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Weim
Even before the implementation of the Weimar Constitution, Rudolf Wissel, finance minister of the first social-democratic government in German history, pointed out with bitter disappointment to the Party Congress of June, 1919: "By building the edifice of formal political democracy, we have done nothing but pursue the program already begun by the imperial government of Prince Max von Baden. We have completed the constitution without a profound popular participation and we have not been able to placate the masses' tacit resentment because we did not have an adequate program... We have failed to influence the revolution so that Germany would have been animated by a new spirit. The very essence of our culture and of our social life seems to have changed very little-and often not for the better. People think that the revolution's conquests have an exclusively negative character, that an individual's military and bureaucratic domination has been substituted by another kind, and that the criteria of government are not substantially different from those of the old regime.. . I think that history will harshly judge both the National Assembly as well as the government." [1]
This sharp and unequivocal declaration of the bankruptcy of the socialization program tended to underscore the political reason for this failure: the lack of active mass participation in the governing of institutions. Social democracy's self-criticism focused here on the crux of the problem: the fundamental economism of the party and the fatal obliteration of the mass base, of the socialized dimension, of politics understood as the specific dynamic form of the relation between the "political" and the "social" and, at the same time, as the working class' ability to run in the first person the transition phases by hegemonically recomposing - in so far as it was the main productive force - the segments of the "general intellect." The failure of a vast and ambitious program of economic reconstruction by the SPD also put an end to the various attempts by the members of the "Socialization Commission" led by Kautsky, Wilbrandt, Heimann, etc., to reconcile planning and workers' councils (Arbeiterrate), socialization, and "industrial democracy."
Wissel's reference to the last imperial government was very pertinent. In fact, for several decades the German labor movement had adapted its organization and struggles to the structure of the Bismarckian state, [3] and after the November revolution the new constitution based itself on the model of pre-war union structure. The June, 1919 Nuremberg union congress, for instance, fully ratified the agreements of the November Convention.[4] Indeed, it went further by promoting studies and projects for a type of "labor community" (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) in which the relative functions of unions and employers would be regulated according to the new political course. The resolution of the Nuremberg Congress assigned to workers' councils the task of carrying out and controlling the socialization program gradually decided upon by the council of peoples' commissars and proposed by the socialization commission.
The timing was particularly inappropriate for this union and social-democratic project of parallel control of the economy [next page]