As to "Socialisation" generally, the reports of the Socialisation Commission have all been rejected and the Commission, that last relic of the revolution, resigned as long ago as May. The recommendations of Wissels, an active Minister, had as little success and he resigned in June.
The Government had promised that socialisation was to be established in the Constitution; but Art. 156 of the Constitution does no more than give the State the power to "socialise" and syndicalise industry, while Art. 155 says that private royalties are to be legislatively transferred to the State.
Therefore, in spite of plaintive posters, it is not communistic socialisation, but capitalistic syndicalisation, that has been introduced in Germany. While loudly proclaiming a step forward, the Government has taken a long stride back.[5]
"Socialisation" has not as yet affected the economic basis of the Prussianism that we have been fighting. This basis was a coalition between the old political interest of the landed proprietors and the new political interest of the captains of industry, or, to express it shortly, between the Junkers and the Jews. The free trade and liberalism that kept Great Britain from "Prussianism" in spite of the power retained by a few feudal families and the landed gentry was due to the different relationship in England between the upper and middle classes. In England our "Junkers" and "Jews" coalesced during our great industrial development, perhaps because our upper class had already more Jews than Junkers. In Germany they remained apart but combined for their own interests. We have seen to what extent the revolution has threatened the economic authority of the captain of industry—the industrial profiteer. Is the feudal landed proprietor also threatened?
The first effort of the revolution further east in Russia, Hungary and the Baltic States has been to "socialise" land. Either, where the agricultural industry is primitive, as in Russia, by simply dividing up the land among the peasants, or where it is progressive, as in the model-farm estates of Hungary, by putting the estate under control of a council of workers as though it was a factory. But in Germany the urban character of the revolution, which has accounted for the comparative ease with which the Government have coerced it, is shown by land tenure being as yet little affected. The only definite action against the large landed estates, that I know of, is a measure of the Prussian Assembly postponing action until 1921. This characteristic procrastination is, of course, explained to the revolutionaries as merely allowing a short period for voluntary breaking up of the big estates, and to the reactionaries as a postponement of all action. Meantime financial conditions in Germany are quite as favourable to the dispersal of large estates as with us; for wherever the farming system obtains the farmers have made even larger fortunes in Germany than in England. But the system of landed tenure is much more varied in Germany. There is a large proportion of freeholders and copyholders, while big estates are farmed by bailiffs with hired labourers.
In the region of these big estates—the land of the Junker (Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Brandenburg)—the revolution is openly defied. The agrarians of these regions not long ago had a regular trial of strength with the present régime, and though worsted were none the worse.
The strength of the German revolution is in labour, its weakness is in the land.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] To end of 1918.