"Democratic labor law in the Weimar Republic" Abstract Román Gil Alburquerque, Ph.D. September 2017 The doctoral dissertation "Democratic Labor Law in the Weimar Republic" is, on the one hand, a contextualizing introduction to the socio-political history of the Weimar Republic in close relation to the history of trade unions, labor law and of the work of relevant democratic jurists committed to the birth of this new legal discipline (and partly responsible for its constitutionalisation) and to its development in the Weimar Republic, as well as a transversal and comparative consideration of several fundamental institutions of this new juridical field, incorporated to the German Magna Carta of 1919: economic constitution and the constitution of work, socialization of private means of production, and workers' councils, all considered in their historical context and from various perspectives of the social-democratic and communist left. Content of research: 1. The historical context The birth of the Weimar Republic coincides with a deep crisis of a German socio- political model (imperial, liberal and bourgeois), afflicted by contradictions inherent to an accelerated modernization of the economy coexisting with quasi feudal structures, which ended abruptly with the collapse of the Empire and, in personalized and graphic expression of it, with the flight of the Kaiser and the need to assume a sovereign power which had been “abandoned in the street for whoever wanted, or could, make it his own”. Given the moral bankruptcy of those who led Germany into disaster (fundamentally, the Prussian establishment of the military, landowners and industrialists, politically agglutinated in conservative parties), the possibility of in fact assuming a new leadership was only held by the social democrats (both the majoritarian branch and the USPD, its left wing split out of its opposition to the SPD's approval of the credits that made possible to finance the First World War, approval due perhaps to tactical reasons related to the definitive inclusion of the SPD in the system, perhaps to genuine patriotism, of to the fear of a Tsarist invasion), or by the radical councilists who had risen and, to a certain extent, contributed to ending the war, after the refusal by the Kiel sailors, organized in rebel soviets, to immolate themselves in the North Sea. 1