"Welfare State, Labor Advocacy, and Democracy: the Unfinished Business of Franz L. Neumann."
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
2
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
3
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
22
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
23
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
26
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
27
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
29
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
30
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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