Workers' Councils in Germany, 1918-19: Recent Literature on the Ratebewegung

Peterson, Brian

doi:10.2307/487820

Cited by 3 publications

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“…(Weipert 2023, 223-24) The workers' schools were part of the Räteschulen or council schools, which must be seen in the context of the revolu tionary council movement, especially the November Revolution that broke out in November of 1918 at the end of the First World War, when the sailors in the north mutinied and rebellion quickly spread across Germany. The council move ment was based on councils or Räte, that is, elected bodies of workers and soldiers and sailors, and the council schools, or Räteschulen, were part of this (Peterson 1975;Adler 1996;Weipert 2023). The Russian term "soviet" means "council", and the biggest role model for this movement was the Russian Revolution -which had taken place the year before -and the role the councils had played for the demonstra tors in that revolution.…”

Section: : Upheaval and Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Esotericism against Capitalism?

French

2024

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This article seeks a better understanding of how Rudolf Steiner envisioned his reform pedagogy as a site of spiritual learning (for example through art, seasonal festivals, ritual drama, etc.), but also as a specific site intended to resist the encroaching influence of capitalism, materialism, and corporatism spreading in Germany following the First World War. Steiner’s ideas about education did not emerge in a vacuum. He was inspired by and connected with other forms of communist, socialist, and Lebensreform movements in his time. Yet Steiner more actively embraced and incorporated esotericism into his pedagogical project. How did his approach differ from the other anti-capitalist and anti-materialist-inspired schools that were spreading, and what role did esotericism play in terms of developing Waldorf students? This article explores these questions and contributes to a recontextualization of both Steiner and esotericism taking place in the academy.

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Section: : Upheaval and Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Esotericism against Capitalism?

French

2024

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“…The vast majority of delegates to the councils' congress supported a parliamentary as opposed to fully councils-ruled system. 8 The growing confrontations between the Left and Right socialists and the brutal suppression of the Left activists who were supporters of complete Räte rule extremely weakened the council movement.…”

Section: Short-lived Workers' Councils In Historical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…There were, however, differences among the skilled workers, who favored control of production as they had "the knowledge and autonomy" to modify production processes along with technicians and engineers, and the unskilled workers, who were more interested in bread and butter. 9 Despite the relative strength of the council movement, it failed in part as a result of lack of support by the SPD-led government and sectarian disputes among the different factions of socialist. The National Assembly debated a workers councils bill, "which was a watered-down version of employer-employee 'co-determination' assigning a minor and insignificant role to the workers' councils."…”

Section: Short-lived Workers' Councils In Historical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The (In)conceivability of Real “Workers’ Control” Under Capitalism

Rahnema

2023

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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Private law rights as democratic participation: Kelsen on private law and (economic) democracy

Dedek

2021

University of Toronto Law Journal

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In the first edition of his famous treatise Reine Rechtslehre, Einleitung in die Rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik (translated as Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory), Hans Kelsen makes the claim that the existing liberal, property rights-based private law of his era is a ‘democratic form of law’ and that private law rights are ‘political in the same sense as those rights that are usually characterized as political rights.’ In this article, I aim to explain how Kelsen developed his theory of private law and private rights within the theoretical and methodological framework of the ‘Pure Theory of Law’ and its philosophical underpinnings of relativism and ‘value neutrality,’ culminating in the connection between private law and democracy. I wish to highlight, in particular, the still often underappreciated fact that the Pure Theory saw itself as a critical project, aimed at exposing and exorcizing ‘ideology.’ To Kelsen’s contemporary audiences, drawing a connection between ‘capitalist’ private law and democracy must have appeared particularly counter-intuitive against the backdrop of one of the most important – if now almost forgotten – political debates of the Weimar era, the debate on ‘economic democracy’ (‘Wirtschaftsdemokratie’). It was a powerful trope in the inter-war period that the capitalist economy and its institutional safeguards – private, labour, commercial, and corporate law – were ‘undemocratic.’ I submit that Kelsen’s statement – flipping the contemporaneous revisionist-socialist rhetoric on its head – may be better understood in the larger context of the precarity of democracy in the Weimar period and especially in the context of a theoretical and political challenge that contrasted the existing ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary democracy with a ‘true,’ ‘social’ democracy that would realize conditions of social and economic justice. By connecting ‘capitalistic’ law with ‘democracy’ and ‘socialistic’ law with ‘autocracy,’ Kelsen once more underscores that democracy, properly understood as a formal principle, is irreducible to substantive justice.

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Workers' Councils in Germany, 1918-19: Recent Literature on the Ratebewegung

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Esotericism against Capitalism?

Esotericism against Capitalism?

The (In)conceivability of Real “Workers’ Control” Under Capitalism

Private law rights as democratic participation: Kelsen on private law and (economic) democracy

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