Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Germany

Workers' debates about political economy in Germany during the revolution of 1848–1849 did not inspire the formation of a group of thinkers so renowned as the so-called Ricardian socialists in Britain. Due perhaps to the legacy of corporate regulation in the urban crafts trades in Germany, the artisans who spearheaded the workers' movement there never expressed the degree of interest in formal theories of capitalist exploitation that their counterparts in the early British socialist movement did.^[102] When the labor periodicals which blossomed in the revolution analyzed the sources of workers' impoverishment, however, their portrayal of the labor transaction varied from the start from that of the British. The revolutionary press in Germany generally viewed the concentration of capital not as the result of ruinous exchange in the market but as its cause.^[103] It acknowledged that market forces reshaped the landscape, but market transactions themselves did not appear to it to comprise the site of exploitation.^[104] For example, the Cologne newspaper Freiheit, Arbeit declared in 1849 that the wealthy profited not just through trade but by "the administration of work" and by "guiding the manufacture" of products.^[105] It portrayed the subordination of labor in the workshop as a mechanism in its own right for extracting profit. In Die Verbrüderung the correspondent Oskar Stobek declared in 1850 that workers engaged in the workshops of superiors were exploited because they

[102] Only upon the reestablishment of political movements in the 1860s did urban artisans begin to adopt the discourse of liberal political economy. Friedrich Lenger, Zwischen Kleinbürgertum und Proletariat (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 195.

[103] P. H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 240–241.

[104] Arbeiter-Blatt , from the textile district of Lennep, edited by members of the local workers' association, portrayed the market as a medium that reflected circumstances disadvantageous to workers, not as the cause of unequal exchange. The newspaper cited wage-depressing factors in Germany, including the abundance of landless, dependent laborers and the stiffening competition that hand workers faced from domestic and foreign machine production. December 3, 1848. In these dire circumstances, the newspaper believed, society needed to protect workers' only property, their labor, from exploitation in the workplace. It did not focus on the moment of exchange itself. Das Arbeiter-Blatt , October 29, 1848.

[105] The wealthy controlled the "valorization" of "talent and labor power." "Materielle Noth," in Freiheit, Arbeit , February 11, 1849, pp. 36–37. For a discussion of workers' contributions to the content of this journal, see Michael Vester et al., editors, Gibt es einen "Wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus"? (Hannover: SOAK Verlag, 1979), p. 64.

were paid only for elapsed time on the premises, not for the value of the output.^[106]

When the German workers' press referred to commercial investment, it revealed some fundamental differences from the British. German writers offered a prescient distinction between money and capital. In 1850 the national organ of the German workers' associations asked, "By what do the people live, who claim that they pay taxes for support of workers? Simply by the circumstance that they use the labor power [Arbeitskraft ] of the worker to get the greatest possible use from their money and to elevate the money to the status of capital."^[107] In a word, money became capital when it employed labor in the production process.^[108] In Britain, by contrast, some writers in the same era made no distinction between money and capital,^[109] whereas others supposed that capital referred to any material holding, such as a house, without necessarily entailing an intervention in production.^[110] The definition of capital that prevailed in the German workers' press during the revolution emphasized its engagement with labor at the point of production, a necessary step for conceiving of the appropriation of surplus at this site. The convention of masters and business persons that met in Frankfurt during July and August, 1848, defined a capitalist not as a shady dealer in the realm of exchange but as a "producer who profiteers with labor power."^[111]

In Britain the emphasis on the realm of exchange as the locus of exploitation led spokespersons for workers to devote great attention to the use of money as a form of trickery. Reliance on the artificial symbols of pounds and pence, John Bray averred in Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy , allowed people to avoid exchanging equal quantities of labor for labor.^[112]

[106] Die Verbrüderung , December 5, 1850, p. 74.

[107] Die Verbrüderung , April 13, 1850, p. 114.

[108] "Grundzüge eines Systems, um Kapital zu sammeln," Arbeiter-Zeitung , February 22, 1863.

[109] The Operative , February 3, 1839.

[110] Bray, op. cit., pp. 140–141. John Gray said that the difference between money and capital is between the currency and physical items, including consumer goods. Gray, Lectures , op. cit., pp. 196–197.

[111] Deutscher Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Congress, Entwurf einer allgemeinen Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Ordnung für Deutschland: Berathen und beschlossen von dem Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Congress zu Frankfurt am Main im Juli und August 1848 (Hamburg, 1848), p. 5.

[112] Bray, op. cit., p. 153. In the 1830s leaflet "The Workings of Money Capital," an anonymous author explains that capital yields a profit because it "buys goods dishonestly obtained." Manchester Library Archives.

