Page 95 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

68 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

party conference in Düsseldorf in September 1948. Here, the speakers
campaigned for a combination of organised supply and free demand
labelled Regulierte Marktwirtschaft (Regulated Market Economy). In
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contrast to Agartz’s planned economy, Weisser’s conception of a Third
Way and Nölting’s directed economy, the advocates of such a regulated
market economy who also included the Senator for Economic Affairs in
Hamburg, Karl Schiller, the Secretary General of the Länderrat, Heinrich
Troeger, and the SPD’s spokesman for financial affairs in the Economic
Council, Walter Seuffert, did not demand the nationalisation of
production facilities and governmental control of the economy. Instead,
they requested the democratisation of the economy via worker
participation and the abandonment of direct governmental interference;
only indirect measures were accepted to regulate the market. While an
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opinion poll among party members at the party convention signified that
the majority of the SPD supported this change of direction in economic
policy from a Planned to a Regulated Market Economy, the party
executive was hesitant to pass any declaration or manifesto as an outcome
of the convention in 1948, but further on supported production control
and nationalisation in particular cases.
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In essence, two opposing parliamentary groups had emerged within the
SPD: the followers of Viktor Agartz and a planned economy on the one
side, and the supporters of a regulated market economy on the other. This
inconsistency was both a sign for the continuing internal party debate on
the programmatic development of economic policy, as well as for the
insecurity triggered by the unexpected success of Erhard’s liberal
economic policy. Various members of the SPD, such as the chairman of
the SPD parliamentary group in the Economic Council, Erwin Schoettle,
cautioned against an uncoordinated appearance and its consequences for
public elections: ‘it is not so much the fact that we Social Democrats did
not have clear concepts, it is rather that our concepts are not yet
coordinated.’ Even Erich Ollenhauer, representing Kurt Schumacher on
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the party board due to the latter’s illness, criticised the SPD:

We neither had the time, nor the energy, nor the people to develop
[...] a programme in which it is in concrete terms stated, what
practical politics and economic policy the Social Democracy would
conduct in Germany in the near future. [...] The question whether we
can achieve this task in the coming years will be decisive for the
political future of the German Social Democracy.
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Even during the campaign for the upcoming first federal elections in
August 1949 the criticism levelled at the disunity regarding a coordinated