The Developmental History of Social Opinion

GA 185a — 22 November 1918, Dornach

Sixth Lecture

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among other significant things that he has expressed and articulated, said a sentence that should actually become a hallowed word of life in the broadest sense. The sentence is: “Man can do what he should; and when he says, ‘I cannot,’ he will not.” Now, I say: this sentence should become a sacred word of life in the broadest sense, and it is precisely the task of spiritual scientific thinking and feeling to make this sentence fully alive in itself. For only out of this consciousness of personality, which can be sustained and strengthened by such an attitude: man can do what he should; and when he says: I cannot, he does not want to — only through such an attitude can the tasks that humanity will face from the present on towards the near future be solved to some extent.

Now the strange thing is – and this is connected with the course of human development – that precisely this sentence is completely contradicted by the prevailing attitude of the present, which is, after all, a result of the attitude of the last few centuries and its development, this sentence, or rather the strength, the content of this sentence. On the contrary, humanity has gradually developed an almost absolute disbelief in itself. This self-doubt asserts itself through the most diverse refinements of life. It asserts itself in such a way that sometimes people believe they have great self-confidence, but only persuade themselves of this out of all kinds of subconscious grounds, while they lack a right, true, active self-confidence the reason that they lack a right, true, active self-confidence is simply because, as a result of the entire education of the nineteenth century, people have become infinitely lazy with regard to their inner life, to the exposure and implementation of their spiritual powers. And if only the awareness could take root that for far too many things people say they cannot do, the truth is that they lack willpower. For the most important thing, the most important thing for the future, will not happen through institutions, will not happen through all kinds of organizations, however much one believes today in institutions and organizations as if they were the only true ones everywhere, but the most important thing for the future will happen through the efficiency of the individual human being. But this efficiency of the individual human being can only arise from a true, real trust in an inexhaustible source of divine power in the human soul. But present-day humanity is far, far removed from this belief in an inexhaustible source in the human soul.

That is why today's humanity is so at a loss in the face of the great tasks that, I would say, today, so to speak, are everywhere in the street of life. Mankind stands perplexed before the great tasks. And the catastrophic events of recent years have increased these tasks to such an extent that most people, who are asleep today, have no idea how great and how comprehensive these tasks are. They do not want to deal with the comprehensiveness and the magnitude of these tasks, which today basically encompasses everything around us. And when, as is happening right now in many parts of the world, people are called upon to make certain decisions based on their judgment, in short, based on their soul, then things get out of hand today, because people are simply not prepared to grasp the magnitude of the tasks at hand; for the tasks cannot be tackled on a small scale today, they can only be tackled on a large scale. And so we shall see that what people will do to replace the catastrophic conditions with what they think of as order will, at least for a long time, remain fruitless work, leading rather to chaos than to any kind of order. This will happen simply because people lack the self-confidence I have been describing. It is indeed more comfortable to say, when faced with the tasks of life, “I cannot accomplish them,” than to seek the means and ways to really gain the strength for these tasks from the soul. And these strengths are in the soul, for the human being is permeated by infinitely vast divine powers. And if he does not seek these powers, he leaves them fallow, he does not want to develop them.

You see, today man must appropriate this on both a small and large scale: to somehow tie everything to the great aspects of life, to make these great aspects of life truly alive. Anyone who observes life could, with regard to such things, observe the great phenomena of decadence in this very area in the current of development that has brought about today's catastrophe. I will tell a little story, because such little stories may teach more than theoretical discussion.

About eighteen or nineteen years ago in Berlin, I met a man who was already highly esteemed as a political economist and organizer. I knew him, I had met him once or twice, and I had also heard about his fame. Even back then in Berlin, people were saying that the man was so famous that now that a big newspaper had been founded, he had been hired by that newspaper with a large salary, and not for articles that he was supposed to write for that newspaper, but he was free to write an article once every few years if he wanted. But the only thing he had to do in return for the high salary was not to write for any other newspapers. The man was so famous that one of Berlin's biggest newspaper entrepreneurs simply gave him a high salary in return for not competing with this man's writing in other newspapers, while allowing him to write in his newspaper whenever he wanted. This man also had a plan to establish, on a small scale, a variety of social institutions over a certain area, so to speak, small social model societies or model states, one might say. He was considered to be extremely ingenious in how he had devised these social model communities. And if he did not actually gain many more followers and the followers he did gain remained only in the theoretical, it was not because people did not think he was very astute, but because people were too lazy to profess something they thought was very astute and very beneficial for humanity. Now he came up to me and said – I could already see him coming with a radiant countenance –: 'I have finally found the man with the money who will provide me with the sum of money that I need to found such a settlement cooperative. Now we want to found the community of the future. – I said nothing but: Go ahead and found it, it will fall apart in no time. – Because such things are only founded in the present time, so that they will fall apart, of course.