Workers believed they could eliminate exploitation by effecting their transactions in labor notes denoting time rather than resorting to currency, as their support for the ill-fated labor-exchange movement illustrated.^[113] German workers, by comparison, did not focus on the use of money per se as a contributor to exploitation, since they did not see the mechanism of exchange as the crucial arbiter of their fate.

The chronology of the development of socialist ideas in Germany nonetheless displays a basic parallelism with that of Britain: in both countries, an early socialist movement was extinguished in the first half of the nineteenth century and a new one born in the second half. During the repression of the 1850s the German states succeeded in dismantling most of the labor organizations, such as Stephan Born's German workers' association, which had introduced workers to socialist ideas during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849. When the German labor movement reemerged in the 1860s, the leaflets about the exploitation of labor with which workers were most likely to come into contact were those of Ferdinand Lassalle.^[114] In his autobiography August Bebel testified that, "Like almost all others who were socialists back then, I came to Marx by way of Lassalle. Lassalle's writings were in our hands long before we knew one writing of Marx and Engels."^[115]

Lassalle emphasized that the use value of a good regulated its distribution in precommercial society, whereas its exchange value regulated its distribution in capitalist society.^[116] Consequently, he could not seize upon the difference between the use value and the exchange value of labor in the capitalist epoch to specify the extraction of surplus at the point of production, as Marx did. Unlike the early British socialists, Lassalle did not envision that the exploitation of labor occurred in the marketplace. He supposed

[113] The outlook of the labor exchange movement can be gleaned from the very title of William King's pamphlet: The Circulating Medium and the Present Mode of Exchange the Cause of Increasing Distress Amongst the Productive Classes: and an Effective Measure for Their Immediate and Permanent Relief Pointed Out in the Universal Establishment of Labour Banks, in Which All the Business of Life May Be Transacted Without Money (London: William Dent, 1832). For the statutes governing the exchange of labor time certificates at such an organization, see Equitable Labour Exchange, Rules and Regulations of the Equitable Labour Exchange, Gray's Inn Road, London: for the Purpose of Relieving the Productive Classes from Poverty, by Their Own Industry and for the Mutual Exchange of Labour for Equal Value of Labour (London: Equitable Labour Exchange, 1832).

[114] Jorke, op. cit., p. 10, 18; Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International 1864–1872 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 124.

[115] August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben , Part One (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1910), p. 131.

[116] Tatiana Grigorovici, Die Wertlehre bei Marx und Lassalle (Wien: Ignaz Brand & Co., 1910), pp. 63–64.

that the capitalist made a profit by controlling, like a feudal lord, "the will and acts" of workers under his authority.^[117] Lassalle and his followers, like British socialists, believed the capitalist employer made a profit by buying cheap and selling dear, but in addition they supposed that the employer's ability to do this depended upon his authority at the point of production.

In keeping with this outlook, Lassalle supposed that profit represented merely a deduction from the labor output. The Lassallians demanded that workers receive the full "return" of their labor, but they used the ambiguous term Ertrag , which did not refer clearly to either the product or the value of the work.^[118] In contrast to the early socialist movement in Britain, which had supposed that the workers' retention of the value of their labor through equal exchange would lead to the workers' acquisition of capital, the Lassallian movement made the acquisition of capital by the workers' cooperatives the necessary starting point for workers to receive the value of their labor.^[119] Lassalle's theory shows that even when the German labor movement lacked Marx's striking elucidation of the appropriation of surplus value in production, it did not focus upon unequal exchange in the product market as the locus of exploitation.

After the publication of Kapital , Lassalle's followers quickly adopted Marx's analysis of the capitalist employment relation, even though Marx had modified Lassalle's earlier presentation.^[120] The Social-Demokrat , organ of the Lassallians, succinctly identified Marx's innovation: the worker, this journal explained, "instead of being able to incarnate his labor into a ware,

[117] Lassalles Reden und Schriften , ed. Eduard Bernstein (Berlin: Verlag des 'Vorwärts,' 1893), Volume 3, p. 180 and, correlatively, p. 798.

[118] On the imprecision of the term Ertrag , see Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Moskau: Verlag für fremdsprachige Literatur, 1941), p. 20.

[119] Lassalle assumed that the production cooperatives he advocated would develop with the support of a socialist state, not simply through workers' frugality and the retention of labor's produce. Ulrich Engelhardt, "Nur vereinigt sind wir stark": Die Anfänge der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung 1862/63 bis 1869/70 , Volume One (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1977), p. 329.

