The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization

GA 329 — 2 April 1919, Basel

IV. Proletarian Demands and Their Future Practical Realization

Don't think that I want to take the floor here today to talk about that cheap understanding with regard to the social question that so many people would like to talk about today and who would like to be heard by name. I would like to speak of a completely different kind of understanding, the kind of understanding that seems to me to be called for by the loud, loudly speaking facts that are spreading across a large part of Europe today: understanding with the historical forces at work in the present and in the future, which call for a very specific, clear and energetic approach to what has been called the social question for more than half a century. How can we speak today of that other understanding mentioned at the beginning? Has not too much been lost for this understanding? Has not a certain part of modern humanity taken a long time to seek such an understanding? Today, a deep chasm is opening up between those who have been the leading classes of humanity up to now and those who are pressing forward with newer demands that have necessarily arisen from the times, i.e. between the leading classes of humanity up to now and the proletariat with its justified demands.

Let us take a look at recent life in order first of all to gain a judgment on the impossibility of easy understanding today. Much has been said for decades about this modern civilization, about this civilization which is supposed to have brought about such great and mighty things for mankind. How we have heard it again and again, the praise for modern technology, for modern transportation! Have we not heard them, all the phrases about how it is possible for people today - yes, which people are possible! - to traverse vast distances of land in a relatively short time, how it has become possible for thoughts to cover almost any distance, how it has become possible to expand so-called intellectual life? Well, I don't need to go into detail about the whole song of praise that has been heard so and so often. But what has all this, to which such a song of praise is sung, risen above? Without what would it not have been possible? It would not have been possible without the work of the greater part of mankind, that part which was not allowed to participate in all that has been so praised, that part which had to provide for these comforts of life under physical and mental privations, without being able to participate in any way in all the achievements of modern civilization.

Let's take a closer look at how, for more than half a century, we have come to the point where we still have to say that the abyss exists today. And if there is much talk of understanding today, it is precisely because people are afraid, because they are afraid of the facts that are looming so threateningly for some people. What, for example, has the moral world view of these leading classes been particularly preoccupied with - to start with a favorite subject of the leading classes since then? The world-view, the moral world-view of these leading classes has been particularly fond of dealing with, in endless speeches, in unctuous expositions, in words that seemed to overflow with feeling, with how men must develop love for one another, how men must see to it that brotherhood spreads, how men can only conquer the spiritual world by entering into such brotherhood. Such speeches, seemingly dripping with deep feeling, have indeed been made quite often by the leading spiritual circles of the hitherto leading class of mankind. Let us put ourselves in the place of such speeches in halls of mirrors or the like, and think how they preached about love of man, about charity, about religiosity, preached over a furnace heating provided by coal - I would like to draw attention to this in order to characterize a little the course of the present facts - which was extracted from those coal mines about which an English inquiry at the beginning of the newer labour movement brought quite strange things to light. Down there in the shafts of the earth, nine-, eleven-, thirteen-year-old children worked all day long in the shafts, children who never saw the sunlight except on Sunday, for the simple reason that they went down into the pits when it was still dark, and were only brought up again when it was no longer light. Men stood down there, completely naked, next to women who were pregnant and who also stood half-naked down there and had to work.

That was the first time that a government inquiry was held to draw attention to what was actually going on among the people, that such experiences were made, about which thoughtlessness had never wanted to enlighten itself, despite all the preaching of humanity, charity and religiosity. Admittedly, that was at the beginning of the modern proletarian movement. But it cannot be said that what has at least to some extent improved the situation of wide circles of people stems from the understanding that would have been gained in the hitherto leading classes of mankind. A large part of these leading classes of mankind are today just as uncomprehending of the true demands of the time, which follow from such facts, as they were fifty or more years ago.

There is no need to go as far as a hitherto leading, or at least seemingly leading, personality of humanity has gone: the former German Emperor, who called the socialist-minded people: Animals that gnaw at the foundations of the German empire and are worth exterminating. These are his own words. As I said, there is no need to go that far, but the judgments that are still made in certain circles today are not so very different from this particularly characteristic judgment just mentioned.

If we now look at what has taken place in the course of the last five to six decades, since what is now called the social question came into existence, we see on the one hand the thoughtless lack of understanding with regard to everything that has come up in the development of humanity, and on the other hand we see the onslaught, the justified onslaught of the broad proletarian masses, which has always been crowding into the words: It cannot go on like this. But today the facts speak a completely different language than they have in recent decades. And how do the judgments that some people make compare with the facts? The terrible catastrophe we have lived through in the last four to five years is a good lesson in this.

Please allow me to make the following personal comment. That which I have had to form for decades as a judgment on European political conditions, I had to summarize it in a lecture which I gave in the spring of 1914 in Vienna to a small circle - a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time - I had to summarize that which was then woven among the people of Europe, among those people of whom one could say that they had something to do with the shaping of political destiny in Europe. At that time one had to say, if one looked at the times with an unbiased eye: With regard to the political and state relations of Europe, we are suffering from a creeping ulcer, a cancerous disease that will have to break out in a terrible way in the very near future. The time when this cancer broke out came very soon. But what did the “practitioners” say? What did the “statesmen” say? Today, when we talk about statesmen, we are always tempted to put quotation marks around the word. What did the “statesmen” say? What the leading foreign secretary of state in the German Reichstag said back then was the following. He said: “Thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, we can say that European peace will be secured for the foreseeable future. - That was said by a leading statesman in May 1914. This peace was so secure that since then twelve to fifteen million people have been shot dead, three times as many have been crippled. Just as in those days these statesmen spoke about what was in the political sky, so today many people speak about what is being said by the whole educated world through facts of the most significant and energetic kind. This is how people often speak about the social question. There is no idea in many circles of what must come and what will certainly come, and of what every reasonable person must be able to judge.