I am telling you this story because it is easy for belief to take hold in a non-energetic way of thinking, in a way of thinking that does not want to tie in with the big problems of life, that one should start in the present with all kinds of small foundations; with non-comprehensive foundations and especially with small foundations, it must be shown whether anything can also prove itself on a large scale. But this is completely absurd, because you are then founding something within a sick social order, which may perhaps be quite exemplary, but precisely because it is good and thus differs greatly from all that it is placed in, it is all the more certain to fail. They cannot possibly, given the way things have developed, where the world on the whole shows how it has led itself into absurdity, even remotely think of achieving anything with small particles or doing anything on a small scale. Only that which seizes the whole of today, which can send out its rays, I might say, to all that is human, can have any significance. It does no harm if such an attempt at grasping the whole fails, for the impulse will remain, and that is what matters. It is the impulse that matters.

But what is more and more necessary is the characterized trust in the source of immeasurable divine powers that lies within man. Nothing has sinned so much against this belief in the immeasurable source of divine powers in human nature in the course of the world as the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. That is why this bourgeoisie has left the emerging proletariat a bad legacy, and this emerging proletariat will initially take on this bad legacy. And if it cannot grasp that it is not important, above all, to want to do new things with old ideas, but that it is important to turn to new ideas, then nothing will come of all the institutions, or rather, they will only come to fruition when these institutions come from real new ideas, from the impulse, from the power of new ideas.

This is where understanding must be applied to a variety of things that we have begun to consider, the consideration of which is extremely important and significant for the present, for an understanding of reality in the present. I have spoken to you about how the rising proletariat is imbued in its thoughts and feelings with the impulses of the teachings of Karl Marx, and I have given you some points of view from these teachings. These aspects, which millions and millions of people today have mastered, can already tell you that this whole Marxism is precisely the heritage of the bourgeois world view of the last century. For I have, I would say, shown you the currents from which Karl Marx himself drank his spiritual water. I have told you that the present-day Marxist doctrine of the proletariat is the product of three sources: the dialectical thinking that Karl Marx had learned at the school of the Hegelians; the socialist impetus of Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc, that is, the French; and the utilitarianism of the English. It was from these three currents that Karl Marx composed what he so effectively taught the proletariat.

Now that we have learned something about the points of view of Karl Marx himself, we can consider these three things in detail. German Hegelianism can be characterized from a variety of angles. In order to understand Karl Marx, one must characterize him from this perspective. Hegelianism is devotion to thought in man himself. Perhaps never has pure thought been so energetically and powerfully worked with as by Hegel himself. Hegel's entire system, if I may use the bourgeois expression, is thought-work, from beginning to end it is nothing but real thought. This also explains why Hegel is so difficult to understand. Since most people never have a single pure thought in their lives, a thinker whose entire system consists of pure thoughts is, of course, difficult, difficult, very difficult to understand. But understanding Hegel requires nothing more than overcoming the laziness of thinking. Diligence is required, diligence. Where there is diligence, then comes the fulfillment of the sentence: Man can do what he should; and when he says: I cannot, then he does not want to. Hegel is therefore an energetic thinker, a thinker who is able to control his power of thought in such a way that he really finds the thought in the individual phenomena of life.

But there is a certain dark side to this, which I would ask you to consider carefully. You have to make the greatest possible effort, but that is enough; hard work is enough. You have to make the greatest possible effort if you really want to work your way into something like the Hegelian system. You have to make an effort. But then, when you have made these efforts, when you have really worked through the Hegelian system from beginning to end – most philosophy professors stop very soon because they believe they have already understood Hegel in principle; that is why Hartmann, Eduard von Hartmann, was able to justifiably claim that of all the university professors in the world, there were only two people who had a proper education in Hegel, of all philosophy professors. Since then, one of the two has died and no one else has been added. Now, if you have appropriated Hegel in this way, ploughed through his system and appropriated it, if you are a normal person – I don't want to say a philistine, but if you are a normal person – well, then, you want to get something out of such a strenuous study, you want to hold something in your hand. But that is not the case at all, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. In the sense that people want, you don't really get anything from Hegel, at least nothing that you can write in a notebook and confidently take home, nor something that you can summarize in a small compendium and carry home as an excerpt of worldly wisdom. You don't get any of that from Hegel. From Hegel, you only have the fact that you have exerted your thinking and that, if you have overcome yourself to plow through Hegel, you can then think. But you can do nothing else with your thinking but think. You can think, but with your thinking you stand outside of all of life. You can only think. You can think well, but with this thinking, which proceeds in the pure conceptual organism and is thus dialectical, you stand outside of life.

