In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

220 ARRAYS
industry, the number of workers is constantly decreasing. This complex
negative picture is due mainly to the Great War's long-lasting effects on
the international market and, some economists suggest, to the way the
Treaty of Versailles has hampered the world economy. The crisis is
especially severe in Britain because the nation's industrial plants are
technologically outdated and because British owners typically offer unusually
stiff resistance to major innovations (Parker, 111ff.). [see Assembly
Lines] Lacking legally acceptable ways to intervene in the national
economy, the British government tries to help revitalize the world market
by returning to the gold standard and to the prewar exchange rate
between the pound and the dollar. But while this measure diverts a
growing flow of capital to British banks, it further diminishes exports,
which suffer as a result of the overvalued British currency.
Under these circumstances, it seems preferable for owners to cope with
the complete standstill of an entire industrial sector, rather than constantly
regulate and downscale the level of productivity without being
able to lower wages. Workers, unless they attempt a proletarian revolution,
have to rely more on appeals to the social and ethical responsibility
of their governments [see Murder] than on the threatening power of
strikes-which no longer really threaten. On both sides of the political
conflict, certain concepts of class-struggle ideology begin to look like
relics of a remote past. [see League of Nations] In an address to the
Verein Deutscher Studenten (Association of German Students) on July 6,
Foreign Secretary Gustav Stresemann declares that taking an arrogant,
superior attitude toward the working class is a dangerous legacy from
prewar times: "And there is another phenomenon, one that I consider
largely responsible for the alienation between the socialist worker and
the bourgeois-namely, the completely erroneous attitude of the socalled
elevated classes, who distanced themselves from everything connected
with the workers' movement, which is rooted in class resentment
rather than dogma. [One recalls scenes in which] a student, still with
lofty notions from academia and school songs in his ears, goes off to war
and meets a worker there. He feels: You and I are strangers; we don't
belong together" (Stresemann, 277-278). Although Stresemann of
course knows of the ongoing struggle between workers and owners in
the coal industry, he seems to be envious of Britain, where, in contrast
to Germany, political mediation between the antagonistic groups is possible
"because, despite the oppositions and the conflicts of opinion,