in the

constitution. I do not know enough about Austrian politics

to say anything intelligent about the poor showing of the

initiative, but the constitutional route can be seen as an

alternative to the notion upheld by writers like Neumann

during the Weimar years, when social rights were seen rather

as a product of a political process in which labor-union

played a central role.

In English-language discussions, the design for social

rights independent of labor union (and anti-union) politics

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has been typically discussed under the characteristic

heading of “social rights,” drawing on the work of the

English sociologist, T.H. Marshall, writing in the 1950s.

As a political matter, and this was certainly true in the

Austrian case, the principal supporters of “social rights”

commonly included the labor unions, but it is nevertheless

important, as Marshall himself emphasized, to distinguish a

social welfare regime grounded in a constitutional guarantee

of rights, which Marshall depicted as an achieved attribute

of citizenship, from a regime grounded in the collective

rights of organized labor, although this too could be shown

empirically to have resulted in advances in social welfare

measures applying beyond the limits of union membership.

The recent revival of interest in Marshall’s approach, often

in the context of global “rights” and sometimes in

conjunction with the unenforcable UN Treaty, has to do not

only with the newly strengthened trend of casting many

claims in the language of universal rights but also with the

widespread decline and denigration of the labor movement.

The question, as was made manifest also in the Austrian

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debate, is about the meaning and force of such alleged

rights.

Let me anticipate the discussion to follow—as long as

my time and your patience hold out—by posing a provocative

and greatly simplified paradox:

1. As trade unions gained institutional strength

both in the sphere of industrial relations as

such and in the political sphere, they tended to

trade in some or much of that strength for

social gains in the wider sphere of public

policy.

2. In many contexts, but not all, the

accomplishments in this domain rendered the

unions themselves increasingly dependent on the

state agencies that operated these programs and

indeed often less attractive to their potential

members.

3. This has meant in turn that the unions become

ever less effective when state agencies

transmute guaranteed social rights into social

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policies, subject to competing considerations of

budgets or ideological reorientations.

4. Some such sequence of events form the central

narrative of Franz Neumann’s explanation for the

failure of the labor movement to offer militant

and effective opposition to the German

developments from 1930 through 1933, where the

matter at issue was far more drastic than a

shift away from the egalitarian concerns with

social justice

The question is not, of course, whether we are on the way to

fascist regimes, but simply whether a concept like social

rights can have any practical force without a labor movement

whose independence and power provides either force behind

the demands that such rights be satisfied or motivation to

provide for such rights as a counter to the strength of

unions. I hope that we will talk about these thoughts

stimulated by Neumann’s analysis, first, of the political

sources of the welfare state in Weimar and second, of the

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collapse of labor in the face of conservative and then

fascist aggression.

The unremarkable thesis of this presentation is that

the establishment and maintenance of the welfare state as a

modality of social justice has been a function of a social

constitution that is complementary to the political

constitution and that features a major role for organized

labor in conflict and negotiations with the powers of prime

economic actors. In this analysis we shall follow a

classical presentation of the case in the Weimar era work of

Franz L. Neumann. A justification for following this older

analysis is that Neumann was also compelled by the

destruction of that regime after 1930 to inquire into the

radical transmutation or liquidation of the social

constitution and its supposed progressive dynamics.

Obviously we are not faced at present by the brutal

dismantling of the labor-grounded social constitution as

practiced by Fascist regimes, but it is nevertheless clear

that the present trend against labor organization is not a

mere cyclical reversal but a structural change. The

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question, then, is whether our unremarkable thesis can also

help with the problems of contemporary diagnosis of the

prospects for social justice. Neumann had this question on

his agenda when he died in an accident, although he also

hoped for a post-war recovery of the Weimar pattern, freed

of some of the features he blamed for its fatal weakness at

the critical moment. That prognosis obviously looked strong

in the postwar—and Cold War—decades in Western Europe. Now

that the economically powerful need to fear the possible

attractions of the Communist model, the work has to be

picked up anew.