What I have to say on this matter is truly not based on any theoretical view. For many years I was a teacher at the workers' educational school founded in Berlin by Wilhelm Liebknecht, the old Liebknecht, I taught in the most diverse branches, and from there I also worked within the educational system of the modern proletariat in trade unions, in cooperatives and also within the political party. It is precisely when one has lived among and worked with those who have endeavored to carry the modern workers' movement forward from real thoughts, from real intellectual foundations, that one can perhaps say that one can form a judgment, not as one who thinks about the proletariat. Such judgment has no value today. Today, only a judgment formed with the proletariat, formed from the midst of the proletariat itself, can have any value.

In the hours that the workers spent after the hard work of the day, in which they went to the theater or played skat while other classes - I don't want to list all the nice things - in the hours in which the proletarian tried to enlighten himself about his situation, in those hours one could learn how the modern proletarian question has become and will become something quite different from a mere wage or bread question, as many still believe today, namely a question of human dignity. A question of a humane existence, that is what lies behind all proletarian demands, and has done for a long time.

Today's proletarian demands can be said to rest on three foundations. The one foundation is very often described by the proletarians themselves by referring to the great teacher of the proletariat, Karl Marx, as the existence of so-called surplus value. Surplus value, it was always a word that penetrated deep into the soul of the modern proletarian; it was a word that had an incendiary effect on the feelings of this modern proletarian. What word did the hitherto leading classes oppose to this surplus value? One will perhaps be surprised if I contrast the following two things.

The leading classes opposed this surplus value with the word of the great, important spiritual life which the civilization of mankind has brought forth. What did the proletarian know of this spiritual life? What was the great question of humanity for him? He knew that the surplus value he produced was used to make this spiritual life possible and to exclude him from this spiritual life. For him, surplus value was the very abstract basis of spiritual life. What kind of spiritual life was that? It was the intellectual life that arose in the dawn of the modern bourgeois economic order. It is often said, certainly not unjustly, that the modern proletariat was created by modern technology, by modern industrialism, by modern capitalism, and we shall speak of these things in a moment. But at the same time as this modern technology, with this capitalism, something else arose which we can call the modern scientific orientation. There it was - it was quite a long time ago - that the proletariat placed the last great trust in the bourgeoisie in the face of what the modern bourgeoisie brought up as the modern scientific orientation. And this last great trust, world-historical trust, has been disappointed.

What was the actual situation? Well, out of old worldviews, the justification of which we really don't want to examine today, what is today an enlightened, scientific worldview was formed. The proletarian, who has been called away from the medieval craft to the soul-killing machine, has been harnessed into modern capitalism, could not accept what the old classes had absorbed in their spiritual life. He could only accept, so to speak, the most modern product, the most modern outflow of this spiritual life. But for him this spiritual life became something quite, quite different from that of the leading classes. One need only visualize this with reference to all the depths of the proletarian soul. One must imagine how people from the hitherto leading classes, even if they were such enlightened people as the naturalist Vogt or the scientific popularizer Büchner, how they could be enlightened people with their heads, with their minds, in the sense of today's science; but they were such enlightened people only because they lived with their whole human being inside a social order that still came from the old religious and other world views in which the old still lived on. Their life was different from the one they professed, however honest they were in theory. The modern proletarian was compelled to take what remained to him as the legacy of the bourgeoisie in the fullest human seriousness. One need only have seen what it meant to the modern proletarian when he was told, as Lassalle once was, about science and the workers.

I stood - if I may also make this personal remark - more than eighteen years ago in Spandau, near Berlin, on the same speaker's platform with Rosa Luxemburg, who recently met her tragic end. We were both speaking to a proletarian assembly about science and the workers. At the time, Rosa Luxemburg said words that you could see had a powerful effect on the souls of these proletarian people who had come on a Sunday afternoon and had brought their wives and children with them; it was a heart-warming meeting. She said that, under the influence of modern science, people can no longer imagine that they have come up from conditions that were like angels, from which the modern differences of rank and class would be justified. No, she said almost literally: man, the physical man of today, was once highly indecent, climbing around on trees, and if one remembers this origin, then one really finds no reason to speak of today's class differences.

This was understood, but differently than by the leading circles. It was understood in such a way that the whole man wanted to be placed in this world view, which was to answer the question of the proletarian languishing in the barren machine: What am I as a human being? What is man in the world at all?

Now, however, the modern proletarian could gain nothing from this whole science other than what he could call a mirror image of what has emerged as the modern capitalist economic order. He felt that people speak as they must according to their economic circumstances, according to their economic situation. They had placed him in this economic situation; he could only judge from it. The leading circles said: the way people live now is a result of the divine world order, or a result of the moral world order, or a result of historical ideas and so on. The modern proletarian could only feel all this by saying to himself: “But you have put me into this economic life, and what have you made of me? Does that show what you have made of me, this divine world order, this moral world order, these historical ideas?