[120] Hannes Skambraks, "Das Kapital" von Marx—Waffe im Klassenkampf (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977), p. 104; Social-Demokrat , February 23, 1868, reprinted in Rolf Dlubek and Hannes Skambraks, editors, "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: 1867 bis 1878 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), p. 180. Von Schweitzer deduced from Marx's analysis that even a "just" employer, who paid labor power its full value in the market, nonetheless appropriated surplus value from the worker. Therefore demands for market "justice" would not protect workers. Cora Stephan, "Genossen, wir dürfen uns nicht von der Geduld hinreissen lassen!" (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1977), p. 212. German analysts adopted Marx's appreciation of the sale of labor power even when they did not accept other portions of Marx's political agenda and diagnosis. Skambraks, op. cit., pp. 104, 106, 126–127, 142–143.

must consequently sell his labor power itself. The value of this labor power itself is determined not by the value that it creates and can create , but by the value required to produce and maintain it."^[121] The columns of the Social-Demokrat emphasized that the site of production, not the market, represented the locus of exploitation. In 1870 the journal said that "the exchange of commodities in proportion to the labor they contain does not at all rule out the exploitation of labor power by capital; rather, it provides the basis on which it [exploitation] can develop."^[122] After the appearance of Kapital , the Lassallian journal also highlighted the significance that could be attached to the locution Arbeitskraft even when the subject matter was not economic theory. For example, an article on commercial development said that labor had become a commodity, but then added a clarification: "To put it more exactly, labor power is a commodity."^[123] By comparison with British misperceptions of Marx, the ready absorption of Marx's analyses and swift revision of Lassalle's economic tenets in Germany suggests that Marx's theory resonated with German experience.^[124]

Of course, only a small minority of the members of the free unions and of the Social Democratic party in Germany concerned themselves with matters of economic theory. Even some of the organizations' top officials, whose time was taken up by party business, paid no attention to Marx's analysis.^[125] In the first decade after the publication of Kapital , party members treated as savants those able to expound the theory at length.^[126] But the creed did not remain occult. In subsequent decades workers interested in Marx's examinations could find abbreviated summaries of his analysis of the production process in popular tracts published by Johann Most, Carl August Schramm, and, after 1887, Karl

[121] Social-Demokrat , February 23, 1868, in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 180. Emphasis in original. Schweitzer's long reviews of Kapital in the Social-Demokrat pivoted on the difference between the exchange value and the use value of labor power. Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, "Das Werk von Karl Marx," Social-Demokrat , no. 25, February 26, 1868, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 181.

[122] Social-Demokrat , May 25, 1871, cited in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 80.

[123] Neuer Social-Demokrat (Berlin), July 10, 1874. Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 80.

[124] Wilhelm Bracke, once a follower of Lassalle, keenly propagated Marx's concept of the sale and use of labor power. See Der Lassallesche Vorschlag , 1873, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 241.

[125] Morgan, op. cit., pp. 132–133; Stephan, op. cit., p. 202. But Stephan catalogues a lengthy roster of Social Democrats who did read Kapital soon after its appearance.

[126] Steinberg, op. cit., p. 17.

Kautsky.^[127] Unlike the popularizations of Marx published in Britain, those in Germany remained true to his distinctive conception of labor as a commodity and to his theorization of exploitation at the site of production.^[128] The records of the libraries of workers' associations and of party libraries around the turn of the century show that Kautsky's popularization of the new theory of exploitation, Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren ("Karl Marx's Economic Theories") , was frequently borrowed.^[129] Over 40 percent of the textile and metal workers who responded to the survey of workers' attitudes initiated by Adolf Levenstein in 1907 reported that they read socialist and trade union literature, including several who said they had read Das Kapital or other economic writings by Marx in the original edition.^[130]

How well could workers comprehend Marx's prose? The libraries of the workers' associations and of the Social Democratic party lent many copies of Marx's Kapital , but clerks at the lending institutions claimed few readers succeeded in digesting the material.^[131] Not all workers were mystified by the thinker in the original, however. In her luminous autobiography, Ottilie Baader reports that Marx's Kapital was the first socialist book with which she came into contact as a sewing machine worker during the period of the anti-socialist laws. Baader said she studied it to great profit, first with family

[127] Ibid., pp. 17, 130. For a discussion of other influential popularizations of Kapital , see Rolf Dlubek, "Die Rolle des 'Kapitals' bei der Durchsetzung des Marxismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung," in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels Forschung , Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), p. 47. Members of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein, Lassalle's organization, wrote extensive reviews of Das Kapital for popular newspapers. Heinrich Leonard, Wilhelm Bracke: Leben und Wirken (Braunschweig: H. Rieke & Co., 1930), p. 16. The secondhand discussions of Kapital saved the book from the oblivion into which the low sales of the original would have cast it. On the original's marketing, see Steinberg, op. cit., p. 21 note.