We begin with the concept of social rights as an

entitlement comparable to other rights of citizenship in the

spheres of civil liberty and political participation and we

ask for an explanation of the supposed rise of this new

dimension to legitimacy and practical force. When political

and social theorists get together with historians to think

hard about matters that deeply concern them all, it is often

tempting to let “world history” serve as the “world court.”

This is all the more the case when the common topic is as

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slippery a concept as “social rights,” which can be

minimally defined easily enough, with T.H. Marhall, as

rights to “a modicum of economic welfare and security [and

as] the right to share in the full the social heritage and

to live the life of a civilized being,” but which stumble as

a term in analysis over the key word “right.” It may

designate an artifact of law, either statutory or

constitutional (and this distinction makes a big difference

in itself), a certain settled state of a highly legitimate

complex of social-political practices, and/or a set of

moral-political demands. To say that social rights are

recognized, accordingly, may refer to a finding of

jurisprudence, analysis of social or political developments,

or moral philosophy. In the deeply interesting literature

of “social rights,”—and we can cite Marshall’s famous essay

on “Citizenship and Social Class” as a landmark (cheerfully

joining the 77 published scholars who made Marshall a main

theme in journal articles in the last dozen years)—the

slippery terrain among these three spheres has been often

negotiated by some variant of “progressivism,” derived from

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Marx or Comte or Habermas, and reinforced by some mode of

sociological jurisprudence. The expansion of the policies

and entitlements intended by the concept of social rights

may then be presented as the actualization of a new,

historically apt and both legally and morally legitimate

constitution.

But what if the public arrangements that had been

understood as an actualization of social rights are

reinterpreted, as has been happening ever more for the past

thirty years, by both public authorities and influential

opinion as nothing more than artifacts of improvident public

policy and treated with little respect? What happens “after

progress”? At that point we are left once again with the

need to distinguish and puzzle out the possible

interrelations among the three aspects of rights, because we

can no longer assume that a historical process of cumulative

social education has brought about a level of moral

sensitivity that manifests itself not only in new political

priorities but also in a new applied jurisprudence.

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Learning from Neumann. To illustrate the parallels and

to open the present-day discussion to some of this past

experience, I want to offer a quick overview of Franz

Neumann’s approach during the Weimar years to the

constitutionalization of the Welfare State and its

constituent social rights—an undertaking that began with his

first doctoral dissertation in 1923, challenging the failure

of the Social Democratic Party to abandon its defensive

individualistic distrust of the state, and ended with a

desperate article against Reichskanzler von Papen’s

pronouncement in 1932 that he would liquidate the welfare

state, to which Neumann replied that the whole of the Weimar

constitution entails a commitment to the “social [and

collective] rights of working people”. And then I will turn

briefly to his angry rejection after 1933 of his own

theories and of the practices they sought to foster. His

attempt to develop a new constructive theory of (social)

democracy was interrupted by his death in 1954, at the age

of 54.

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Since Neumann’s Weimar writings are the work of a

practicing jurist, they are both technical in their contents

and forensic in their rhetorical design. It would be

extravagant to referee his arguments in detail, especially

in an oral presentation. So I will summarize quite

ruthlessly, using the earlier summaries of T.H. Marshall as

a point of reference.

First, there is the insistence on conflict. The gains

in social welfare that interest Neumann are the products of

working class resistance to the superior power of propertied

classes under capitalism—a superiority that is present in

the workplace, the economic firm, the labor market, the

realm of commodities, and the political sphere. It is

natural to refer this view to Marxism, but it is not

productive to spend a lot of time, given our present

interest, in deciding just what kind of “Marxist” Neumann

may have been during these productive years.

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Second, however, there is also the recognition of

periodic suspensions of conflict through negotiated

settlements between collective formations of the contending

parties in the various sites of contention, with the deals

in place reflecting the respective power resources and

skills of the collective bargaining agents at the time of

settlement.

Third, the principal power resource of the working

class is organization—and where their economic conditions

and the state of their social welfare are at issue, the

organizations that matter are the trade unions, whose

counter-power is applied in a uniquely effective site—at the

point of productivity and the source of profit—and whose

inner logic directs them to such objectives.