And so the concept of surplus value - the surplus value that he produced, that was extracted from him, that made this life of the leading classes possible - ignited in his emotional world and the opinion arose in him that everything that is produced by the leading circles in terms of spiritual life is only the reflection of their economic order.

Finally, for the last few centuries the proletarian theoretician was undoubtedly right in this view. The last few years have amply demonstrated this in the most diverse areas. Or can one believe that the people who taught history, for example, or wrote about history in the various schools - I don't want to say mathematics and physics, there's not much you can do in world views - can one say that they ultimately expressed anything other than a reflection of what the state-economic order was? Just look at the history of the states that entered the world war. The history of the Hohenzollerns will certainly look different in the future than the German professors have written in recent years and decades. It will, however, be made, this history, by people who have been told - yes, it is also a word of the German emperor - that they are not only enemies of the ruling class, but enemies of the divine world order.

So what was the spiritual life of the ruling classes became for the proletarian a dull ideology, a luxury of humanity, something for which he could muster no understanding. Nevertheless, his deepest longing was to find something that told him what human dignity, what human worth was. That is why the first proletarian demand is a spiritual demand. And one may say what one likes here or there, the first proletarian demand is a spiritual demand, the demand for such a spiritual life in which one can feel what one is as a human being, in which every human being can feel what human life on earth is worth. That is the first proletarian demand in the spiritual sphere.

The second proletarian demand arises in the field of legal life, of the actual political state. It is difficult to talk theoretically about what the law actually is. In any case, law is something that concerns all men, and one need only say the following about law: just as one cannot talk to a blind man about what a blue color is, but one does not need to theorize much about the blue color with one who sees, so one cannot talk about law with those who are blind to law. For the law rests on an original human awareness of the law. On the commandments of the political state, which the ruling classes have so finely carved out for themselves in recent centuries, the proletarian sought his right, his right above all in relation to his field of labor. What did he find? At first he did not find himself harnessed to the constitutional state, he found himself harnessed to the economic state. And there he saw that in contrast to all ideas of humanity, in contrast to all ideas of pure humanity, there remained for him a remnant of old inhumanity, a terrible remnant of old inhumanity. That, in turn, is something that Karl Marx so passionately impressed on the souls of the proletariat. There were slaves in ancient times. The whole human being was bought and sold like a commodity. Later there were serfs. There was less buying and selling of people than in the old days of slavery. Even now, people are still bought and sold like commodities. What Karl Marx and his successors have repeatedly and again so understandably expressed for the proletarian soul is that human labor power is sold. In the modern commodity market, where there should only be commodities, labor power itself is treated like a commodity. This rests in the depths, albeit often unconsciously, of the proletarian soul, so that it says to itself: the time has come when my labor power may no longer be a commodity.

This is the second proletarian demand. It springs from the legal ground. In drawing attention to this relationship, Karl Marx was once again speaking one of his most incendiary words. But we must be even more radical in this area than Karl Marx himself was in his approach. It must become clear: a world order, a social order must emerge in which man's labor power is no longer a commodity, in which it is completely stripped of the character of a commodity. For if I have to sell my labor power, I can also sell my entire human being. How can I retain my human being if I have to sell my labor power to someone else? He becomes master of my whole person. Thus the last remnant of the old slavery, but truly not in a lesser form, is still there today in this “humane” age.

So the proletarian, with his labor power and its sale, found himself thrust out of legal life into economic life. And when it is said, well, the labor contract exists, it must be countered that as long as a contract can be concluded between the employer and the worker about the labor relationship, the slave relationship with regard to labor power exists. Only then, when the relationship with regard to labor between labor manager and physical workers is transferred to the mere legal ground, only then is there that which the modern proletarian soul must demand.

However, this can only be the case when a relationship is no longer concluded only about wages, but only about what is produced jointly by the physical and the intellectual worker. There can only be contracts about goods, not about pieces of people. Instead of knowing that his labor relationship is protected on the basis of law, what did the modern proletarian find on this legal basis? Did he find rights? When he looked at himself, he really did not find any rights. Certain people had gradually become accustomed to perceiving this modern state as a kind of deity, as an idol. Almost as Faust spoke to Gretchen about God in the first part, so certain people spoke about the modern state. One could well imagine a modern labor entrepreneur instructing his workers about the divinity of the modern state and saying of this state: “The all-preserver, the all-embracer, does he not grasp and sustain you, me and himself?” He will probably always think: especially me. - Rights awaited the consciousness of humanity on the soil of the state. The modern proletarian found the privileges of those who had gained them from economic life, especially in recent times. Instead of that which must be demanded in regard to all rights - the equality of all men - what did the modern proletarian find? If one looks at what he found there on the ground of the constitutional state, one comes to his third demand; for he found on the ground on which he was to find the right, namely the right of his labor and the opposite right, the right of the so-called owner, he found the class struggle. For the modern proletarian, the modern state is nothing more than the class-struggle state.