That was more or less what Marx was able to learn from Hegel: he was able to learn how to think, to really move with virtuosity in thought, he was able to learn that. But he was looking for something else. He was looking for a conception of life for the proletariat, for the vast majority of the propertyless newer humanity. He could not doubt the correctness of Hegelian thinking, if I may express it that way, but he could not begin with this mere Hegelian thinking in relation to his task. That gave, if I may say so, his karma the corresponding impetus, which led him beyond mere Hegelianism, in which his thinking had been sharpened, to the French utopians, to Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc. When Marx asked himself: How should we shape the social order? —, Hegelianism could not answer him, for Hegel himself could, I might say, only offer everyone the opportunity to think deeply and penetratingly. But when Hegel was asked in later years what the best social order would be, he had actually forgotten his youthful views. It is extraordinarily interesting. One of Hegel's most significant youthful views with regard to the social order is that the state destroys everything that is truly human; therefore it must cease. That is a Hegelian youthful dictum: the state must cease. This great thought was still fermenting in Hegel when he wrote this sentence. When he had developed it to the pure thought, with which one could only begin to think, he had, with regard to the best social order, only the answer that one can reproach him for today can, if one wants to judge everything one-sidedly. There he had only the answer from his astute thinking: the best social institution is the Prussian state, and the center of the world, of everything perfect, is Berlin. Berlin is the center of the world, and the University of Berlin is in turn the center of Berlin. So that we are here – as he said in an inaugural address – at the center of the center. Anyone who has no sense of greatness, which can often be grotesque precisely because it is great, will of course raise all those objections, which are fair, against such a sentence. But spiritual science could give them an inkling that behind all these things, from the point of view of reality, there is something infinitely significant. For Hegel did not say such things out of mere silliness. And the judgment about the great, unique thing that never existed in humanity before: the moving in pure thought, that never existed in the world except with Hegel, is not affected by the fact that under certain conditions Hegel himself drew such a conclusion. But it seems understandable that Karl Marx could not get much for the best social interests out of Hegel,

So, initially, his karma led him to the French utopians. I have already characterized some of them for you. For Saint-Simon, for example, it was mainly a matter of replacing the state he had found with a different institution, and in thinking of this different institution, what immediately presented itself to his mind was what is most characteristic and most influential for the modern era: the industrialization of life. Therefore, he demanded that the administration of the various branches of production be established in place of all the old political institutions, so that basically he sought the salvation of the social order in the best possible administration of the social structure according to the order of a factory context. In 1848, as is well known, Louis Blanc established the most diverse national workshops in which such Saint-Simonian ideas were to be realized. Well, they soon perished, as is natural for such things to perish. As the fundamental impulse that should underlie all such administration of branches of production, Saint-Simon conceived a kind of very, very simplified Christianity. Not the old dogma Christianity should go, he thought, but a practical Christianity should go, which should actually consist in the only sentence: Love your neighbor as yourself. - A very nice sentence, but if you preach it, just as ineffective as if you preach to the stove to be warm and do not heat it.

So now Karl Marx was thrown in with these utopians. With Hegel he could say to himself: Wonderful thinking, but it is not feasible if you are to enter into this real life. You don't touch it, this real life. It remains at the level of pure dialectical thinking, not abstract, but pure dialectical thinking. Here, with the utopians, he found, in a sense, a forceful feeling, because in the case of both Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc, the social impetus came from feeling - a forceful feeling. But Karl Marx, through his Hegelian training, was, first of all, too great a thinker not to have seen the dullness – I mean no harm by this, but in relation to life, as one has a blunt knife – the dullness of this utopian doctrine and view of life. And on the other hand, Karl Marx had to say to himself: In order to create such institutions as Saint-Simon demanded for the salvation of humanity, one needs, within the bourgeoisie, goodwill, practical Christianity. But where should that come from? – That becomes the main thing for him: Where should this practical Christianity come from?