Fourth, these deals are binding—until they are not. As

is true of the collective bargaining agreements between

employers and employees, which is Neumann’s paradigm, the

agreements do not preclude the dynamic accretion of new

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powers to one side or the other, and they are consequently

subject to what trade union lore calls “reopeners.”

Fifth, however, not all settlements are at the same

level and have the same degree of flexibility.

Constitutional settlements define the terms on which and—

much more importantly—the procedures by which the contests

at a lower level are resolved. Short of revolution, they

are subject to change by a process of constitutional

politics that is constrained by the overall design because

so much has been invested in it that the parties in conflict

cannot calculate the consequences of disruptive change.

Sixth, then, the rights guaranteed by the codified

constitution, if it exists, provide critical information,

above of all, about first principles of the settlement that

has been reached, and they also give notice of the remedies

provided.

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Within this framework, derived in its basic mechanism

from the collective labor law theory of his mentor, Hugo

Sinzheimer, Neumann set forth his understanding of the

Weimar constitution as the articulation of a “Sozialen

Rechtsstaat.” [Social State under Rule of Law] Language is a

problem here. It sounds awkward to say “articulation,”

rather than “foundation,” but some such language is needed

to comprehend the argument that puts the power balance—and

its prospective unbalancing—first. Then I leave the key

term in German because it contains what is almost a pun.

The term Recht can refer to the norms and procedures

constituting the legal order. I cannot even say “law” here

because there is critical difference between the

systematized law, and the variously enacted statutes (or

Gesetze), which we would consider the primary laws in Anglo-

American legal discourse. And Recht can also refer to what

are called “rights” in English. Technically, German jurists

distinguish between objective and subjective “right” to

comprehend this distinction. The term Rechtsstaat normally

refers, of course, to the concept that is inevitably but

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inadequately translated by the Anglo-American conception of

a state under the “rule of law.” With the modifier,

“social,” however, the reference would seem to be (also) to

a state that grants social rights, especially since the

point of the concept is to distinguish such a state from a

liberal state that exists to protect individual rights. The

very idea that the term “right” can apply to anything other

than what Marshall called “civil” and what Neumann called

liberal or bourgeois rights, is denied by many Weimar

theorists, notably the formidable Carl Schmitt, and is at

the core of Neumann’s interpretation of the Weimar

constitution.

Neumann’s argument must be technical because it is

addressed to the legal community, which in a legal system

like the German may itself be a legal authority, since the

consensus of opinion (or “Herrschende Lehre”) among jurists has

a claim to take the place filled by precedent in common law.

As noted, the question is whether a bill of rights is not

inherently liberal, as Schmitt and other contended, with the

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social contents of some provisions serving merely as

ideological cover, since the very concept of rights has

individual property as its paradigm, if not as its core.

Only individual and negative rights, on this reading, can be

protected in court, given the premises and logic of such

proceedings. The very fact that the Weimar constitution

contains a bill of rights implies that the “basic

decision,”—a concept in Schmitt that is replaced in

Neumann’s analysis by the notion of a negotiated settlement—

was for individualism, capitalism, and liberalism. Neumann

counters that the meaning of rights has been revised in the

Weimar settlement, but he does not attempt to make his case

(for this constituency) by more than an incidental reference

to the parallelogram of forces expressed by the

constitution. Instead, he shows, first that all the liberal

rights incorporated into the constitution—most notably the

right of property—are hedged about with social conditions

and expressly subject, not only to the reserve power of

legislation (Vorbehalt des Gesetzes), which is commonplace for

most guarantees in parliamentary civil law systems, but also

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to acts of lesser authorities if motivated by social

purposes. Second, then, he examines the numerous guarantees

of rights that are both social in intent and collective in

their bearers. But above all, and in the final analysis, he

turns to Section 165 of the constitution, which recognizes,

without the reservation for legal limitation, both the

respective organizations and the collective agreements

between employers and employees, while providing both

guarantees and mechanisms of co-participation in decisions

affecting the economic sphere, which Neumann expands to

include social policy as well. In the last critical year of

Weimar, Neumann makes the rounds of several university

seminars in constitutional and labor law, including the

seminar of Carl Schmitt, to press this case, arguing that

not even the emergency powers of the President could

override this guarantee, which is expressly phrased to

recognize the collective agreement and its organized parties

as a reality more fundamental than all the provisions that

were subject to Presidential rule. Social rights—or at

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least those rights that are most directly at issue in the

autonomy and power of labor organizations---are fundamental.