Thus we designate the third proletarian demand as that which aims at overcoming the class state and replacing it with the constitutional state. Labor and labor management are objects of law. What, after all, is property? In the course of modern times it will have to become something that belongs to the old rusty things; for what is it in reality? In the social organism we need only the concept which says: possession is the right of any man to make use of any thing. Possession is always based on a right. Only when rights are regulated on the basis of a true democratic social order will workers' rights stand in opposition to so-called property rights. Only then, however, can that which is the legitimate demand of the modern proletarian be fulfilled.

If you look at the facts of today, which speak so loudly, then you come to the conclusion that what has gradually emerged as a social organism under the influence of modern technology, under the influence of modern capitalism, must be looked at more closely. - And one need only look at the three demands of the modern proletariat just characterized, then one will also see what is necessary for the recovery of the social organism. A spiritual, a legal and an economic aspect - these are the three aspects that must be looked at. But how have these three aspects been treated in the modern historical order, which is currently under the influence of technology and capitalism?

This is where we come from the critique of what has been formed by the ruling classes of the present, to what emerges today as a historical demand. I can imagine that some people will not fully agree with me in what I am about to say. But do not the facts that have developed show that people's thoughts have often lagged behind these facts? That is why it is perhaps justified to listen when someone says: “We not only need all kinds of talk about the transformation of conditions, no, today we need to move forward to completely new thoughts. New thoughts must enter the human brain, because the old thoughts have shown what they have made the human social order into. Rethinking and relearning, not just trying things out, is necessary today. And if what I have to say differs in some respects from the usual thoughts, I ask you to take it in such a way that it is taken from the observation of the facts of life and is just as honestly meant as many other things that are honestly put forward for the recovery of the newer social conditions.

I see, for example, how in recent times, precisely under the influence of the bourgeois social and economic order, economic life has increasingly grown together with legal life, how the political state and the economic state have become one. Let us take a very characteristic example of the present. Let us take the example of Austria, which has just succumbed to its fate. When, in the sixties of the 19th century, this Austria finally decided to establish a so-called constitutional life, how was the Imperial Council, this old blessed Imperial Council - because they wanted to have such a clear and short name, they called this Austrian state, apart from Hungary and the lands of the so-called Holy Crown of St. Stephen, “the kingdoms and lands represented in the Imperial Council”, - short name for Austria! - was elected? Elections were held for this Imperial Council according to four curiae, firstly the large landowners, secondly the chambers of commerce, thirdly the cities, markets and industrial towns, fourthly the rural communities. The latter were only allowed to vote indirectly. But what are all these curiae? They were economic curiae. They had to represent purely economic interests, and they elected their deputies to the Austrian Imperial Council. What was to be done there? Rights were to be established, political rights. What ideas did they have about political rights by basing the Austrian Imperial Council on these four curiae? Well, they had the idea that in the Imperial Council, where the law was to be decided, economic interests were merely transformed into rights. And so it was, and still is, that basically the state representations include, mostly openly or covertly, the mere economic interests. Look at the Farmers' Union in the German Reichstag; you can refrain from giving me closer examples. Everywhere we see how the tendency of modern times has been to merge economic life with the political life of the state proper. This was called progress. They began with those branches which were particularly convenient to the ruling classes, the postal, telegraph and railroad systems and the like, and extended them more and more. That is one thing that was welded together. The other thing that was merged, that was welded together, was intellectual life and the political state.

I know that I am to a certain extent treading on ice when I speak of this fusion of intellectual life with the political state, when I speak today of the fact that this fusion has led to the disadvantage, to the harm, to the illness of the social organism. Certainly, it was necessary for the ruling classes in the last centuries, and especially in the 19th century. But one must not merely believe that the administration, the operation of science and other branches of intellectual life has been corrupted, impaired by the state administration, but the content of science itself. Here, too, there is no need to go as far as the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, who once called the members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences “the Hohenzollern's scientific protection force” in a beautiful speech - gentlemen always speak very, very beautifully when they talk about such things.

In an enlightened age, there was a lot of mockery about how in the Middle Ages external science and worldview, the handmaiden, was the servant of theology. Certainly, we will never want to return to those times. Anyone who looks at things today with unbiased judgment knows that a later time will judge ours in a similar way. In many cases, scholars no longer carry the train of theology, well, I don't want to say that they clean the boots of the states concerned, but in many respects the bearers of the train of the states concerned have already become the bearers of the train. That is what one must keep in mind again and again if one wants to talk about what it has actually brought about that in recent times, on the one hand, economic life has merged with political state life, and on the other hand, intellectual life has merged with precisely this political state life. Anyone who looks into these things does not now ask, as so many people ask: What should the League of Nations do, which is now to be founded from one point of view or the other? The other day in Berne I heard a gentleman who considers himself particularly clever say: The League of Nations must establish a supranational state, it must create a supra-parliament. Yes, you see, anyone who looks with an unbiased eye at what the previous states have achieved in these four terrible years really does not want to ask with regard to the League of Nations: How should the various measures and institutions of the previous states be transferred to this League of Nations? What should be done to make this League of Nations as similar as possible to the state? - He will probably ask differently. He will perhaps ask: What should this state refrain from doing? - After all, what it has done in the last four years has not really borne much fruit. Gradually, if you really look into the workings of modern social life with a healthy mind, you come to say what the historical powers and forces really demand in modern times.

