Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany

6. Corporatist Discourse and Saar Heavy Industry

chapter 6 Corporatist Discourse and Saar Heavy Industry The new bioracial managerial rationality accompanied a wider transformation in the ideological discourse of employers and industrial culture. In a departure from the familial metaphors and representations long associated with the paternalist factory regime, many Saar industrialists began to reimagine work identities and social relations in distinctively corporatist terms during the decade before 1914. In their industry newspaper, journal publications, and internal reports after the turn of the century, they became increasingly preoccupied with a new “social aristocracy” of labor in the “productive economy” and a harmonious “community of work” in the large industrial concern. They also began to link these de‹nitions of work and occupational identity to a larger social imaginary that articulated a corporatist vision of a world composed of “occupational estates” (Berufsstände). In this new ideological idiom, Saar employers began to call for the political organization of a wider “occupational estate of industry and trade” (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand ) and the formation of a corporative sociopolitical order. The prewar ideological discourse of Saar employers therefore became corporatist in a dual sense: it articulated a worldview in a vocabulary that invoked forms of social address, natural hierarchy, and community that seem reminiscent of the corporate order of the old regime; and it formed the basis of programmatic political aims calling for the direct representation of economic interests in the realm of party politics and the state. Scholars have long understood this corporatist discourse in terms of the persistence of premodern cultural and political traditions or antimod168 ern sociopolitical developments in German political economy during the early twentieth century. Intellectual historians have traced corporatist ideas about social order to a speci‹cally German tradition of romantic “antimodernism” that rejected “modern, liberal, secular, and industrial civilization” and helped pave the way for National Socialism.1 Social historians have attributed the appearance of a residual and “romantic” corporatist ideology to the right-wing Verbände, which helped to forge the new economic and social interest groups of the Kaiserreich into a “secondary system of societal powers” that prevented the established political parties from coordinating competing social interests, frustrated the establishment of democracy, and strengthened the “traditional antiparty orientation of the authoritarian state” during the late Kaiserreich.2 The practitioners of “social science history” formulated this interpretation explicitly in relation to the Sonderweg thesis, which associated corporatist representations of social order and calls for the creation of a “corporative state” (Ständestaat) with predominantly “preindustrial, precapitalist, and prebourgeois ” social groups at odds with the political imperatives of modern industrial capitalism.3 Historical sociologists of corporatism have focused not on archaic ideologies and social relations in one nation but comparatively on the general structural realignments of advanced political economies during the twentieth century. In this interpretive framework, the term corporatism refers to a “new system of interest representation” common to the political economies of the twentieth century, involving state-sanctioned and regulated bargaining between noncompetitive and hierarchically constituted economic and social interest groups.4 It permits analysis of the ways in which nearly all industrialized states in the twentieth century granted to various organized interest groups a “representational monopoly” over their speci‹c ‹elds of economic-social activity and displaced decisionmaking power away from the parliamentary arena toward the bureaucratized bargaining between state of‹cials and large-scale interest organizations . Despite its illuminating comparative framework, however, this approach tends to portray right-wing corporatisms in places like “Fascist Italy, Petainist France, National Socialist Germany and Austria under Dollfuss” as state-centered projects derived from “delayed capitalist, authoritarian,” and “neomercantalist” tendencies, rather as than “advanced” capitalist systems and their exponents;5 and it rejects attempts to understand corporatism in terms of historically evolved political-ideological relationships as opposed to a universal “axis of development” in Corporatist Discourse and Saar Heavy Industry 169 modern industrial societies.6 By contrast, this chapter draws attention to the dynamics and productivity of discourse in the formation of social relations and the elaboration of capitalist political economies in order to offer a new interpretation of the generative context and forward-looking, productivist meanings of corporatism as a variant of capitalist ideology in the early twentieth-century Saar. Corporatist Discourse in German Heavy Industry Corporatist categories and assumptions shaped the theoretical re›ection and social experience of a diverse range of philosophers, social theorists, state of‹cials, and politicians in Germany and Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth...