The Reorganization of the Social Organism

GA 330 — 3 May 1919, Stuttgart

V. Ways Out of Social Hardship and Towards a Practical Goal

In the present grave situation of a large part of humanity, especially of humanity in Central Europe, it would be disastrous if the cure for various serious social ills were sought with small and petty means. It is necessary today to strive for comprehensive, forceful impulses that are based on a real understanding of what has driven us into confusion and chaos. It is necessary to turn our eyes, impartially, honestly and sincerely, to what actually is there and from which we want to escape. These considerations, which are characterized by the few sentences just quoted, were the starting point for the writing of that appeal for the threefold social order, which you know and which I also want to talk about today. It is only possible, I might say, to point out the necessity of what is said in this appeal and, in somewhat more detail, in my book, The Essential Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life, from this or that point of view. And many lectures would be needed if one wanted to point out everything that underlies the impulses that led to this appeal. Therefore, I must ask you to accept that what I can say in a single lecture can only be a part of what is actually needed to understand the social ideal that is meant by the appeal. Above all, however, I would like to point out today that a glance at the international situation that led to the terrible catastrophe of recent years, if viewed objectively and without prejudice, must lead to this appeal. Foreign political conditions and domestic political conditions, if we speak from the point of view of Germany, seem to force us to the impulses that are meant here. The basic idea of this appeal is that the terrible situation in which we find ourselves is essentially due to the fact that in modern times there has been a tendency to mix and blend three areas of life that must now develop independently: the three areas of intellectual life, the actual political or legal or state life, and economic life.

In the unitary state, which has increasingly been regarded as the panacea for the social order, hypnotizing humanity, all the forces of these three areas of life have been merged. Today, salvation for our social organism must be sought in the independence of these three areas of life, as a practical goal. This is, in the abstract, the basic impulse underlying this appeal. If we want to understand from one of the many points of view that come into consideration, we must look to the left and to the right, so to speak, if we want to understand what has led Central European humanity, in particular, into today's terrible and dreadful catastrophe. Germany and the German people were involved in the war to the west and to the east, and it can be said that it is only by looking at the circumstances in the west and the east and how they interacted that we can understand our current situation in Central Europe.

If we look to the West, we will see, if we first consider social hardship, how, especially in the countries of the West, in those countries with which the war lasted the longest, in the historical development of modern times, clear fusion of economic life with political life has taken place, so that from the national instincts, especially of the English-speaking population, I might say, in this part of the world, as if naturally and elementarily, a striving for the state has arisen, above all, from the particular point of view of economic life. Everything political was permeated by the economic. The economic laws became political laws. Thus we see the fusion of political and economic life when we turn our gaze to the West.

In another way, we see the fusion of political life with cultural life initially in the form of nationalist folk cultures and their intellectual life, which emerges from this nationalism. Looking eastward, we see the fusion of intellectual life with political life. Everything – here it can only be hinted at, but a thorough study of the European and American situation proves it – everything indicates that the explosive materials which have gradually accumulated between Central Europe and the West can only be understood from the conflict that arose in the West itself between economic and state life due to the fact that economic and state life, but with a particular predominance of economic life, had merged in a chaotic way. In the East, the explosive materials were stored due to the merging of the individual spiritual cultures of the national communities with the political life of the state.

We were placed between these accumulations during the development of modern times. We have so far failed to learn what our task is in this wedging between West and East. The terrible world catastrophe that arose from these two impulses, which I have characterized, should teach us where to steer, especially in Central Europe, which should learn from the West and the East. From the West it should learn that, as a neighbor of the West, it has the task of separating and achieving independence in economic life and political state life. From the East it has to learn the separation of spiritual life from - if we look superficially at it only in national life - state life. Huge errors – there is no use closing our eyes to this fact today – huge errors have piled up in the politics of the middle states, in the careless politics of these middle states, which finally led to nothingness, because the statesmen were not able to see how certain national instincts in the West have so far prevented economic life from merging with political life and gaining the upper hand in the latter, just as it provided one explosive charge after another in the East, how intellectual life has merged with state life in an unorganized way. Huge political errors, which one must recognize in their historical necessity, are what finally had to be discharged in that catastrophe that brought us the most terrible disaster. Has one in recent times, and I mean a long time, yes, has one actually until today the good will to look at these conditions in a penetrating way? Are there not, in spite of the present terrible situation, many people among us who look down on truly practical impulses as worthless idealism because these practical impulses are great ideals today, and who, out of complacency and timidity of spirit, long for small goals, which they alone call practical, while they turn against the great goals that are necessary today as against the impractical ones. These people, who today reject the truly practical, great goals as idealisms and only want to look at the very nearest, these people are the same or the descendants of the same who brought Central European humanity, European humanity in general, into its present situation and who will cause the damage to become even greater. If it is not possible for the so-called practice of life of the philistines to be replaced by the real practice of life — today the situation must be viewed impartially and honestly — then the result of a true foreign policy, which leads to the impulses of the threefold social organism, will never come.

But today we are not only dealing with a consequence of foreign policy. We are dealing with developmental forces that are surging from quite a different direction and making waves in humanity! What we are facing today can be compared to the migration of peoples and the encounter of this migration with Christianity at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Anyone who considers the great impulses of Christianity in their effectiveness through the Middle Ages and the modern era must actually notice the character of Christianity's impulses, especially among the peoples who are usually referred to when the migration of peoples is considered, and the character it has taken on among the more southern peoples. Originating in Asia, Christianity first took hold among the highly developed peoples of Greece and Italy, among the highly developed intellects of these southern regions of Europe. Only then did it penetrate into the lands of the “barbarians,” as the southern peoples called those storming in from the north. If we take a survey of these conditions, we find that what actually made Christianity effective in the world did not develop through its passage through the southern peoples, who were at the highest stage of development but already in a state of decline, but that it unfolded its mighty impulses in the hearts and minds of those peoples who still had unspent intelligence and unspent soul power. That was, I might say, the horizontal migration of peoples with its peculiarities at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Today, when we look at the proletarian movement, we are faced with a vertical migration of peoples. That which can be called the proletariat flows out of the depths of cultural life to the leading currents of culture. But what we must seek as the new, saving element of culture, as the great impulses that lead us out of the confusion, that works, I would say, from the depths of the spirit, as Christianity once did for the Greek and Roman peoples. And we see how that which wants to seize the future in order to reshape the world in spiritual, state and economic terms needs the unspent intellects, the unspent minds of those masses of people who, in today's vertical migration of peoples, are streaming from bottom to top, while, as I already I have already stated here, in the worn-out brains of those who, like the Greeks and Romans of old, are at the height of culture, there is hardly any trace of that fire in the leading circles that have been in charge up to now, a fire that we urgently need today to find the way out of social distress and to achieve truly great, practical goals for humanity. That such paths must be found is indicated above all by the fact that the vertical migration of peoples has played itself out in the course of the more recent development of humanity.

Foreign policy points to the threefold nature of the social organism. What does domestic political life show us? It shows us that precisely those elements of the people who carry the unspent intellect, the unspent powers of the soul from below upwards – however little many people today may want to admit it, however little the proletariat itself can find suitable and appropriate words and ideas for certain phenomena today – that these people feel this in their souls, they feel it in the hardship of their bodies, and in everything that confronts them, one can say that for three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, they feel the triple hardship of the social order in three ways. They felt that they were facing, first of all, a spiritual life with which they felt no community other than the one that had been characterized for them in the last half-century by Karl Marx's words about “surplus value”. What underlies this has by no means been fully understood, neither on the one hand by the bourgeoisie nor on the other by the proletariat. In fact, things are taken rather superficially, especially in more recent education. What underlies it is that the entire, so much praised, so much vaunted intellectual culture of modern times in all its ramifications could only develop as the culture of a few on the subsoil of the deprivation of culture on the part of the great, broad masses. Not as if the hitherto leading classes had brought want and misery to the proletarian masses out of a malicious will, out of devilry. No, they brought it about, as I tried to show last Monday, through lack of understanding of the tasks that arose in world history from the fact that ever broader and broader masses were seized by the modern vertical migration of peoples, by the striving for a spiritual life that they lacked. But that was how it was, and the essential thing is that what we have achieved in art, indeed in science, what we have achieved in education with regard to intellectual life, could, on the one hand, only be for a few and that it had to be worked for under the deprivations of many. This special kind of intellectual life could not exist without creating an abyss between the privileged and the disadvantaged. The broad masses, striving upwards, felt this in relation to the main aspect of human life, in relation to the intellectual life.

In contrast to the life of the state, or of politics or law, the upwardly striving masses felt more and more that there is something for human nature that is the same for all people. This equality cannot be developed in any theory; it simply exists in the experiences of every healthy soul. Just as one cannot speak to a person with blind eyes about the color blue or red, so one cannot speak to an unhealthy soul about what lives in every healthy soul as a sense of right and wrong, that sense of right and wrong that makes man equal to all other men in the second sphere of social life, in the life of the state. But this feeling, which was still suppressed in the broad masses in the old patriarchal conditions, and even in the conditions of the Middle Ages, this feeling of equal rights, it came up more and more intensely in the last centuries and especially in the proletarian development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ruling and leading classes could not help but call on the broad masses for democracy. They needed it for their own interests. They needed a proletariat that was increasingly educated in schools. But you cannot educate one soul without educating the other at the same time. By making the proletarians into skilled workers for the complicated tasks in their factories and elsewhere, the ruling and leading classes had to, because one is not possible without the other, because the other develops by itself, at the same time allow the legal consciousness that is inherent in every self-aware human soul to arise in the proletariat. But this sense of justice developed quite differently in the proletarian than in the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity. In the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity, feelings of justice developed around the circles of interests into which these classes had long been born. The proletarian, by being placed at the machine, by being harnessed in the soul-destroying capitalism, was not equipped with such interests. Those relationships that existed everywhere between what the leading classes represented in social life and what they felt as their humanity, those contexts of interest did not exist for the proletarian. I do not mean it humorously when I say that for the members of the leading classes, something may have emerged from the social context in which they were placed, from an inner sense of humanity that gave them a certain sense of right and wrong when they could write, let us say, “factory owner” on their business card and the like, or even “reserve lieutenant”. But for the proletarian, there was no such connection of interests between the soul-destroying machine and his humanity, and between being harnessed into capitalism and his humanity. The proletarian was reduced to his bare human rights, and by looking at the others, he saw not universal human rights, but class privileges and class disadvantages. That was the second experience, the experience in the field of state life.

And the third experience arose for the proletarian in the economic sphere. There he saw how his labor power in the wage relationship was treated by the leading, leading circles in exactly the same way as a commodity. This had a deep, profound impact on the feelings of the modern proletariat. It created an awareness that perhaps did not express itself clearly in the mind, but that took root more and more deeply and intensely in the hearts of proletarians who were aware of their humanity: In ancient times there were slaves, the whole man could be sold and bought like a thing; later there was serfdom, less of the human being could be bought and sold, but still enough; today there is still buying and selling of human labor for those who own nothing but that labor. This labor power, one must go with it, by having to sell it, one cannot carry it to the market like an object and go back again after selling the object, one must deliver oneself to the one who buys the labor power. The enslavement of the laborer to the economic cycle was the third experience of the modern proletariat. Thus, in the social order that emerged as a welfare state, the proletarians found themselves united in the same way that we found them united in foreign policy; they found themselves united in the modern state, in intellectual life, in state and legal life, and in economic life. Just as the amalgamation of the great imperialisms led to the explosion of the world war, so, on the other hand, what moves from the bottom up, what is experienced threefold in intellectual life, in legal or state life and in economic life, leads to social explosion. The two belong together. The old order exploded into the world war catastrophe from the empires, into which modern capitalism saw itself transformed from large-scale enterprise without really knowing it. Large-scale enterprise has become imperialism, and the clash of imperialisms has given rise to the world war catastrophe. That which moved vertically, from bottom to top, contains the same impulses. It only leads in the opposite direction to that social distress that was a world social distress in the conditions of the newer empires, which either, as in the West, became empires of interests, or as in the East, amalgamations of state empires with national empires. The fusion of the three spheres of life led to the explosion of the world war and into a social distress of the greatest magnitude, because this so-called world war is nothing different than previous wars. It is the last gasp of the old order in a terrible form. Let us see how a new one is about to begin, from the bottom up. Let us not fail to see what impulses are striving to develop differently for the further development of humanity than those that developed from the old economic order into world imperialism and thus led to the most terrible horrors of recent times. This is how the signs of the times speak today. And so man must know how to face these signs of the times today. Have we not experienced how, especially in Central Europe, it has become apparent that people have gradually lost a truly healthy judgment about intellectual, economic, and political life because of the unnatural, the impossible gradual fusion of the three areas?

I ask you, without getting involved in a critique of the circumstances, I ask you whether events and facts of the last human development – let us look at them only with regard to Europe for now – have not emerged almost entirely under the influence of the fusion, for example, of politics and economic life? The whole world has screamed – I do not want to get involved in a critique of this screaming, of course, there are not only lambs on this side and only wolves on the other – but the whole world has screamed about the breakthrough through Belgium at the beginning of the war. How could this breakthrough have come about? It could only have come about because the strategic railways had been built there. They would not have been there if the economic forces had been separated from the political forces within the German territory. Look at the map of Europe, consider the many railway networks and then study from a healthy industrial science - which we do not yet have - whether these purely economic institutions, the railways, would be as they are - you can even do these studies in neutral countries - if they only served economic life and developed out of it. Or do we not notice, when we look at the relationship between economic and political life, how, precisely because the empire has become more and more merged with economic conditions, all of Central Europe has gradually become more and more of a large commercial building, following the Western model? Do we not notice that political education is increasingly fading away? Just think of the vast sums of intelligence, the vast sums of prudence that have been directed towards pure business life, towards economic life, while the peoples of Central Europe have become more and more apolitical, even compared to their apolitical nature of earlier centuries. We have become depoliticized by merging politics with economic life.

And finally, more and more we have come to depend completely on state life for all intellectual life. Here, too, it must be pointed out again and again how not only the filling of positions but also the administration of schools have come to depend on modern state life, but also the content of intellectual life itself, the content of art, the content of science. People are not yet aware of this today, which is why the most monstrous prejudice arises in this very area, when people attack what is important. And what is important today is that we rise up to work towards a healthy separation of economic life from state or political or legal life on the one hand, and again towards a separation of the entire intellectual life from state life on the other.

Today, the call for socialization runs through our economic life. It emerges, one might say, from the aforementioned vertical migration of peoples like a motto in world history. And even though there is still little sign of even a reasonably adequate understanding of true socialization, we must nevertheless say, when we look at social life without prejudice: However unclear the thinking on the matter may be, the call for socialization expresses something significant in world history. We see this perhaps most clearly from the fact that, precisely because of the terrible economic experiences of the war, even capitalistically oriented thinkers could not avoid speaking of the necessity of socializing the economy. This necessity for socialization of the economy is, for example, very energetically emphasized by an otherwise capitalist-minded man, Walther Rathenau. Indeed, in some of the points the Appeal makes, one can even find points of contact with what Walther Rathenau says, for example, in his little book 'The New Economy'. But as we shall see in a moment, for those who really understand the impulses of the threefold social organism, there is a radical, fundamental difference in the socialization of the economic between what must be demanded on the basis of this threefold social organism as such socialization and Rathenau's views. And this fundamental difference shows precisely what is most necessary in contemporary social striving.

But how did people actually arrive at the idea of socialization in the economic sphere, at the demands for socialization? For a long time, the human ideal was seen in what was called the free play of economic forces. Much of what can be called the modern private-capitalist economic system came into being as a result of the free play of economic forces, of the free competition of economic personalities and groups. But then, in the course of the development of the economic system that had emerged under the influence of modern technology, under the influence of modern capitalism and under the influence of the free play of economic forces, it became apparent that more and more was being separated from a human minority, namely the proletarian majority, which became the bearer of the three great demands that I have just characterized. And so the justified demand arose within the proletariat for socialization, that is, for the opposite of the pure play of forces in the economic sphere. According to the ideas of the leading figures of the proletariat, the development of economic life should henceforth be based on the thorough organization of the whole of economic life. And we see, of course, how in certain areas, albeit to the horror and disgust of many, such thorough organization is being implemented. For the old free play of forces, one still found the beautiful saying of the salutary of throne and altar as an echo of earlier state and economic orders. Now, out of the catastrophe of world war, the call and enthusiasm for throne and altar is abandoned, but we see something lurking that opens up in the face of the former throne and altar. Not only the former ruling classes, but also the broadest sections of the truly rational, thinking proletariat feel something frightening in the question: What will happen when office and machine take the place of throne and altar? Will it be better for us? Could it not be that the same dictators might develop from among those who work in the factory and office as have developed under the influence of throne and altar? This is a significant question, but also one that, if answered in a healthy way, must lead to a way out of social hardship to truly practical goals. I am still speaking in a very abstract way, but the idea I am about to express can be practically applied in all areas of economic life if all those involved in economic life are called upon to organize these matters. But it must be done in such a way that trust can prevail between all these links in the economic chain.

Let us speak openly and honestly on this matter. The days I have spent here in Stuttgart addressing numerous proletarian assemblies have been a great experience for me. I hardly spoke, only in form at most, to the proletarians differently than I speak here. I was, it turned out, understood in Switzerland and here in the broadest circles of the proletariat. And what did this teach me? It taught me that it is only possible to make progress, whether with socialization or with other social demands of the present, if we work with the trust of humanity. That we will only make progress if we work with people and align ourselves with their desires, if we stop seeking salvation only in issuing decrees from above out of a seemingly superior intellect. Today we can only avoid dictatorships if we find the right words that, when spoken by individuals, are spoken from the heart, from the feelings of the broad masses, especially the working population. I wanted to say that first. It points out that the social issues that are immediately urgent cannot be resolved in small circles, however they may call themselves, but that they must be resolved on the broad basis of the factories and workshops, from the people, not from socialist theories.

One of the first demands, if we take this human factor into account, is that the economic life should learn from the bitter and terrible events of the world war catastrophe, that is, from what the world war catastrophe has become, how socialization should be carried out. We must learn that everything that leads to such socialization must be disastrous, especially if it again confuses state or legal life with economic life.

Time and again I have to point out the unnatural amalgamation of economic life with state and legal life, as it developed in Austria in the last third of the nineteenth century. The fact that Austria fell into such a terrible decline, and was ripe for decline long before the world war catastrophe, is due to the fact that, on this hotbed of conflict, it was not understood how destructive it would be to form the state based on the rule of law from economic curiae at the dawn of the newer constitutional life. Only through coercion was a change made, much later, but it was much too late, to something other than what was attempted in the 1860s. The so-called Reichsrat was formed from four economic curiae: large landowners; chambers of commerce; cities, markets and industrial towns; rural communities. Purely economic interests were asserted on the territory of the state, where the law was to arise. Economic interests were transformed into rights! And anyone who has properly studied this political development of Austria, which under the Taaffe Ministry in the last third of the nineteenth century was called muddling through, knows what seeds of destruction lay in the fact that in these territories, which were based on the most diverse nationalities, the impulse was not found to develop the legal life separately for itself and the economic life separately for itself. I could say a great deal, and I could say a great deal in the parliaments of practically all the present States, if I wanted to show in detail how the impossibility of merging political or state or legal life with economic life has increased everywhere. From today onwards, the first requirement must be to separate this economic life from the state life. Then we can proceed with the claim of all human resources involved in economic life, trusting in them to carry out the appropriate socialization, which will consist - as I have explained in my book and also hinted at in other places - in the formation of associations, first by profession, then by context, coalitions, cooperatives, which arise from the pursuit of harmonization of conditions in consumption and production. Only on this basis can healthy socialization arise. It will arise when people see the damage caused by both the free play of forces and mechanical socialization – both of which have been prejudicial to humanity. It will only arise when we learn from the lessons of world's history, so that socialization will come about not through the extinction of the free play of forces, but precisely through the understanding work of the free play of human forces. You can only do that if you spread trust, but then you can do it! That, more or less, is what Walther Rathenau meant, and he was echoing a certain saying of Gretchen to Faust. But the threefold social organism means something quite different. You see, that is why Walther Rathenau's concept of socialization is quite different from the socialization that had to be proposed by the threefold order, because Walther Rathenau cannot imagine anything other than socialization taking place while state supervision continues and the state draws a steady profit from what is produced in the socialized enterprises.

This only proves that a person who might have learned from practical experience remains trapped in blind theory. This only proves how powerfully suggestive the thoughts that have formed in the course of the development of modern capitalism continue to be, even in those who strive for socialization, how necessary it is to struggle against prejudices in this area with all the strength of free practical insight into the circumstances. Everything that is to be raised in the way of order in economic life, of reasonableness and understanding permeating economic life, of morality, must come from the independent personalities and bodies that themselves direct economic life. Economic life will only develop healthily when the state has nothing to say in economic life other than what it has to say through the personalities involved in economic life, as personalities with rights. Of course, if someone cheats others in the field of economic life, then he is subject to the state law. He is subject to the state law as a personality. But the functions and activities of the personality in economic life must be based, in the economic partnership, on the mere contract, on mere trust. Even if this still meets with many prejudices on the socialist side today, anyone who judges not from concepts and ideas but from the experience that the last decades of European economic life have brought, up to the economic downfall in the war, will say this. And he must say: We will not achieve sound economic conditions until the separation of economic life from state life has been accomplished. We have arrived at the present situation through the intermingling of what should be based on trust and contract with the state, which should be based solely on laws. The laws of the state may only shine into economic life insofar as they shine through personalities. Only in this way can we bring out of economic life what must be brought out, that which, as labor power, is today, like a commodity, unlawfully harnessed into the economic cycle, according to the proletarian sense.

On the one hand, economic life borders on natural conditions. Imagine the following absurdity: some economic consortium would get together, determine its balance sheet, the probable balance sheet for 1919; and this consortium would take the 1918 balance sheet and then, based on assets and liabilities, determine how many days it should rain in the summer of 1919, for example, in order to achieve a desirable business situation for the next year. Of course this is pure nonsense, isn't it. But I only mention this nonsense because it should be seen from it that, on the one hand, economic life is based on natural conditions, which we cannot completely regulate from within this economic life. We can do some things through technical devices, but we cannot completely regulate them from within mere economic life. Just as economic life borders on natural life on the one hand, so in the future economic life must border on the legal life of the state, and in the legal life of the state everything must be regulated that is subject to the legal life, above all human labor. For the economic cycle, the regulation of the human labor of the worker must lie outside this economic process. Just as the natural forces of the soil ripen the corn and wheat outside the economic process, so the regulation of the measure, time and type of labor must be outside the economic process. Nothing must be determined by the economic situation, nothing must be determined by the economic conditions and forces with regard to the measure and type of human labor. With regard to labor, man stands quite differently to man than with regard to the satisfaction of human needs, which are met by the economic cycle of production, circulation and consumption of commodities. From this cycle of production, labor must be taken out and regulated in the purely democratic life of the state, in the separate state emancipated from economic life. Thus the economic process is healthily constrained between nature on the one hand and the legal life of the state on the other. All this must be organized in the spirit of threefolding. This can only be achieved if the state does not develop what can only develop within the economic process from person to person, but only develops everything that relates to the relationship between individuals, where each individual is equal to every other individual. Therefore, no profit that comes from a consortium of people, from an economic group, from an economic community, may prevail on the basis of this state life. What is gained in the economic sphere must in turn flow back into the economic life of the people to raise their standard of living. Whatever flows into the state, let us call it a tax or whatever, must, if I am to express myself clearly, come only from the pocket of the individual human being. Only the individual human being can stand in relation to the state; then, on the basis of the state, only the individual human being stands in relation to the individual human being. Then human rights will truly flourish on the basis of the state. Then the social question, insofar as it is a labor question, will be solved by emancipating state life from economic life, in which the compulsion can no longer prevail by which labor itself becomes an object of the free play of forces in the free play of forces. The worker must have organized his labor power before he enters the workshop, before he enters the factory, before he enters the economic process. Then he appears as a free personality, whose freedom is guaranteed by the state labor law, to the head of labor; only then does a healthy relationship develop.

Here we are on truly practical socialization ground. Those who understand the conditions of this ground know that you can make socialization framework laws without end from other conditions. You can make them today, find them useless after two years, reform them, find them useless again after five years and reform them, and so on. We will not arrive at a healthy, beneficial state sooner than we rise up to attack the practice at such a point as I have just pointed out. It is precisely this characteristic of the development of recent times that this development, in many ways for human thinking, for human habits of thinking, clings to the surface of things. And now, when we are confronted with world-shaking facts, we see in so many cases, unfortunately, unfortunately, the inadequacy of the old party judgments, which were supposed to build up and which in the building up often behave not like judgments that intervene in reality, but like mummies of judgment that have died under the party stiffness, under the party philistrosity of more recent times. Therefore, it can be said that in the present day, when things should be seen urgently and squarely and honestly and truthfully, the most important things are seen so crookedly. It is understandable that many who have seen modern capitalism in its development now hold the view that private capitalism as a whole must go and common ownership of all means of production must prevail. It is understandable that this judgment, which has been formed over decades, I would say out of bleeding souls, out of need and misery, is difficult to discard. Nevertheless, a deeper question must arise – after all, we cannot do without capital accumulation in the modern economy – the question: What must be associated with capital accumulation? The individual ability of people to use capital in the appropriate way, not in an egoistic but precisely in a social sense, must be associated with capital accumulation. We cannot do this if we do not cultivate human individual abilities, if we do not make the respective capital administrations of the enterprises accessible to these human individual abilities. Therefore, on the ground on which this call for social threefolding, which you have mentioned again today, originated, an idea had to be grasped that represents something completely different from what is still often understood today as the socialization of capital.

It is remarkable how, when thinking practically, one is led to making the administration of capital dependent on the third sphere, which must become independent in a healthy social organism, the emancipated spiritual organism. We have increasingly severed the link between intellectual work and the work of capital in the economic process. As a result, instead of developing an economic upswing that can be linked to an increase in the standard of living of the masses, we have increasingly developed a kind of economic overexploitation despite all technical advances. Particularly with regard to the impulses that play a major role in modern economic life, for example the impulse of credit, modern economic life has run itself into a strange cul-de-sac. Credit in the context of economic life today is something that can almost only be supported by existing economic factors. In the future, we need the possibility that credit will not only be born on the basis of economic life, we need the possibility that credit can be born into economic life from outside. Not true, a paradoxical assertion, a strange assertion; but what underlies it is even stranger as it is. As spiritual life becomes independent in the direction of the future, developing out of its own conditions, we shall emerge from that abstract spiritual life, from that luxurious spiritual life that cannot find any relation to practical life. Those who know me will not suppose that I want to belittle spiritual life in any way. But the intellectual life that will develop out of its own conditions, isolated from the other two social organisms, will not be an abstract intellectual life that merely preaches or remains on abstract intellectual heights. It will be an intellectual life that does not merely lead to abstract knowledge about this or that, but that leads to making people capable as people. In a future social order, we will no longer be able to use our grammar schools, which are alien to life. Nor anything similar.

But that which will live will be something that has spiritual impact, that the human soul is able to carry in all its most spiritual needs for life. It is precisely by developing that which so many people today regard as an outlandish spiritual life that we come to find that path which cannot be found by our education system, which is forged to the state, that path which educates the human being as a whole human being, educating the human being in such a way that any kind of intellectual culture will no longer be possible without at the same time being a skill for practical things, a way of looking at practical things. The materialism of modern times has made people impractical. A true spiritual life, which will not be the life of a state servant in the field of the spirit, will make people practical again. It will not produce people in the field of the highest culture who think they have worldviews but do not know what a bank, credit, mortgages and so on are, and how these work in economic life. It will not produce people who know about the forces of physics but who have never chopped wood in their lives. I am, of course, speaking comparatively here. There is a practical bridge between a genuine spiritual life, left to its own devices, and the management of economic life. Capitalism, in its damaging form, can only be overcome if the management of capitalism is closely linked to the recovery of spiritual life. Then there will emerge what may be called a healthy socialization of capital. Then those people will emerge from the spiritual life who can also bring credit, new credit, into economic life, who can constantly fertilize economic life. Then the cycle of capital will be possible, of which I speak in my book. Today I can only touch on these points. In the next lectures that I am allowed to give here, I will have to discuss individual specific questions of this kind, in particular the relationship between capital and human labor.

Thus we see how the three great impulses of human social development, which, as I mentioned the other day, have been shining maxims of human endeavor since the French Revolution, will be able to materialize through the three-part social organism. Freedom in the field of independent intellectual life, equality in all fields of state life, fraternity through the associations and cooperatives of the self-built economic life.

Now, in conclusion, I would just like to say this: I know that if one hears only the generalities, and not yet the specific practicalities that have been mentioned again today, one can have many objections to them, because one does not know how everything is really connected in practice in the thinking about this threefold social organism, from the founding of the university to the sale of a toothbrush. The practical nature of the proposal lies precisely in the fact that one can object in many ways when one only hears the general. But the practical value will emerge when people of all professions, of all human activities, participate in the realization of this idea in their social work in the individual concrete case. In the face of the objection that it is idealism or even utopian, in the face of this objection, more and more people will speak out about the serious facts of the time.

In July and early August 1914, world events reduced to absurdity in a strange way the ideas that many still consider practical today. In my pamphlet, 'The Crux of the Social Question', I pointed out at the end, where international relations are discussed, that people at home and abroad still have no idea of what really happened in Berlin on the last day of July and the first days of August 1914. The world will demand to know what happened there. When the truth is told about these things, it will be seen that a terrible light falls on the events of modern times, a light that will show that we do not just need a transformation of one or the other, that we need new thoughts, new habits of thought, that we not only have to transform institutions, but that we have to relearn and rethink in the thoughts of our heads.

Those who honestly and sincerely come to terms with this situation will not despondently recoil at the objections of those who say: You idealist, stick to your trade, stick to your ideals, don't talk us into practice! These practitioners will see what a pest this practice of life will reveal itself to be. But those who are the true practitioners, who think from the great impulses of human development, do not ascribe any special cleverness to themselves. For what compels us today to speak as I have done today, are the facts of the present itself. Oh, sometimes one feels so that one would like to compare oneself with that boy who once sat at the machine and had to operate the two taps, where the steam was let in through one and the condensed water through the other. The boy was truly not a genius inventor because of his age, but he stood before the machine, which revealed something to him through its facts. He saw how opening one of the valves coincided with the descent of the balance arm on one side, and opening the other valve with the descent of the balance rod on the other side. So, in his naivety, he took some ropes and tied the cocks to the balancing rod – and lo and behold, there he was at his steam engine, watching the balancer go up and down and open and close the cocks. But with that something important had been found. It was not the man who had been right at the time who now approached the boy and said: You good-for-nothing, get rid of those cords, just open the valves by hand; but it was the man who had found the self-control of the steam engine through the naive machinations of that boy.

Today, the facts speak so powerfully that one truly feels naive when trying to find how the self-control of the healthy social organism should be achieved. I could only hint at this today. It will be found when the following are allowed to function in full independence: spiritual life, economic life, and political or state life.

And so, I would like to conclude today by saying that I hope that humanity, and in particular Central European humanity, will recognize the significance of these impulses in the necessities of life in modern times before it is too late. For it must be recognized that we can only effectively move towards practical goals out of social need if we come up with ideas that contain the germ of action. It is thoughts that contain germs, thoughts that contain the germs of deeds, that we should seek, and we, who represent the tripartite social organism in its three impulses of independent spiritual, economic and legal life, believe that these impulses must be carried into the development of humanity before it is too late.

Closing remarks after the discussion

Dear attendees,

I do not want to keep you any longer with my closing remarks, not so much because there is not still much to be said about the remarks of the esteemed speakers, but above all because we are already too far ahead in time. Therefore, some of what I would like to say, but only in a vague way, has been said by some of the esteemed speakers, will have to be taken into account in the next two lectures to be given here. However, I would like to address some of them today, albeit very briefly. So please forgive the brevity of the answers to the direct questions that have been put to me.