While the world war was raging, I spoke to many people about what I am also saying here. I preached to deaf ears. I said to quite a few people: You still have time now; as long as the cannons are thundering, it is advisable that those states that want to end this war sensibly speak words into the thunder of the cannons, words that are demanded by the times, words that will definitely be realized in the next ten or twenty years. Today you have the choice of either accepting reason and realizing it through reason, or, if you don't want that, you will face cataclysms and revolutions. Like sound and smoke, that went past our ears.

What the times demand of us is that we really make up our minds to create independent social entities: a free, self-reliant intellectual life, a political state to which we leave only legal life, and an economic life that we place on its own foundation. - How dreadful it is for some who, in the sense of the old habits of thought, consider themselves practitioners, that one should now approach the complicated, three juxtaposed social organisms, a special spiritual organization, a special legal organization and a special economic organization! Just think what effect this will have on economic life, for example. On the one hand, economic life is limited by the natural basis, climate and soil conditions. On the one hand, nature can be dealt with by making all kinds of technical improvements, but there is a limit beyond which we cannot go. The natural basis forms one limit of economic life. One need only recall extreme examples. Think of a country where many people can feed themselves from bananas. It takes a hundred times less work to bring the banana from its place of origin to consumption than it does to bring our wheat in our regions from sowing to consumption. Well, such extreme examples clear things up. But even if things are not so extreme in a closed social territory, the natural basis is there. It is one limit of economic life. There must be another boundary. This is the one formed by the state, which stands independently alongside economic life. Within this state, which must stand on a purely democratic basis, because it deals with what applies equally to all men, what all men must agree upon, because it must emerge from the consciousness of right which is rooted in the soul of every man, in this constitutional state, measure, time and many other things relating to human labor will also be determined quite independently of economic life. Just as the seed is not already part of economic life in relation to the forces that grasp it under the earth, but just as these natural forces determine economic life itself, so labor law must also form the basis of economic life on the part of the independent state. The price of the commodity must be determined, as by the natural basis on the one hand, so on the other hand by the labor law independent of economic life. Commodity prices must be dependent on labor law, not, as is the case today, labor prices on commodity prices.

That is what every real worker secretly, in the depths of his soul, basically expects, that the regulation of labor power and also the regulation of so-called property, which will thus no longer be property at all, will be separated from economic life, so that in the economic field there can no longer be a compulsory relationship between employer and employee, but merely a legal relationship. Then there will be in economic life only that which belongs solely to economic life: the production of goods, the movement of goods, the consumption of goods. And what can be realized is precisely what socialist thought strives to realize, that from now on production will no longer be in order to profit, but that production will be in order to consume. This can only happen if the rules are made about labor and work performance just as independently as the rules themselves are made by nature for the economic order independently of this economic order. Only then will that come into its own in the field of economic life which is today developing as the cooperative system, the associative system; this must find a proper administration on the ground of economic life. Production life must be regulated in associations, in cooperatives, according to the needs of consumption. Above all, the entire regulation of currency must be taken away from the political state. Currency, money can no longer be something that is subject to the political state, but something that belongs to the economic body. What will then be that which is the representative of money? No longer some other commodity, which is really only a luxury good and whose value is based on human imagination, gold, but what will correspond to money - I can only hint at this, you will find it explained in my book on the social question, which will appear in a few days' time - what will correspond to money will be everything that is available in the way of useful means of production. And these useful means of production, they will be able to be treated as they should actually be treated in the sense of modern social thought, they will be able to be treated in the same way as today only that which is regarded in our time as the most abominable property is treated.

What is considered to be the worst property in our time? Well, of course the intellectual, the spiritual property. In our time we know that we have it from the social order. Yes, no matter how clever a person is, no matter how much he can achieve, no matter how beautiful things he produces, it certainly corresponds to his talents, and to some other things as well, but insofar as it is utilized in the social organism, insofar as one has it from the social organism. It is therefore just that this intellectual property should not remain with the heirs, but should, at least after a number of years, pass into the social organism, become common property, to be used by those who are suited to it by their individual abilities. This most precious property, intellectual property, is treated in this way today. This is how all so-called property will be treated in the future. Only it will have to be transformed much earlier into common property, so that those who have the abilities for it can in turn contribute these abilities to this property for the benefit and purpose of the social organism. Therefore, in the book that will be published in a few days, I have shown how it is necessary that the means of production remain under the management of one person only as long as the individual abilities of this person justify the management of these means of production, that everything that is profited on the basis of the means of production, if it is not again put into the production itself, must be transferred to the community. Through the spiritual organism, we can seek out those who, in terms of their individual abilities, can pass this on to the social community.

If one has really come to know this social organism from life, it is not so easy to fulfill this modern demand that the means of production no longer be transferred to private ownership so that they remain in this private ownership. But the means must be found by which this private property loses all meaning, so that the so-called private owner is then only the temporary leader, because he has the ability to manage the means of production best for the good of the community through his skills.

When, on the one hand, workers' rights are regulated in the political state, when, on the other hand, property thus becomes a property cycle in the true sense of the word, only then will a free contractual relationship between worker and labor leader concerning communal production be possible. There will be workers and labor leaders, entrepreneurs and employees no longer.

I can only briefly outline all these things. Therefore, please allow me to point out that, in addition to the independent economic area, which on the other side will have the independent political state, the constitutional state, which will stand independently and sovereignly next to the economic area, like nature itself, there will be spiritual life. This spiritual life can only develop according to its own, true, real forces when it is placed on its own ground in the future, when the lowest teacher up to the highest leader of any branch of teaching or education is no longer dependent on any capital group or on the political state, but when the lowest teacher and all those who are involved in spiritual life know: what I do is only dependent on the spiritual organization itself. Out of a good instinct, even if not exactly out of a special appreciation of religion, out of a good instinct, modern social democracy has coined the word with regard to religion: religion must be a private matter. In the same sense, as strange as it may still sound to people today, all spiritual life must be a private matter and must be based on the trust that those who wish to receive it have in those who are to provide it. Of course, I know that many people today fear that we will all, or rather our descendants, become illiterate if we can choose our own school. We won't become illiterate. It is perhaps precisely members of leading circles, hitherto leading circles, who today have quite a lot of cause to think this way about education; they remember how much trouble it has been for them to acquire the little bit of education that secures their social position. But that which the tripartite social organism demands of people will certainly not lead to illiteracy in a free intellectual life, especially under the influence of the modern proletariat.

I am completely convinced that if one is able to realize in this way the completely democratic constitutional state, which secures workers' rights, in which every person has a say in what is the same for all people, then the modern proletariat in particular will not be preoccupied with preaching illiteracy, then it will demand of its own accord, even in a free intellectual life, that people should not be led to the ballot box in the way that can now sometimes be heard from individual regions of a neighboring state, where the monks and country priests have cleared out the asylums for idiots and lunatics in order to lead those people who did not even know what their names were to the ballot box.

Whoever wants to believe in these things and hope for these things must, however, have faith in real human power and real human dignity. Anyone who, like me, has been independent of any kind of state order all his life, who has never submitted to any kind of state order, has also been able to preserve his impartiality for that which can be built up as a spiritual life that is independent of the state and stands on its own. This spiritual life will not cultivate the individual human faculties in the way that the luxury spiritual life, the ideology of the previous spiritual life, has done. The spiritual life that is built on itself will also not be a philistine, bourgeois spiritual life, it will be a humanity spiritual life, a spiritual life that will reach down from the highest, very highest members of spiritual creation into the individual details of human work and its management; the leaders of the individual economic areas will be pupils of the free spiritual life and will not develop out of this free spiritual life what has today become the entrepreneurial spirit, the spirit of capitalism.

There are labor contracts, but no real contract can actually be made about labor. What is today a labor contract is a lie, because in reality labor is not comparable to any commodity. Therefore one must say: if any contract is to be concluded in the future, it will be concluded about the jointly performed product, and then one will feel all the more: What was this previous employment contract actually about? What was it based on? - It was not based on any right, but on an abuse of personal, individual abilities. Basically, it was an overreaching. But overreaching, where does it come from? From the cleverness that today's intellectual life has often displayed. The spiritual life that I imagine, which is left to its own devices, will not produce this cleverness, it will not produce the lie of life, it will produce the truths of life. There will no longer be protective troops for any thrones and altars, but the spirit itself will administer the individual abilities of man right down to the individual branches of mankind. Capitalism is only possible if the spiritual life on the other side can be enslaved. If the spiritual life is liberated, then capitalism in its present form will disappear. I wanted to think about how capitalism can disappear. You can read in my book on the social question in a few days' time that this capitalism will disappear when spiritual life is truly emancipated and the truths of life are put in the place of the lies of life.

In essence, what I have outlined to you today in a brief sketch has been resounding through humanity for a long time. At the end of the 18th century, the words “liberty, equality, fraternity” rang out like a mighty motto in France. - In the course of the 19th century, very clever people repeatedly proved that these three ideas contradict each other in the social organism. Liberty, on the one hand, demands that individuality can move freely. Equality excludes this freedom. Fraternity, on the other hand, contradicts the other two.

As long as one was under the hypnosis of the dogma: The All-holder, All-embracer, does he not embrace you and me, himself? As long as one was under the hypnosis of this idol of the unitary state, these three ideas were contradictions. At the moment when mankind will find understanding for the threefold healthy social organism, these three ideas will no longer contradict each other, for then freedom will prevail in the field of the independent, sovereign spiritual organism, and equality of all in the field of the state organism, the legal organism, the equality of all men, and in the field of the economic organism, fraternity, that fraternity on a large scale which will be based on the cooperatives of production and consumption, which will be based on the associations of the individual professions, which will administer economic life in an appropriately fraternal manner. The three great ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity will no longer contradict each other when the three areas - spiritual, legal and economic - have come into their own in the world. Take this today as something that is still little thought of, but it is not a utopia, it is not something that has somehow been thought up, but something that has been gained from decades of observation of modern political, economic and spiritual conditions, something that can be believed to rest in the womb of human development itself like a seed that wants to be realized in the near future. And one can perceive in the loudly speaking facts of today, one can perceive in the demands of the proletariat, even if much is still expressed differently, that the longing for such realization is already present today.