You see, even in purely practical terms, there is no possibility of believing that the ordinary bourgeois outlook and bourgeois mentality are capable of solving what Karl Marx, Saint-Simon and all those others could call the social question. For the social issues on which the bourgeoisie based their work led to many things, I mean, as values for the bourgeoisie, but that was only enough for a small minority, for a really small minority. A small minority could live comfortably, could travel, could enjoy all kinds of art – I am only mentioning the nicest things. But the great majority could not get at all of that. And how should the bourgeoisie, which was only able to provide for a small minority, how should it do something out of mere compassion or sympathy for the whole proletarian mass? I think the simple idea suggests itself that nothing can be achieved in this way, apart from the idea that Karl Marx then asserted, and which I mentioned to you the other day: that, precisely because of the social structure of this bourgeoisie, it is not even remotely capable, even if it wanted to, of doing anything effective for the proletariat. Now, as we pointed out the other day, Karl Marx regarded Hegel's thought as appropriate to the new era, and Saint-Simon's feeling. But in his opinion he could not do anything with either of them.

So his karma led him further to English utilitarianism, to that social structure within which the modern industrial being, I would say, had progressed the furthest, even as Karl Marx was forming his worldview. Those within English thought who, like Karl Marx, pursued socialism, developed their socialism — I am thinking here of Robert Owen — primarily out of volition. Karl Marx was able to study how, when a certain will is restricted to a small area – you will remember what I said just now – nothing can be achieved. We know that Robert Owen introduced model economies that were really set up in practice. But in the modern world, all you can do with small model economies is fail. Of course, Robert Owen's attempts also failed in the end; that is only a matter of course. And so Karl Marx was led through all this, but was particularly attracted by the practical thinking that is purely absorbed in the mechanization of industrialism, and from this he formed his proletarian world view, this proletarian world view that is not based on thinking, although it uses thinking, that is not based on feeling although it uses feeling, nor is it based on the will, but rather is based on that which happens externally, purely externally in the sensory world, and specifically happens in the industrial world, in the world of modern production, under the hand of the proletarian. And here Karl Marx showed himself, who had gone through modern thinking, feeling and willing in such a magnificent way that he was attached, and in the classical sense now attached to, I would like to say, with a certain greatness this lack of trust that actually characterizes modern mental life. For example, in Hegel, Karl Marx had been able to hear that world history is the progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom; thus, something ideal lies at the basis of the development of humanity in its history as an impulse. It is an abstract proposition, which is not very helpful. From Saint-Simon he had been able to learn that where practical Christianity prevails, and to the extent that practical Christianity prevails, the development of humanity must advance. But it has not progressed; it has led precisely to modern impoverishment, to modern proletarian misery, and so on. An idea took hold in Karl Marx, an intuitive impulse that was really capable of finding understanding in the broadest proletarian circles, and not in the bourgeois circles only because the bourgeois circles were lazy and did not take up such things, did not care about such things. Karl Marx became convinced of the idea that ultimately it is completely irrelevant what people think, what they feel, what they want, because what determines historical development depends only on the economic process, on how people live. Whether someone is an entrepreneur, a worker, or involved in the economy in this or that way, this leads to them having thoughts in a certain way, feeling in a certain way, and having certain volitional impulses. A child growing up in a family of civil servants has a different idea of what is right and what is wrong, feels and thinks differently simply because he grows up in the economic order of a civil servant's family, unlike the child of a proletarian who is left to his own devices while his father and mother go to the factory and so on. And so Karl Marx came to his relevant, proletarian-relevant sentence: The institutions that affect people are not based on the consciousness of the people, but the consciousness of the people is based on the institutions that arise by themselves, through a mere actual necessity. People believe that they think and feel and want out of their inner impulses. Oh no, they do not think and feel and want out of their inner impulses, but they feel and think and want according to the class into which they were born, without merit or demerit.

One can sense that if the basic impulse of a doctrine is this, this basic impulse must lead to a receptive understanding in the proletarian class, because through this doctrine one was above all trust in oneself. You don't need to have any self-confidence, because it doesn't help you at all whether you think energetically or not, whether you feel energetically or not, whether you will energetically or not; after all, all that is only the outflow, the superstructure, of the foundation that the social order, the economic position into which one is born, instructs you. Therefore, you can think up the most beautiful systems, as the true Marxist would say, for how people can best organize their social structures and how the best economic life can be shaped. You can think about how to make people happy and content, how to ensure that they have enough to eat and can lead a can lead a pleasant life, you may think as you like, but all that has no value, nothing depends on it, all that is only a mirror of economic life, how you think and feel and want, because what makes everything is economic life. That is why Karl Marx rejected all socialist theories as theories and said: “It is only important to understand economic life, to know how economic life works.” At most, you can give the locomotive a jolt here or there to make it go faster, but it goes by itself, things develop by themselves.