Neumann’s reliance on Section 165 is paradoxical from

one point of view inasmuch as the bulk of it is, by his own

admission, a dead letter. The subsections following the

basic statement considered above deal at some length with

the formation and the powers of various participatory

councils of workers, as well as joint councils of workers

and employers, who are supposed to play a major role in the

development of social and economic policy by parliament; but

only one of these councils ever existed, and its role was

trivial. In agreement with his partner in his legal

practice and intellectual collaborator, Ernst Fraenkel,

Neumann maintains that those councils were written into the

constitution because the unions had lost the confidence of

many workers during the revolutionary months at the

foundation of the Republic, but that the unions had regained

that confidence, as witness their control over the works

councils that were to have formed the feeders for the

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council system, so that the basic balance has been retained,

although subject to an adjustment consistent with the norms

of constitutional politics.

Fraenkel and Neumann designate the Weimar regime as a

“collective democracy.” Parliament remains sovereign and

parliamentary legislation supreme, but the constitution

provides for a secondary constitution in the social and

economic spheres, connected through Section 165, and its

prime actors are autonomous collectivities. It is the

institution and procedure that is guaranteed, not the power

distribution between the respective parties; and qualitative

change may take place. When Fraenkel discusses “collective

democracy” in 1929, he speaks of it as an institution to

“limit” Parliament, especially important because the system

of government and opposition does not work under Weimar

conditions, and the parliament cannot challenge the

ministers or their bureaucracy because of the

interdependence arising out of the need for coalition

government. The “limitation,” however, does not take the

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form of challenging parliament on its own political grounds,

but of attending to the things that parliament does not do,

or at least compelling Parliament to contend with coherent

and forceful opposition when they do decide to exercise

their unquestioned supremacy. If nothing else, this adjunct

constitution keeps the struggle between the proponents of

social rights and capitalist logic on the table, and

provides a forum for developing schemes of adjustments

between them. Most important—and the real sense in which the

“collective democracy” serves as a control on the state—, is

that the role of unions derived from Section 165 extends to

their participation in both administrative and judicial

agencies concerned with issues of social rights; and it is

precisely the bureaucrats and the judges who would otherwise

exercise the actual power in these spheres, without any

meaningful parliamentary or ministerial control. That

feature of the constitutional design is what gives reality

to social rights.

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Of special importance to Neumann was the categorical

rejection of judicial review of legislation, especially

where such review purports to measure parliament’s decisions

by constitutional rights. His reasons included distrust of

the judiciary as a kind of “upper chamber” structurally

biased against the interests of workers, as well as his

charge that jurisprudence in this field is overwhelmingly

subjective and grounded in “sense of justice” rather than

the terms of the norms supposedly applied, but his point was

also that Parliament could quite properly move beyond the

even balance between the prime social contestants, as their

power relations shifted, so that a judicial application of

the guarantee of equality before the law could easily

override valid adaptations to the needs of labor, like

differential treatment that properly counteracted inequities

in power or skills. Neumann’s examples come from rulings

concerning comparatively unimportant procedural matters, but

he is also thinking of his own scheme for the control of

cartels, where these business entities would be subjected to

regulations far more stringent than those applied to other

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collective agents, notably unions, that might be considered

legally similar. Rights can be protected by courts against

administrative agencies on grounds of ultra vires, but they

must be given reality by political and social agents. And

across a wide stretch of the social terrain, they must be

negotiated in multi-partisan bargaining structures.

Procedures are trumps.