Many people call what I am saying a utopia. It is taken from a reality-friendly, reality-appropriate way of thinking. This idea of a tripartite division is not a utopia. It can be tackled immediately everywhere from any social condition if one only has the good will, which is unfortunately so often lacking today. If you believe that what I am saying is a utopia, then I would like to remind you that what I am saying here about the healthy social organism is not what is usually said. People who otherwise speak of social ideas are setting up programs. I am not thinking of a program, I am not thinking of wanting to be cleverer than other people and to know the best about everything, how to do it and so on, but I am only thinking of structuring humanity, which should decide for itself what is true, what is good, what is expedient, in the right way. And it seems to me that if it is organized in such a way that people stand within it firstly in a free spiritual life, secondly in a free political legal life, thirdly in an economic life properly administered by economic forces, then people will find the best for themselves; I am not thinking of legislation about the best, but of the way in which people must be called upon to find through themselves that which is pious for them. Nor am I thinking, as some have believed, of a rebirth of the old estates and classes: The teaching class, the military class, the nurturing class - no, the opposite is what I am talking about here. People should not be divided into classes. Classes, estates, they are to disappear by dividing up life outside man, objective life. Man, however, is the unity that belongs in all three organisms. In the spiritual organism his talents and abilities are cultivated. In the state organism he finds his rights. In the economic organism he finds the satisfaction of his needs.

I believe, however, that the modern proletarian will develop a true consciousness of humanity out of his class consciousness, that he will find more and more understanding for what has been pointed out here: for the true liberation of humanity. And I hope that once the modern proletarian's soul will clearly realize how he is called to strive for the true goal of humanity, that he will then become, this modern proletarian, not only the liberator of the modern proletariat - he must certainly become that - but that he will become the liberator of everything human, everything that is truly worth liberating in human life. That is what we want to hope for, that is what we want to work towards. When it is said: Words are now spoken enough, let us see deeds - I wanted to speak today in such words that can really turn directly into deeds.

Discussion

1st speaker (Mr. Handschin): Spoke very spiritedly of the oppression of the worker by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie imposes violence on the proletariat. The private property of the propertied classes has been created by the workers. Only communism would bring peace.

2nd speaker (Mr. Studer). Points to the ideas of free money and free land, which should enable the liberation of economic life.

3rd speaker (Mr. Mühlestein): Shows how in Germany the old powers are re-emerging and nothing has changed. Criticism of Social Democracy and the Center. Criticism of the threefold structure: it removes the law from economic and intellectual life; but justice must prevail in all three areas, not just in the constitutional state.

4th speaker: Wants to report on a “Swiss Federation for Transitional Reforms”; but is interrupted and the discussion is closed.

Rudolf Steiner: You will have noticed that the first two speakers in the discussion have basically not put forward anything against which I would need to argue, since, at least in my opinion, what has been put forward by the two gentlemen essentially shows - at least to me - how very necessary it is to take seriously what I have tried to do in a perhaps weak but honest way to contribute to the solution of the social question in the present serious times, as far as it is humanly possible. And that this is necessary, that today is the time to do so, you will at any rate have been able to gather from what the first speaker in the debate has just said to you from a soul that is certainly warmly felt.

Since the time is already well advanced, I would like to address just a few points here. The word “free land, free money” was used by the honorable second speaker. You see, this hints at something that is like a lot of things in the present day, if you want to approach the social question in precisely those ways, as I said, in real ways, as I tried to do in my presentation. On such occasions I have very often been in the situation of having to say: I am in complete agreement with you; the other person just usually, or at least very often, doesn't say it to me! The thing is, if I believed that my ideas were simply plucked out of the air from somewhere, then I wouldn't bore you with them, I would believe that they had long since not matured. That is precisely what I believe, that there is something essential about the ideas presented to you today. You will find the material, the building blocks everywhere. I gave a similar lecture in Bern the other day. A gentleman came to me then, not only in the discussion, but the next day for a conversation, and also spoke about “free land, free money”. After an hour, however, we were able to agree that what is actually wanted in the regulation of the currency question, in the creation of an absolute currency, will simply be achieved if this tripartite division that I have spoken of today is carried out properly - properly indeed - if the administration of values, the administration of money, is simply taken away from the political state and transferred to economic life. As I have said, I will show in my book “Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft” that the basis of the currency will then be quite different from what it is today, and that it will also become international. As long, of course, as the leading state, England, clings to the gold currency, the gold currency will have to apply in foreign policy; but internally, those who now really have the one true currency will no longer need gold in the social organism; for the only real true currency will consist in the means of production, which will then be there to be the currency for money. Money is completely misunderstood today. Money is only understood if it can be grasped as the complete opposite of the old natural economy.

What is money for today's social organism? It is the means of conducting a common economy. Just imagine the whole function of money. It consists simply in the fact that for what I work myself I have an instruction for something else that someone else works. And as soon as money is something other than this instruction, it is unauthorized in the social organism.

I could go on at length to confirm this, but I will only say briefly that this is what money must become! It will become so when all other machinations that play a part in the circulation of money cease. For only money is the common index which is there for the common comparison of the mutual values of commodities. That is what can also be achieved through the nature of this tripartite division, and what is partially, individually sought by the free-money movement; that is why I have said in such a case: I am in complete agreement with this movement - because I always try to see the individual movements in their justification, and I would like to lead them into a common great stream, precisely because I do not believe that one person, or even a group of people, can find what is right, but because I believe democratically that people together in reality, working together, properly organized alone, will only find what is right.