Of course, they will feel that all sorts of contradictions are stirring. We will come back to that. But now let us present the matter as it is reflected in the minds of the Marxist proletarians. So Karl Marx said, and so these say: the main forms of economic life have developed apart over time. In earlier oriental conditions, the coexistence of people was steeped in barbarism. Then came that economic system which divided men into masters and slaves, which was still regarded as a necessity in Greek, even by Aristotle: that men be divided into masters and slaves. Then came the more medieval order of serfdom, of feudalism, where people were not slaves, but serfs, bound to the lord who held the feudum, so that they belonged, so to speak, to the feudum, to the estate. Then came the more recent period, the wage system, in which the worker, in the way I characterized for you the other day, sells his labor power as a commodity to the entrepreneur and receives the price for the commodity in the form of wages. Barbarianism, slavery, serfdom, the wage system are the main forms in which economic life has developed. The thinking of people must be different where slavery prevails, different where serfdom prevails, different where the modern wage system is. For all that people think, by which they believe they can make the world happy, is the ideological superstructure. What people think about it can become consolidated; and what has thus become consolidated in views, opinions and thoughts can in turn have an effect, so that these human thoughts in their ideologized form actually have an effect on the economic order. But originally they come from the economic order. This modern wage system has developed most intensively in modern economic life under the influence of modern industrialism through the antagonism between entrepreneurs and workers. It has developed in such a way that, as I have already explained to you from a different point of view, the entrepreneur is the owner of the means of production. Because he is the owner of the means of production, work can only be done through him. The worker is forced to sell his labor power as a commodity to the entrepreneur and to be paid for it, which, as I have shown you, results in added value.

This modern economic life, Karl Marx assumes, tends to concentrate the ownership of the means of production more and more. This economic life brings with it the necessity that entrepreneurship must unite from the individual entrepreneur to the company, to the trust and so on. And as a result, as the entrepreneurs unite, the sum of means of production comes to a sum. But this prepares the way for the socialization of the means of production in general. The entrepreneurs are already working on it, and when a certain point has been reached, the means of production must be concentrated to such an extent that only one reorganization is needed. Then you nationalize, socialize the means of production, which have already converged in companies and trusts anyway, and you just rearrange things by having the one who was previously the worker, now, as a whole society, take possession of the means of production, by having them through a necessary process. What is being presented now must happen. The entrepreneurs are preparing the way for socialization; by increasingly taking care of socialization themselves, they bring it to a point where the proletariat can take it over. Hegel went in thought from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Karl Marx implements this in the reality of the economic process: the entrepreneurial order turns into its opposite; the proletarian takes possession of the means of production all by himself. The economic process makes itself. One is merely the obstetrician of that which happens by itself, not believing that this ideological superstructure of thinking, feeling and willing can make anything special. The economic process, says Karl Marx, does everything; what you think are merely the foam waves at the top of the economic process. Depending on the economic order, this produces this or that thought in these or those human minds. Those are the foam waves up there. The economic process is the most important thing, but it necessarily leads from thesis to antithesis. What the proletariat has worked for was taken away from the actual owners, the proletarians, by the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs became the expropriators. But this process of expropriating the proprietor is necessarily reversed in the economic development into its opposite. As cause and effect follow in nature, the expropriation of the expropriators arises.

You didn't need any faith in the powers of the soul. You could work with this proletarian theory, especially with the worst legacy of bourgeois education in modern times, with mistrust of the human soul. The proletarian saw himself helplessly at the mercy of the bourgeoisie. He had sympathy for a theory that does not claim that he should help himself, because the expropriation of the expropriators automatically brings about what the socialization of the means of production must result in. The modern mode of production necessarily turns into its opposite.

That things would make themselves, was something that seemed so tremendously obvious to the proletarian world. And if one wants to gain an understanding of the psychology of this proletarian sentiment, one must take into account that it was precisely this absolute mistrust of the powers of the soul that was an important driving force in the triumphal march that Marxist thinking made through the world. Marxism is not a dogma at all, but a method of observing the world - and for the proletarian, the only world accessible to him - the world of economic order, of economic development. I would like to say – I believe this really hits the nail on the head – the proletarian does not rely on any kind of power of thought, although Karl Marx says: “The philosophers have only ever interpreted the world through thought; one must create through thought in the world” – but actually he does not rely on thoughts and their power, on the effectiveness of thoughts for any kind of institution, but he relies only on the self-regulating process of the economic order. And that was essentially what one encountered when one familiarized oneself with the real life of the modern proletariat. One might say that one encountered the almost apocalyptic hope that the expropriation of the expropriators, the necessary socialization of the means of production, would have to come with a major crisis.

