Workers' Councils

GA 331a

Introduction

“Holding meetings at the top only leads us to perpetuate the old damage, because what needs to be realized today must come directly from the people, and the symptom that this is what history wants is the council system.” (Rudolf Steiner in a public lecture on May 16, 1919, in Stuttgart)

Great hopes – great human prospects

On January 29, 1919, the German socialist and journalist Ernst Däumig (1866-1922) addressed the proletariat with the words: "The socialist century has begun. The nationalist century has been followed by the age of socialism. Nationalism has been revolutionarily overcome, and capitalism awaits its economic death blow. A new legal system is to blossom from the ruins of the collapsed violent state. A free community is to be established on the ruins of big capitalist strongholds. Let us become aware of this tremendous change!“ This appeal was published in the weekly magazine ”Der Arbeiter-Rat. Weekly Journal for Practical Socialism" (1st year, no. 1, 5th week) – almost three months had passed since the fall of the German Empire on November 9, 1918, and the proclamation of the republic. The revolution in Germany had come as a complete surprise to many and had also swept away the monarchies in the individual German states, such as the Kingdom of Württemberg. Provisional governments were formed, the majority of whose members sought to establish a parliamentary republic. At the same time, workers' and soldiers' councils had formed spontaneously throughout Germany, in which people from the populace—most of whom were sympathetic to socialist ideas—asserted their right to have a say in the future shape of society. From December 16 to 21, 1918, the first Reich Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils met in Berlin as the central representation of all German workers' councils. A new era seemed to be dawning; the future of society was to be negotiated on the basis of humanitarian rather than one-sided party political considerations. In his book “Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution” (Works Councils in the November Revolution, Düsseldorf 1963, Chapter 7, “On the Compatibility of the Council System and Parliamentary Democracy”), historian Peter von Oertzen writes about the mood that prevailed among part of the German population at the time: "The new social and economic order could not be established using the old methods and institutions; new bodies had to be created that would give expression to the development toward socialism. Above all, the fundamentally changed position of the working class in the new society had to be taken into account. In the councils, it was to act as a self-confident, equal co-determining or even leading force; there they should drive socialization forward and at the same time acquire the technical and economic skills they still lacked."

But wasn't this striving for direct democracy bound to lead to conflict with all those efforts that saw the introduction of a parliamentary system as the goal of a new state structure for Germany? In the first weeks and months, however, nothing had yet been decided: the spontaneous fragmentation of state power remained, as the following overview of the political decision-making centers in Germany and Württemberg in the first months after the revolution shows, albeit without taking into account the soldiers' and farmers' councils, which led a more or less strong special existence alongside the workers' councils.

The coexistence of these two decision-making systems ultimately remained unresolved. Even though, for example, the powers of the workers' councils in Württemberg were defined by law on December 14, 1918, granting them the right to control government activities, the convening of the constituent state assembly on January 23, 1919, raised the question of whether this task should not fall to the state assembly after all.

This meant that the activities of the workers' councils were once again up for discussion. Such a situation could not be maintained in the long term.

The dual nature of state power after the revolution

This was also clearly evident at the level of the state as a whole. The negotiations at the first Reich Congress in December 1918 made it clear that even there, a majority of the delegates did not see the council system as a permanent solution. At that point, the councils had already become embroiled in political infighting, with the various political factions attempting to destroy them or co-opt them for their own purposes. The radical left-wing advocates of a dictatorship of the proletariat saw them as welcome instruments for a communist takeover, while the radical right-wing supporters of an authoritarian form of government believed they were breeding grounds for communist ideologies. But even the moderate circles, the advocates of parliamentary democracy, saw these councils as an unnecessary duplication in the political decision-making process, especially since a National Assembly had convened in Weimar on February 6, 1919, with the task of drafting a new constitution—similar to the constituent state assembly that had been formed in Stuttgart a good two weeks earlier. Just four days later, the National Assembly passed a “law on provisional imperial power” that denied the councils any political role.

So should they only have decision-making power in economic matters, or should this also apply to the political sphere? The tasks and areas of competence to which they were entitled were therefore extremely controversial.

When Ernst Däumig published the first issue of his magazine in support of the workers' councils at the end of January 1919, he already considered their existence to be under threat. With his magazine, he wanted to give them an effective public voice and thus provide them with political support. In the first issue mentioned above, under the title “The Hour of Destiny for the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils,” he wrote: "The workers' and soldiers' councils are indeed facing an hour of destiny today. We cannot believe that the forces that put an end to the old monarchist Germany and shook the military and police state to its foundations will now simply disappear from the revolutionary stage without a trace.“ And he doubled down: ”We have now entered a stage in which the existence or non-existence of the workers' and soldiers' councils is at stake. It will depend on the vigilance and energy of the working population and the workers' and soldiers' councils whether they can continue to exist and function or whether they will disappear from the public scene in the foreseeable future, to be recorded in German history as a temporary episode of revolutionary Sturm und Drang."

A good two months later, the tide had finally turned. From April 8 to 14, 1919, the second Reich Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils took place, overshadowed by the council revolution in Bavaria. The majority of delegates voted against the Independent Social Democrats' motion to introduce a political-economic council system; they supported the postulate of the majority Social Democrats for the realization of a socialist democracy with a parliament and the simultaneous creation of chambers of labor. The representatives of the so-called pure council idea opposed this; in their appeal “To the working people of Germany!” on April 15, 1919, the faction of Independent Socialists, including Ernst Däumig (in the weekly newspaper “Der Arbeiter-Rat” of April 23, 1919, 1st year, no. 12, 17th week), declared: "We, as advocates of the pure council idea, therefore had to reject this motion. We demand a council organization that guarantees manual and intellectual workers the full right of self-determination in state and economic life. It is our firm conviction that this is the only way to achieve socialism as quickly as possible.“

The sudden emergence of ”people's councils" a surprising development

It was only shortly after the second Reich Council Congress that Rudolf Steiner began his work for the threefold social order in Germany. On April 20, 1919, he arrived in Stuttgart, long awaited by many anthroposophists, a few days after the end of a general strike. In the weeks prior to this, he had presented the idea of social threefolding in numerous lectures in Switzerland and at the same time had written his paper “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Future.” In these Swiss lectures, there is no reference to the idea of a council state, because for his Swiss audience this was not an option at all. After the failed general strike in November 1918, the establishment of a socialist society had become a distant prospect.

When Rudolf Steiner arrived in Stuttgart, he found political conditions that were completely different from those in Switzerland. In addition to the parliamentary bodies, there were these council bodies, which had political and economic decision-making power. Rudolf Steiner actually considered the fact that ordinary people from the population were asserting their right to co-determination on the basis of their humanity to be a welcome development. In his public lecture on May 16, 1919, on “Details of the Reorganization of the Social Organism” (in GA 330), he acknowledged, based on the catastrophe of the World War: "On the one hand, it has poured out over capitalism, which is driving itself to its own destruction; but it has also poured out over the truly justified aspirations arising from human nature, which are called the social movement. What has actually emerged from this social movement? People have risen up—people who, in various ways, as councils, as “human councils,” want to take further development into their own hands, who want to intervene in development on their own initiative, based on their human decisiveness, their human insight, their human will. If one had sufficient discernment today for the facts of reality, one would find what has been suggested to be an enormous surprise.“ And in the same lecture, he drew the conclusion: ”There is really no need to discuss whether the councils are a reality or not. They are in part, they will become more and more so, no human being will be able to drive them back, they will arise in forms quite different from those in which they already exist. Realistic thinking demands that we create the ground on which these councils can work."

Based on this human fact, it was natural for Rudolf Steiner to continue working on the basis of the council system and to develop his idea of threefold society in line with the council system. And he was very serious about it — so serious that he was probably one of the very few leading minds of the time who considered this impulse so important that they wanted to help bring it to fruition. This did not fundamentally affect his idea of social threefolding, insofar as he could imagine it taking shape institutionally in various forms. In the discussion evening on the shaping of free spiritual life — which took place on June 21, 1919 (in GA 331b) — he said: "The idea of the threefold social organism can only be understood if we realize that We are living in a time when, firstly, many things are undergoing radical change and, secondly, new formations are bound to emerge." For example, Rudolf Steiner could well imagine the sphere of legal life being regulated by workers' councils and not just by parliaments.

Connection to political centers of action Discussions with workers' councils

When Rudolf Steiner came to Stuttgart on April 20, 1919, he was first asked to speak to the workers in the factories of anthroposophical entrepreneurs. In view of the great impression his remarks made, he was asked to give a lecture to the workforces of other large companies as well. The workers in the greater Stuttgart area, who had been disappointed in many ways by the course of the revolution so far, as demonstrated by the strikes in January and April, were initially surprisingly open to new ideas. Rudolf Steiner was very well received, and at the end of many meetings, a resolution (in this volume) was passed by a large majority, calling on the Württemberg government to appoint Rudolf Steiner as an advisor for the implementation of the threefold social order. And so it did not take long before a connection was established with the Greater Stuttgart Workers' Council and the members of its state committee, and Rudolf Steiner was invited to present his ideas on the proper socialization of society.

On April 29, 1919, the desire was expressed to invite Rudolf Steiner to the plenary assembly of the Greater Stuttgart Workers' Council; on May 7, he gave his first lecture, and on May 8, 1919, small-scale discussions began with individual workers' councils. It seems that Rudolf Steiner even gave the workers a short course in national economics; at least, various entries in his notebooks point in this direction (for example, the presumed discussion of May 27, 1919, in this volume). Rudolf Steiner's relationship with the workers' councils lasted a good month; it was the party leaders who feared for their influence and followed Rudolf Steiner's activities with increasing mistrust. Particularly within the ranks of the Independent Social Democratic Party, resistance arose against all those party members who, as members of the Workers' Committee of the Threefold Society, had publicly advocated the idea of social threefolding. On June 16, 1919, they had to justify themselves at a party meeting in Stuttgart. Although they were not expelled from the party, their commitment to the cause was severely dampened. This became clear in the discussion on June 17 (in this volume) when it became apparent that further activity by Rudolf Steiner within the framework of the workers' council was undesirable. The groundwork for this decision had been laid by a comrade who had a personal hatred of Emil Molt and the Waldorf-Astoria – his fiancée had worked there and had been dismissed because of her behavior.

This brought the dialogue with the workers' council to an end without any real council organization in the spirit of the threefold social order having been established at the political level, not even in the slightest. However, even at this point, the signs were already pointing to the abolition of the workers' councils. On June 13, 1919, the constitutional state assembly in Württemberg had decided to dissolve the workers' councils by July 15. Even though this decision was revoked on July 16, 1919, the workers' councils no longer played a significant role in the weeks and months that followed. Their final dissolution on March 31, 1920, received little attention in the political arena.

Alexander Lüscher