This is what I have described as a view of reality, not as some objective development. But I believe that the real human being will find what is right for the social organism out of his healthy human experience in association with other people.

We have one thing that everyone knows is only possible in social life - today's egoists would probably also like to have it for themselves - and that is language for a closed organism. Again and again it is preached in schools: If man had grown up on a lonely island, in solitude, he would not be able to speak; for speech can only be formed in social life. One must recognize [...] that all those things which are hidden behind private capital, property, which are hidden behind the mastery of some kind of work and the like, that all these things, including human talents, individual gifts, just like language, have social functions, that they belong to social life and are only possible within it. There must come a time when it becomes clear to people in schools what they are through the social organism and what they are therefore obliged to give back to the social organism. So what I am counting on is social understanding, which must come, just as the multiplication tables are taught in schools today. We will also have to relearn this. There were times when people learned something completely different in schools than they do today; just think of the Roman schools. There will come a time when children will be taught social understanding in schools. Because this has been neglected under the influence of modern technology and capitalism, we have ended up in today's conditions, in the pathological conditions of the social organism.

As far as Mr. Mühlestein is concerned, I must say that I am also in a position to have nothing against what he has put forward; I only believe that if his ideas continue to develop, they will then lead to what I have said.

For example, he has not at all considered that I am not - of course not! - want to take law out of economic life and intellectual life. No, on the contrary, I want to keep it in. And because I want it inside, I want to have developed an independent social science in which it can really be developed, created. When it has been generated, then it can have an effect on the other areas. Comprehensive thinking will show you this. If you consider the following, for example: Today, even scientific thinking does not yet really think logically and appropriately in relation to the natural human organism. People today think: the lungs - a piece of meat; the brain - also a piece of meat, and so on. Science says otherwise, but it does not say much else; for it regards these individual members of the human organism as parts of a great centralization. In truth, they see nothing else. The human being as a natural organism is a tripartite system: we have a nervous-sensory organism. The one is centralized and has its own outlets at the sensory organs. - We have a rhythmic organism, the lung-heart organism; it has its own outlets in the respiratory tract. - We have the metabolic organism, which in turn has its own outlet to the outside world. And we are this natural human being precisely because we have these three limbs, these three centralized limbs of the organism.

Can anyone now come along and say - if I say, as I have now done in my last book, “Of Riddles of the Soul”, that simply the proper scientific observation results in these three members of the human natural organism - can anyone come along and say that nature should not have developed these three members, because what matters is that all three members have air? - Of course all three limbs have air! - When the air is first inhaled through the lungs and processed accordingly, the metabolic members and the brain have their air, so that this air is drawn in and processed, and can therefore also be treated with all natural care in a specially separated member of the human natural organism. I do not want, like Schäffle, or like Meray or others, to play this analogy game between physiological and social concepts, that does not even occur to me; I only want to draw attention to the fact that a thoroughly formed thinking does not understand man as a natural organism if one only thinks: everything is centralized into one - but one understands man if one understands his three organ systems centralized in themselves.

It is precisely because man is perfect that he has these three centralized organ systems. This will be a great advance in natural science when we realize this! And the thinking that thinks so healthily about the human being also thinks healthily about the social organism, and feels healthily about the social organism. Spiritual life will be freest and best organized when it is emancipated. For in the field of emancipated spiritual life the people are already to be found who will provide for this free spiritual life. There will arise those who will actually bring the necessary dominion to this spiritual life. Those who do not bring it are those who are servilely dependent on capitalism or other things. Those who will be free as spiritual administrators will also be able to bring the blessings of spiritual life to the other two members.

And so, if justice is really produced in a state of law existing for itself, really centralized in itself, one will not have to worry that the other two members will not have justice, certainly in favorable distribution; in all the things that have been touched upon by Mr. Mühlestein, there must be justice; that will come in when it is first produced.

So it is not in order to have justice in one separate organ and not in the other that I take these three parts, but precisely in order to have justice in all three, I see the necessity that it should first be produced.

I would like to know if anyone can say: In a house, there are father, mother, children, the maidservants; but now you divide this house into father, mother, maidservants, and two cows that give milk, but all need the milk, so all must produce milk, not just the two cows? - No, I say: the cows must produce the milk so that everyone in the house can be properly supplied with milk. And so the constitutional state must have the law according to plan, produce the law, then the rights will be where they are needed. And that is precisely when they will be - forgive the somewhat trivial comparison - when they can be milked by the rule of law!

That is what I would like to emphasize; that what is important today is not to somehow pursue favourite ideas, but precisely to summarize that which pulsates in many hearts as a demand, that which is already present in many minds, even if more or less unconsciously, out of the forces of the times, and to really grasp that in the impulses that are there as the great forces of the times, which want to be realized, which we should now realize through reason. But if we do not want to realize them through reason, this will not prevent them from entering into reality.

Dear readers, we either have the choice to be reasonable or to wait in some other way for the realization of that which must be realized because it wants to realize itself out of the forces of history.

In this sense, however, I believe that proletarian consciousness is capable of grasping these demands, which lie in history itself, and thus of really striving for and achieving what I said at the end, insofar as it is possible for human beings: the liberation of everything in humanity that is worth liberating.