The bourgeoisie ridiculed this, repeating again and again that the modern proletariat was waiting for the great Kladderadatsch. This great Kladderadatsch was imagined as the shattering of the vessel, so to speak, that founded the entrepreneurial system, and its transformation through self-regulation into the joint administration of the means of production by the proletariat. That was, so to speak, the apocalyptic hope. It was in this hope that this modern proletariat worked with such firm belief. They were firmly convinced that it could not happen otherwise than that this socialization would have to occur.

You see, in Marxism every mere theoretical view is rejected. A mere theoretical view is ideology or superstructure, which can indeed react back, but which, even when it reacts back, originally arose out of the mere economic order. And yet the whole thing is a theory, after all. It cannot be denied that it is a theory. And as a theory it has had a tremendous impact; it has uplifted people, it has taught people a certain belief. And the strange thing was: as the faith of the bourgeoisie, which was not a new one, but only a traditionally old one, became more and more mired, rotten and corrupted, a purely materialistic faith arose, the faith in the apocalypse of the economic order, rock-solid in the proletariat. If you look only at the power of faith, only at the impetus of faith, you can say: It is quite certain that even within the first Christian communities there was never a stronger belief, a stronger belief than that of the modern proletariat in the apocalypse of economic development: expropriation of the expropriators. One could already get to know the power of faith there, even if, in the opinion of people – people other than the proletarians – it did not address anything very lofty. One could already learn what the power of a belief, of a confession, is; because for the proletariat this became a confession.

Now, the remarkable thing is that Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels drew this conclusion from their observations, primarily of life in the British Empire; but this doctrine has been most intensively adopted, so that it has become orthodoxy, within the German working class. The most genuine Marxists were to be found among the German workers. And for those who can study such things according to the fundamentals of reality, the matter is such that they realize that the Marxist doctrine could only arise within the British Empire from the observation of British conditions. Only a man who had gone through Hegelian dialectic thinking, a man steeped in the utopian sentiment of the Saint-Simon school and who had looked at Owen's and other socialist experiments, but who at the same time observed how entrepreneurship and the proletariat relate to one another in English industrialism , and how there is an absolute lack of understanding, a mere adjustment to a fight, only such a person, who has gone through all this, who has just landed with his observation where, so to speak, the economic, the purely economic process stood before him in pure culture, could think up something like that. When Marx thought this up, Germany, for example, was still far from being an industrialized country in which one could have thought up what Karl Marx thought. You needed German thoughts of Hegel's teachings to think through the industrial-economic system so astutely. But Germany itself was still far too much an agrarian and not at all an industrial country at the time to be able to observe what was necessary to arrive at this Marxist method of observing economic life.

There are, of course, older socialist teachings within Germany, for example Weitling's “Gospel of a Poor Sinner” or Marlo's socialist experiment. Marlo was a professor in Kassel, Winkelblech is his real name. Then there is Rodbertus; but Rodbertus relies mainly on agrarian conditions. All these things are really only small beginnings of social feeling compared to the forcefulness of the Marxist view. What Karl Marx did could only be gained through observation of the object, namely in the British Empire, where industrialism was already so advanced in the first half of the nineteenth century. But then, after it was gained, it was able to take root thoroughly in the burgeoning industrialism, to take root thoroughly among the proletariat of burgeoning industrialism within Germany.

It is quite understandable that it was able to take root there. For when a person like Hegel lives in such a region, he does not fall from the sky like a meteor, but rather he represents only the concentrated power, precisely with regard to such a quality, as it is with Hegel, the concentrated power of tendencies that are already present in the people. Karl Marx had, as it were, learned his dialectical thinking in Germany and carried it over from Germany to England. It is understandable that what he had developed there found the deepest understanding in Germany, that his thinking was now suitable for being applied in the transformation from the heights where one had only learned to think to comprehension, to the attempt to comprehend the economic process. If you only have Hegel – isn't it true, I have characterized this for you – well, you can think afterwards, but you have nothing in your hands. But now Marx, under the influence of the British Empire, of the industrialism of the British Empire, has changed thinking so much that he presented the proletariat with the following: When the crisis has come, you will have all that the people who are sucking you dry have. You just need to think like that, then you're doing enough. Just be understanding; the locomotive is running, just give it a push sometimes to make it go faster. That's the only thing you can do. Of course, what you think is also just an ideology, but what you think has an effect in turn. Your thoughts come from economic life, and healthy economic thinking cannot be acquired through study, but only by being a proletarian, because economic thinking comes only from this class. So you are a proletarian. Because you are a proletarian, you think correctly in the sense of modern times. That is where your ideology develops, with which you can in turn have an effect, by giving the locomotive a push. Now we have something of use! This is not just Hegelianism, nor Saint-Simonism, nor Owenism, because Hegelianism gives thoughts that do not intervene in reality, Saint-Simonism gives social feelings, but they are like saying: “Warm up, dear stove,” without putting wood in. Robert Owen and others have failed with individual socialist enterprises; but Karl Marx has pointed out a process that all of humanity is undergoing, the proletariat across all countries across the entire earth, which consists of the expropriation of the expropriation, that the means of production are socialized. There is therefore an intrinsic reason why what has been seized upon by German thought has, to a certain extent, also taken most hold in Germany, so that the most orthodox Marxism has arisen there.

The strange thing is that Marx could fabricate such a doctrine in England, but it is not applicable to England itself, because people there do not accept it for the very reason that the contrast between entrepreneur and worker does not exist to the same extent. I think I have mentioned this. There the entrepreneur and the worker are closer. I can also give you individual proofs for this. I will give you one such example. All these things, which are mentioned from a spiritual-scientific point of view, can also be fully proven by empirical facts. You see, Marx worked with astute Hegelian thinking, which is mainly German thinking. His Marxist system found sympathetic support precisely in the German proletariat. Eduard Bernstein, who then spent more time in England, studied not so much the industrial economic process as the views of the people, the proletarians, the social currents there. He was less schooled in Hegel — after all, Bernstein was still alive. He did not apply Hegel's astute dialectical thinking to the English situation, but rather adapted his thinking more to English proletarian thinking itself. When he returned to Germany, after he had long been banned from Germany and found asylum in London, his view of things became what is known as socialist revisionism, that is to say, a watered-down, no longer Marxist way of thinking that has actually been little understood and has only gained followers – not within the proletarian-socialist party, but within the various trade union circles – because it is somewhat more accommodating towards the powers that be than Marxism. You see, there you have living proof: someone who has adapted to English proletarian thinking has not come to Marxism, just as the German proletariat has directly embraced Marxism, because although this Marxism could be fabricated in England, it does not have the soil in England itself, it does not have the soil in the people. It found its soil in the German workers above all. From there it then spread in many directions, but in the same orthodox rigidity, firmness, with that tremendous power of faith, but not so easily elsewhere as within the German proletariat.

This is very important to note, because it characterizes the German essence, the German proletarian essence, its whole position in the world, especially at the present time when the social question plays its great role. And this must also be borne in mind if one wants to thoroughly understand the current world-historical position of the social questions, if one wants to understand them in the context of the catastrophic political events of the present.

You see, it is a theory, I said before – despite the fact that all theory is declared to be mere ideology – it is a theory that has penetrated hearts and minds and developed an enormous intensity of belief. But in becoming a fact, it has, as it were, developed the rigidity of theories. This led to the modern proletariat, especially the German proletariat, being firmly educated, filled with faith in Marxism in its majority, but having no real understanding of certain elementary things if they did not agree with the fact of Marxism. Anyone who has had many discussions with modern proletarians, as I was able to do when I was a teacher at a workers' educational school and spoke to a wide variety of trade union and political associations of social democracy, anyone who was able to study the actual conditions there – I also gave speech exercises because the people were practical, they wanted to participate in political life, wanted to learn to talk —, who held discussion exercises by name, that is, was familiar with the way people discussed with each other, of course knows what things people were open to. If you lead discussion exercises, you simply throw in something here or there as a technical aid to stimulate the discussion. Especially if you only lead discussion exercises, you know – everyone knows – that you don't throw in what you throw in as your opinion, but as a trial. You could also say: What would you answer if, for example, you wanted to say to the proletarian: Yes, you see, the strike is something that is a very useful weapon in the modern proletarian class struggle; why don't you go on strike against the cannon factories? You are committing the great contradiction that you know full well that cannons are your worst enemies, but you are making them. You would achieve infinitely more in terms of the real effect of your theory if you refused to make cannons. — You see, no proletarian understood this very elementary objection, because they did not go that far. For them, it was not a matter of somehow intervening in what was actually developing. It was all the same to them what was being produced. For him, it was only about the single point: the transfer of the means of production, regardless of what is produced, into the social order, socialization of the means of production, regardless of what these means of production produce.