The question has been raised as to why I myself – possibly through those on whom my word could have made some impression – have not raised the voice of peace earlier. Well, even though there were speakers in this discussion who again raised the accusation of idealism, I would like to emphasize quite strongly that I am and want to be a practitioner of life through and through, and that therefore it never occurs to me to merely propagate things that do not show their potential for realization in the facts of life. I would therefore also like to answer these questions with a few facts. What do you think would have been a truly practical way of promoting peace propaganda in real terms, say here in Stuttgart, well, let's say in the middle of the year or in the spring of 1916? By calling you together here and speaking fine words to you about the necessity of peace? Do you think that in the spring of 1916 a real practitioner of life could have achieved that so easily? Well, there were other ways. These ways, which came from the realization, from the full realization of the matter, were tried in order to do what was right at the time. In the not too distant future, it will be necessary to talk seriously about the history of the last four to five years, not in the way that people still talk about the history of these years in many circles. To mention just one of the facts: I fully advocated what I considered necessary as early as the spring of 1916, when it would have been possible to take practical action. I tried everything possible. Partly because of lack of time, because I would have to talk a lot about it, I will not elaborate further. It came to the point that on a certain day my task in the face of the terrible events should have begun. But then came the strange decree, I will call it that, from the highest instance, although those who had examined the matter considered it to be very promising. The decree came from the instance in which many people believe because they were ordered to believe: “He is an Austrian German, after all. Before we use Austrians for such services, we have to hire our capable German people for them. — That is the truth! That is how a truth can be! If I told you the whole context of the matter, no one would ask me why I did not stand up earlier for what I stand up for today. And another thing. At the beginning of this century and at the end of the last century, I was a teacher at a workers' training school founded by the old Wilhelm Liebknecht. At that workers' training school, I formed a very loyal following among the students. But perhaps the members of the Socialist Party present here know that there are also so-called bigwigs within this party. And so it came about that one fine day, because I did not want to teach a dogmatic, materialistic view of history, four people out of six hundred of my students – four people who had never heard me outnumbered six hundred of my students who had heard me for years – and managed to get me fired. This is also a small chapter as to why the things that are now being spoken of me have not been spoken of earlier. Those who know how and where I have spoken on these subjects do not ask. But it is one thing to speak and another to be listened to. I am firmly convinced that many of those who are listening to me today would not have listened at all before the great lessons of the terrible and dreadful events of recent years came. This is also something that must be taken into account.

If it has been said that a bone of contention should be thrown between the state and labor, then, please, I must also refer to one of the next lectures. It will show that the esteemed previous speaker has misunderstood me completely if he believes that I want to make the state an economic actor in just any old way. That will not be the case. Rather, the state will play no economic role at all, so it cannot be the payer of wages either. Instead, for the state it is a matter of the freedom of the labor force. In this sense, I have also been correctly understood by many.

Now I have only briefly responded to certain questions with individual facts. In the course of time, these very questions will be answered quite differently.

If one of the esteemed gentlemen who spoke before has pointed out that it has been said that I have not explained the things, then it must be said that it is precisely the case that these things can only be explained from the experience of life, that when they are expressed, they go out as an appeal to human thinking and human experience. One must really turn to life for a change, otherwise we will not make any progress. Here is something that approaches people in such a way that they are to give it their free understanding. Unfortunately, we have seen that much has been understood in recent times – well, what I have not understood are the things that certain gentlemen have had framed in quite beautiful frames in recent years, the proverbs from a certain quarter, I have not understood those. The difference between what is to be understood here and what has been so easily understood in the course of the last few years is that, of course, here, with understanding, an act of inner freedom should be present. There, understanding was commanded. Let us sit up straight for once, try to understand something without being ordered to understand it, and let us try to work out how much of what we think we understand we only think we understand because it has been instilled in us, drilled into us or ordered to be understood. Now, anyone who is a practitioner of life can finally understand when someone says: Don't be hard on the money bag carrier, have pity on this or that person. But such instructions are actually quite selfish instructions, really quite selfish instructions, because it does not matter whether someone realizes that money is dirt or continues to believe that money is a little god. That is not what matters to the socially minded, but rather what role money and a person who has it play in society.

We should not shut ourselves off from such feelings: we should feel sorry for the moneybag carrier – but we should open our minds to the circumstances, not just to what we would or would not want to feel sorry for based on our own tastes. It is a matter

about breaking the habit of idle preaching. This idle preaching is one of the things that has brought us to our present plight and misery. I have often said figuratively to my listeners: All the talk about love of one's neighbor, about brotherhood, is all very well, it does so much good for the inwardly egotistical soul when one talks about love of one's neighbor in a well-heated room, about loving all people without distinction of station and so on. But that is now compared to reality as if I stood in front of the stove, so I said, and said to the stove: You stove, it is your stove duty to heat the room. The way you look, you have a stove physiognomy, such an object has the categorical imperative to make the room warm. — But it does not get warm, I can preach as much as I want.

And so people preach in abstractions over and over again, it does not get warm, but outside it is now going haywire. The thing to do is to stop preaching, use my thoughts to consider how warmth can be created in a sensible way, and to get firewood and make a fire. In the matters that are now at hand, it is important that our thoughts contain the seeds of what can be done. I believe that anyone who really seeks will find this in the meaning of the call to action in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. There have been enough words that are just words, now we need action. But if these actions are to be reasonable, we must first come to an understanding about them. We need germinal thoughts for action, such germinal thoughts that lead to action as soon as possible, before it is too late.