It may seem strange to offer for serious consideration

a conception that seems to have been so tragically mistaken,

and even to suggest that in certain respects its conjunction

of social rights and something resembling Marshall’s

transitory “industrial constitution” provides analytical

tools that are superior to the faith in some universal moral

development, whose present-day counterpart may well be the

legend of human rights. Simply stated, the question is

whether the regime of social rights can outlive the

organizational presence and bargaining power of the labor

movement, whose effects in this domain were by no means

limited to its own political objectives. In fact, it came

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to be Neumann’s contention that precisely this class of

effects undermined the movement itself, as Marx had warned

in the Critique of the Gotha Program and as certain political

leaders since Bismarck had intended it to do.

Franz L. Neumann completed his interpretation of the

end of Weimar and the triumph of Nazi Germany in 1944, while

he was associated with Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social

Studies in New York, but he published it, by mutual

understanding, without subjecting it to the editorial

scrutiny of the director or the group. It is not a product

of the so-called “Frankfurt School,” and precisely with

regard to the issues we have been following, it develops

arguments that he had written in his first exile years,

under the tutelage of Harold Laski. He dedicated quite a

large portion of it, in fact, to a challenge to the

interpretation of Germany’s economic power structure most

widely accepted at the Institute and he largely neglected

the cultural and psychological factors that were ever more

prominent in the Institute’s thinking about the subject.

There is no doubt about Neumann’s indebtedness to his years

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at the Institute, but he was a mature intellectual when he

arrived there, with a rich history of work and

accomplishment in a field that was little understood by the

philosophers who occupied leading positions there,

notwithstanding the common point of departure in the

contested legacy of Marxism. He had been a labor lawyer,

constitutional theorist, and specialist on the cartel and

monopoly regime in Weimar Germany. When he returned to

university in exile, he did not pursue a course towards

valid legal credentials, as his closest associates did, but

gained a Ph.D. in political, social, and legal theory with

Harold Laski and fellow-exile, Karl Mannheim. So it is no

surprise that his book focuses on the organization of power

in Nazi Germany, on the emerging structure of economic life

as an element in that organization, and on the character and

uses of law.

What makes the book different from much that was

written at the time—and certainly different from the general

impressions in the public sphere—was that it largely

ignored, perhaps to a fault, the theatrical spectacle of

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Nazi rule, and downgraded the anti-Jewish campaign to the

level of an instrumental device to be understood in relation

to its long-term purposes, which he thought were not focused

on Jews but on more powerful modes of likely resistance,

especially the Christian churches. Behemoth is a dry book

in many respects, full of tables and lists, but its

principal thesis is dramatic and consists of a complex

answer to a question that is more than pertinent at the

present. At the time that Hannah Arendt, implicitly

accepting nationalist arguments about world order, was

drawing out of the Hitler experience the project of an army

comprised exclusively of Jews from the United States and

everywhere because there could not be a Jewish nation among

a world of nations without it, Franz Neumann was asking

whether Germany under Hitler was truly a state and

maintaining that it was precisely its failure in this

respect that made its actions impervious to rational design

or justification.

Leaving aside the rich tradition from Hobbes to Hegel

that informs Neumann’s understanding of the rational

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character of states, we are familiar with the complex of

expectations associated with the concept of the state as

rational actor in realist international relations theory,

and our collection of so-called “failed states” is vast,

even if we hesitate before entering upon the contested

domain of globalization as an as yet incalculable challenge

to the state. Neumann’s Behemoth is worth more than a

ceremonial celebration on its seventieth anniversary. For

present purposes, however, the question is about his

merciless assessment of the Weimar social constitution and

the project of the labor movement he had served.

In considering Neumann’s treatment of labor and the

labor movement in Behemoth, it seems irresistible to shift

from reading the book as an exciting, intrinsically

interesting initiative for thinking about matters that are

problematic today to thinking about it in terms of what Karl

Mannheim would have called its “documentary” meaning--in

this case, as a document of Neumann’s bitter defeat and

exile. This is not to say that there is nothing to discuss

about Neumann’s critique of what a later generation would

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call the neo-corporatist strategy of the German labor

movement during the Weimar years, a trend that Neumann had

in fact already criticized during the 1920s, especially with

regard to the reliance on state-imposed collective

agreements.

