(7) Temporarily the right to strike in certain industries vital to the German economy will be restricted. The right to stop work will have to be voted by nine-tenths of those employed in that industry.
(8) To realize this programme the number of Ministers who will occupy themselves with economic questions will be reduced to three. They will constitute within the Cabinet an “Economic Committee,” whose directions will have to be followed absolutely by the political Ministers.
On the whole this project aimed at the realization of a state intermediate between capitalism and socialism.
Defended only among the socialists by a small group of doctrinaires, this project had against it at the same time the Independents, the bourgeois parties and the Social Democrats. The Independents opposed it because it permitted capital to survive. The bourgeois parties opposed it because the supervised economy prevented the free play of economic factors and paralyzed initiative. The Social Democrats opposed it for fear of dissatisfying the Centre and the Democrats, of whom they had need to maintain themselves in power. Particularly opposed to Wissel’s project were the Trade Union conceptions supported in the Cabinet by the Minister of Food Supply, Robert Schmidt. He presented a counter-project which embodied the argument which the Socialists of the government opposed to the theoreticians of socialism. The work of socialization, said they, must be undertaken but slowly and the socialization of an industry must wait until that industry is sufficiently matured. This last conception prevailed and in July, 1919, Wissel resigned. Thereupon the offices of the Minister of Public Economy and that of Food Supply were merged and Robert Schmidt given the unified post.
It was to be expected, therefore, that the process of socialization would be considerably slowed up. In fact, the Constitution of the month of August confined itself to specifying and enlarging in several respects the principles of the law of socialization of March 23; and for several months there was only one law enacted along these lines, that of December 31, 1919, on the socialization of electricity.
But once more the people intervened. It may be recalled that one of the “Eight Points” of the agreement imposed on the Cabinet by the Trade Unions after the _coup d’état_ by Kapp, provided that the Committee on Socialization be at once reconvened, that representatives of vocational associations be added to it, that new industries be socialized and that the socialization of industries already decreed be enforced.