The New German Constitution

by René Brunet

There is in addition at each stage of the above structure a corresponding economic council or Chamber of Labour, formed by a meeting of the delegates of the Councils of Production of that stage.

The union of the delegates of the Councils of Production of each stage constitutes a Chamber of Labour, that is to say, by the side of the political assembly of the commune, of the district, of the province, as well as by the side of the National Assembly, there is room for a communal Chamber of Labour, a Chamber of Labour of the district, a Chamber of Labour of the Province, and a National Chamber of Labour, where all the economic interests of the commune, the district, the province, and of the Reich, are represented. By means of a Chamber of Commerce, the producers, as producers, participate in political life. It is an economic parliament by the side of a political parliament. Whether in the commune, the province, or the Reich, no assembly elected according to merely habitual democratic principles (Volkskammer) can of itself deliver verdicts or decisions of principle. An ordinance of a communal assembly would have to be submitted to the approval of the corresponding Chamber of Labour just as a law passed by the National Assembly would have to be ratified by the National Chamber of Labour, no matter what its subject matter. The Chamber of Labour thus plays the rôle of a second chamber and its veto cannot be broken unless for three years in succession the popular chambers vote the same provisions in the same terms in regard to the matter in conflict. The Chamber of Labour and the popular chamber have equally the right to invoke a referendum. Finally, it belongs in principle to the Chamber of Labour to be the first to examine all projects of an economic character; and it can, when it sees fit, take the initiative in proposing a law.

There are between this programme and that of the Independents profound differences. This programme gives the employers a place; the proletariat is not all-powerful; and if it gives to the organs representing the workers part of the public power, it does not thereby completely abandon the employers. Neither dictation by the proletariat, therefore, nor dictation by the Councils; but a political parliament and another chamber in which employers are allowed to keep the right to existence, collaborating by the same title and to an equal measure with the workers in the direction of public affairs.

From the purely democratic point of view the most serious objections can be made to this system and these were amply expressed.

In the first place, said the democrats, these Chambers of Commerce cannot be made up of men who have the sufficient knowledge and experience with economic questions except by selecting them from among the employers, employés and the workers in the different branches of any given industry. But these men are personally most strongly interested in the problems they are supposed to solve. The danger is great, therefore, that they would decide not according to considerations of general interest but to considerations of the special interests of their particular industry or their own commerce. The decisions of a Council composed of representatives of different enterprises will be dictated by the delegates of the most strongly represented enterprises; and if the interests of all the vocations that have voice in the Councils can agree on something at the expense of the interests not there represented, one can be certain that this solution will be chosen. The proof of this is already here; councils of producers grow always at the expense of the consumers.

The champions of the Chamber of Labour, continue the democrats, are guilty of a fundamental error. They believe that in economic questions there are only such problems as can be studied by the technicians, and that these can give such problems the only and obvious solutions. Actually, however, even in purely economic questions, we ask always not what is, but what should be, what we want of them and what we can effect. A technical knowledge of circumstances, of causes, and consequences is naturally necessary for a serious decision. But, even after the most scientific examination, one arrives almost always, and above all in important questions, at diverse conclusions, only because different aims have been followed. These conclusions are always dictated by political conceptions. Technicians can decide the best system for cleaning the streets; though even here it may be a political question to know if such a system, which is the best but also the most costly, can or should be employed. But when it comes to questions of Sunday rest, if woman labour should be countenanced, if and how the land should be distributed, how the relations between capital and labour should be organized in the great modern enterprises, and perhaps above all, who should pay the taxes—all these questions and an infinity of others raise up problems not of knowledge but of will. They are the questions in which the concern is not with economy but with the situation of man, his rights, his liberty, and his dignity within the economy. It is a question of the power of deciding for the collectivity on a subject of collective interests. It is not for the technician to decide, but for the man political.

A last and decisive objection, conclude the democrats, against the system of a vocational parliament is that it replaces or annihilates the democratic Chamber elected by the equal suffrage of all, that is to say, by democracy itself, and substitutes for it a professional chamber elected by a plural vote of privileged persons. Let the proposal be remembered which the Prussian conservatives submitted two months before the Revolution of 1918 to effect, as they claimed, the equality of the right to suffrage. Each elector was to have one vote within his professional vocational group; but the representation contemplated by this proposition was that the group of farmers were to have one seat for every 12,295 electors, whereas their labourers would not get more than one seat for every 110,530, a landed proprietor having electoral power ten times as strong as that of an agricultural labourer, six times as strong as that of a factory worker and one-and-a-half times as strong as that of a civil servant. It is true that the division of mandates in a Chamber of Labour would not result in as anti-democratic consequences as these; but the project of this chamber is based on the essential principle of parity between employers and workers; the two are supposed to be rigorously equal in numbers. That would be self-evident and understandable fully if the two groups had to settle questions in which their reciprocal interests were opposed, or if it were a question purely technical, where the number of delegates does not enter into consideration. But it is absolutely impossible to admit that an assembly thus constituted should take decisions or vote resolutions; for, a numerically equal representation both of employers and employés would correspond obviously to a proportion of electors much greater for one class than for the other. In any industry, for example, an employer represents considerably fewer electors than a worker, and to give his voice in the direction of public affairs an influence equal to that of a worker, would be, from the point of view of democracy, an absurdity. One thing or the other. Either the seats in the Vocational Parliament are apportioned among the professions according to the number of electors in each, the representatives being elected in each vocation by the equal suffrage of all without distinction between employer and employé—in which case there would result a duplication of the political parliament of which the least one can say is that there is no apparent utility in it. Or, the number of seats attributed to each profession must be measured by the economic or social importance of that profession, basing representation in each profession on the principle of parity—in which case there would result a parliament of the privileged, condemned by the democratic ideal. An assembly thus composed could very well draw up reports and give advice on questions in which it possesses special competence. But it cannot be a parliament having rights equal to those of a political parliament.

Such are the objections put forward by democrats against the institution of a Chamber of Labour, and their force cannot be denied. But the champions of an economic parliament reply with vigour.

These objections, say they, all take the point of view of formal democracy, that is to say, the point of view that considers only the external forms of democracy, which contents itself with a purely theoretical equality of right and equality between citizens corresponding not at all to the facts of reality, which reduce this equality to nothing. To this form of democracy, to-day condemned by reality, there must be opposed real democracy, in which one takes into account the special rôle which certain elements in the life of a nation play. Formal democracy has been fully realized by giving all men and women the right to vote. That is not enough. In a modern democracy public economy must be given its proper place, which is in the forefront. Producers, as such, must play the preponderant rôle in the state, for the other members of the community live only as parasites on their labour, and the state does not exist except by the labor of the producers. No decision can be taken in a state if it is not accepted by the producers; the latter must be the touchstone of all decisions.

It is not because of their technical competence that producers are proposed as the constituents of a special chamber. It is because they judge things from the point of view of production, which in a modern democracy should count more than any other. It is not a question of abolishing the political parliament, but of placing in juxtaposition to it an economic parliament through which the voice of the producers can be heard and by which the ideology of the politicians can be corrected by the realism of men of affairs.