Briefly, then, Behemoth, in its abbreviated

introductory section on “The Collapse of Weimar” expands on

Neumann’s bitterly angry—and self-lacerating—attack on the

policies and leadership of the Weimar labor movement, which

he first set forth in an exile publication in 1934 and 1935

under the pseudonym of Leopold Franz. In one of the

articles, he actually cites Franz Neumann—not quite fairly—

as one of the apologists for the fatal mistakes that he

thinks were made. The case is quite simple. The principal

agents of the labor movement focused narrowly on

improvements in the collective bargaining regime and the

enhancement of welfare benefits during the Weimar years, he

maintained, and they accepted tutelage from state agencies

as their bargaining position weakened, due, first, to dire

economic conditions—the initial hyperinflation and the later

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depression and mass unemployment—and second, to the

progressive displacement of the competitive economy, on

which the traditional policy depended, by cartels and

monopolies, a progression that their policies actually

furthered. The Communists had a better analysis, Neumann

claims, but their mode of organization and externally

imposed strategies made them into an obstacle rather than a

better alternative. As the crisis reached its height,

Neumann maintains, the labor movement had no strategy—and no

inner resources—for counter-attack against its enemies.

They sought minimal accommodation at all costs, hoping to

preserve at least the trade union organization, as they had

done during the Bismarck anti-Socialist campaign some fifty

years before. What they should have done instead, in

Neumann’s sparsely articulated opinion, was a resort to

general strike and the acceptance of the consequent civil

war, despite the uncertain prospects—a historical citation

of the unions’ militancy at the time of the much less

threatening Kapp Putsch shortly after the establishment of

the Republic.

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Neumann’s anger and despair at the policies of the

German labor movement—its unions and political parties—do

not mean that the logic of labor’s objective position, as

seen by Marxist approaches, is not important in his analysis

of the National Socialist regime. At the heart of many of

its policies and organizational designs is the need to

counter the ever-present potential of a labor uprising, he

maintains. In a vital sense, the socialist revolution

remains virtually present throughout in Neumann’s analysis.

There are interesting and important suggestions in

Neumann’s discussion of labor, especially with regard to the

consequences of the labor regime on the rule of law and

similar matters. Yet the analysis itself rests on an

unrealistic misjudgment of the forces: there was no “true”

revolution available in 1918/19, as he knew at the time, and

there were no dramatic alternatives open to the labor

movement, as the depression hit. At minimum, in 1942, when

he had been in the United States for half a dozen years and

had actually written briefly about some aspects of American

labor, he would have had to say something about the reasons

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why the effects of concentration of capital and depression

in the United States were so different for the American

labor movement. At the level of intrinsic meaning, it is a

weak part of the book

If I had time, I would turn to the level of documentary

meaning and show why this aspect of Neumann’s study is more

constrained by the restricted vision of the exile, whose

meaning for Neumann is centered on the mission of restoring

labor to its leading role in the transition to a mode of

democracy beyond the design of the liberal-democratic modern

state. Neumann’s unfinished effort to move beyond this

perspective did not properly begin until after the war, and

even then, there is, for example, a moment at the founding

conference of the Rand Corporation in 1948—foolish or

moving, depending on your politics—when Neumann looks for

guarantees that the Cold War policies they were designing

would not make the United States hostile to an authentic

socialist revolution anywhere in Europe. No one around the

table knew what he was talking about.

They would have been even more perplexed if they had

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been able to attend the closed seminar on “Labor in Germany”

held at the Institute for Social Research on one of the days

of this Rand Conference, where Neumann inveighed, among his

most trusted associates, against the Social Democratic Party

for its obsession with opposing the [Communist] Left. The

SPD, he says, is “totally corrupt and fights only against

the Left, while the [Communist-led] “SED calls for Volksstaat

and fighting the monopolies.” At that table too, to judge

from the rest of the discussion, no one knew what he was

talking about. And he retracted it himself, in part, when

he concluded that the polarization of the world makes the

problem insoluble anyway, precluding independent national

labor movement policy. He could never finish his business.

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