One immediate danger menaces the Economic Council. It is that the men who compose it will let themselves be guided on the technical questions they are to examine by party considerations. It may be divided—as is natural—into groups of employers, groups of workers, groups of agriculturalists, industrialists, and merchants. If it turns out to be an assembly of conservatives, democrats, Catholics and socialists, it is doomed to sterility.
If, however, the Economic Council avoids this danger it will render, first of all, the service of clarifying the political atmosphere itself. The members will defend very legitimately only the interests by which they were charged with representation. In this way economic groups will not need to act indirectly through the intermediate agency of political representatives. They will be able to express their point of view clearly and support their interests directly. The political parties, too, will gain thereby; for they will be freed of all considerations of interest and they will no longer have to complicate technical problems by imposing on them their general political conceptions. As for the authority that will accrue to the Economic Council, it depends entirely on itself whether it will be nullified or preponderant, and its future lies in its own hands.
Former Under-Secretary of State, von Delbrück said before the National Assembly—speaking, it is true, of the Economic Council to be organized by the Constitution, but the Provisional Economic Council is nevertheless its precursor—that the Economic Council is without doubt, by the side of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, a third legislative assembly. For such an assembly, “called upon to deliberate on the most important questions in the national life, will necessarily have a natural tendency to enlarge its powers. We are undoubtedly on the eve of a period in which the Reichstag and the Reichsrat will be considered as one side of a balance, and the Economic Council as the other. Behold in this a wholly new political evolution. There will come a day when the Economic Council will seek to become the heir of the Reichsrat and to take its place.”
Will this prediction be realized? It will if the Economic Council is able to render the government and the people the services they expect of it. It will not if it does not deserve to be heard by them and does not know how to make itself heard.
SECTION II
SOCIALIZATION
In order to reconstruct in Germany the public and private economy destroyed by the war and the revolution, it is not enough to give the producers a special right to co-operate in the regulation of economic questions; nor to recognize particularly for the working class the right of co-deliberation in the determination of these matters. It is hoped that such measures will increase production. But it is also necessary that no part of production be lost and that all of it be utilized to the utmost for the community. One is thus led to inquire whether the system of production and the distribution of wealth, such as prevails under a capitalist régime, is capable even if improved, of attaining such an end; whether it were not better to substitute a new system, socialist or not, giving the utmost guarantee that production will benefit the entire community.
We must inquire what attitude the Constituent Assembly took on this question and what solution it adopted.
1.—THE PROBLEM OF SOCIALIZATION.
On the morrow of the Revolution, power passed entirely into the hands of socialists, that is to say, by definition, men whose programme may be summed up in these words: the abolition of private property and the taking over by the state of all the means of capitalist production.