[128] August Geib's pamphlet on the Normalarbeitstag also uses the term Arbeitskraft to distinguish between the use value and the exchange value of the workers' only commodity. Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 211. See also the 1873 edition of Johann Most's Kapital und Arbeit: "Das Kapital" in einer handlichen Zusammenfassung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 27, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., pp. 276–279. Although the 1873 edition captured the distinction between use and exchange values of labor, it contained other misrepresentations, which Marx corrected in the edition of 1876. Dlubek, op. cit., p. 27.

[129] Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 130–139. On the influence of Kautsky's popularization of the first volume of Kapital , see Erich Matthias, "Kautsky und der Kautskyanismus," Marxismus-Studien , second series (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1957), p. 156, and Hans-Josef Steinberg's introduction to Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), p. xiv.

[130] Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1912), pp. 393–403.

[131] Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 130–137.

members and later in reading groups of socialist women.^[132] Testimony such as hers, in conjunction with the pattern of library lendings, suggests that a significant minority of educated workers had a serious encounter with Marx's theory of exploitation in the capitalist labor process.^[133]

Workers did not absorb Marx's ideas only in solitude, through texts. Members of workers' associations discussed Kapital soon after its publication. In Magdeburg, the cooper Julis Bremer announced a lecture to the workers' education club in Magdeburg on Marx's Kapital just five months after the book's appearance. In the next three years, programs of the Social Democratic workers' association there included the work frequently enough that the local liberal newspaper, the Magdeburgische Zeitung , took fright at the "propositions" of Karl Marx that "were interpreted and demonstrated."^[134]

During the period of union expansion in the two decades before the First World War, the newspapers and conferences of the Social Democratic (or "free") textile unions faithfully adopted the Marxist theory of the extraction of surplus. Local branches held meetings for workers on such topics as "The Value of Labor Power."^[135] The journal of the German textile union, Der Textil-Arbeiter , used the general term labor to describe the factors necessary for production but referred to labor power in the context of the employment relation.^[136]Der Textil-Arbeiter also emphasized that workers were exploited separately as "producers" at work and as "consumers" in the

[132] Ottilie Baader, Ein steiniger Weg: Lebenserinnerungen einer Sozialistin (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1979 [1921]), pp. 23, 25, 36.

[133] Workers' letters to Marx upon reading Kapital are listed in Eike Kopf, "Die Ideen des 'Kapitals' von Karl Marx werden zur materiellen Gewalt: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des 'Kapitals' in Deutschland bis 1872," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena , Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, Volume 17, Number 2 (1968), p. 150.

[134] Hans Bursian, "Über den Einfluss des 'Kapitals' von Karl Marx auf die Magdeburger Arbeiterbewegung, 1869–1871—Forschungsprobleme und Ergebnisse," Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung , Volume 10 (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1968), pp. 115, 117–118. In 1868 at the general conference of the ADAV the representatives heard a presentation of Marx's theory of surplus value and passed a resolution praising Marx's analysis of "the capitalist production process." Jutta Seidel, Wilhelm Bracke: Vom Lassalleaner zum Marxisten (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1966), pp. 40–42.

[135] Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 1, 1902, Adorf. For references to other unions' discussion of terms such as "the commodity of labor power," see Dlubek, op. cit., p. 41.

[136] Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 4, 1904, "Produktion." The "free" unions' newspapers referred to the extraction of unpaid labor time and described the profits of companies as "surplus value." Fach-Zeitung , July 16, 1899, Krefeld; Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 8, 1909, Bautzen.

market who paid taxes and higher prices due to tariffs.^[137] By comparison, the press of the British labor movement did not distinguish so carefully between these two modes of exploitation, but, rather, combined them under the general rubric of unfair exchange in the market.

The assumption that the worker transferred labor to the employer in the form of labor power shaped literate workers' descriptions of their productive activity. Der Textil-Arbeiter treated "labor power" as a detached thing which the capitalist tried to seize. For example, the newspaper enjoined its readers in 1901, "Above all, [your] labor power and [your] very selves must be protected from exploitation."^[138] The phrasing treated labor power as an entity apart from the concrete person and identified its use as the cause of exploitation. At a conference of workers from the jute textile industry in 1906, a representative complained that "the piece rates are arranged so that to achieve the pay of 1.6 marks, the labor power is fully absorbed [by the capitalist]."^[139] Labor power was seen as comprising a real substance which the employer "consumed." The choice of expression shows that even when textile workers did not engage in abstract discussions of political economy, they assumed that their struggles pivoted around the calibrated use of "labor power" in the production process.^[140]