If you take this, you will see that it actually came down to a specific goal. Of course, if you, like the modern proletarian, are not entirely belligerent in your soul – the proletarian is naturally not belligerent because he does not expect any benefit from war – then you can only hope that you are contributing to overcoming war by making cannons just as well as anything else, if you yourself come to power, because then you can, after overthrowing the old powers, abolish cannon-making! And that was more or less, or is more or less, the way of thinking. It is a matter of acquiring power.

There you have indicated the point where Marxism, as it were, turns, where it enters into a kind of contradiction, where the dialectical process, I might say, takes revenge on it. For it starts from the assumption that economic life is, as it were, subject to self-control, that therefore what is to happen happens of itself; one need only push the locomotive here and there once. And yet he must strive to overthrow the old governing powers and place himself in their stead, that is, to strive for power that emanates from man. He wants to make what should happen happen. He is therefore appealing to man, counting on the fact that he will come out on top and then have the power, whereas previously the others had the power.

This was already to some extent in the theory. In practice, I would like to say, as revenge of dialectics on Marxism, this modern terrible catastrophe of war, which now suddenly plays power more or less into the hands of the proletariat over large areas of the earth, not at all out of the economic order, but out of a completely different order, or rather disorder, plays power into the hands of the proletarian. This is a remarkable process, extraordinarily remarkable. And it becomes even more remarkable when you see it, this process, in its entirety, when you see it now, so to speak, spreading across the whole world. Because, as I told you recently, the truth has only emerged over the years from this so-called war. That the Central Powers and the Entente were opposed to each other was, of course, untrue; in reality, this terrible economic struggle, which is now beginning, emerged. — That is the truth that emerged from that untruth, which masked what actually underlies world history. And actually, the two camps are already beginning to stand out a little today. The two camps stand out economically, in that it is becoming more and more apparent that the English-speaking population geographically and historically represents a kind of entrepreneurship as the ruling element, which in one way or another defeats the other world, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, more or less the proletariat as the ruling world. Just as entrepreneurs and workers face each other in the modern factory, so in the world the old Entente entrepreneurship faces the proletariat in the defeated powers. This is the grand, oppressive, tragically grand effect. We cannot study what is happening today other than by understanding it in the context of the whole proletarian socialist question.

But on the world-historical stage, not only what I have just hinted at will unfold, but another element is disconcertingly mixed into what is actually only an economic struggle, a huge economic struggle. The economic struggle arises within humanity, and it will be an economic struggle that will be fought in a terrible way between one half of the world and the other half of the world. The economic struggle within humanity is based on the development of the senses and the nervous system. And in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the age of the consciousness soul, the English-speaking world is particularly organized for the sense-nervous system, because in this period the nervous system develops only utilitarian, material thoughts, tending to turn the world into one big commercial enterprise. But the world of blood, the other pole in the life of man, the world of blood, has a disturbing effect on this world of the sensory nervous system. It will throw its wave into what the sensory-nervous life stirs up on the one hand as a purely economic struggle, the world of blood, initially represented by the united Slavic outposts: Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, Slovaks and so on, until the other wave with the purified blood, with the spiritualized blood in Eastern Europe, the Russian-Slavic, will then play into it. , Slovenes, Poles, Slovakians, and so on, until the other wave of purified blood, of spiritualized blood, in the east of Europe, the Russian-Slavic, will play into it. While from the West the East and Central Europe are to be made into a large area for the consumption of the products of the producing world of the West, not only the revolt of the consuming proletariat of the East will radiate towards the West, but above all the restless wave of blood. Blood and nerves could also be called that which comes into the world and wants to be understood, which wants to be mastered with understanding. It was already involved in this military catastrophe. Study the effects of German shipbuilding and the German fleet, navy, the German colonization system, study the things that the far-sighted but selfish Chamberlain negotiated with the simple-minded German government at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and what then did not come about, then you will have such approaches, but some of the many approaches to the great economic process that played into this so-called war. And if you study the so-called Oriental question with its last phase, the unfortunate Balkan war, then you have the other thing, the wave of blood that counteracted the economic war. This is already playing a role in the current catastrophe. These things need to be understood.