Current Social and Economic Issues

GA 332b — Stuttgart

Appeal to all People to Establish a Cultural Council!

Leaflet, second edition, June 1919

This appeal is addressed to all people because culture is a matter for all true people, because every individual is involved in intellectual life in some way or other, or at least draws their spiritual nourishment from it. It is particularly addressed to all those who are actively involved in intellectual life in the fields of education, teaching, art, science or religion.

Freedom is the fundamental nerve of every spiritual culture. It cannot develop healthily in dependence on or in the service of any alien power, whether it be called state or capitalism.

Civilized men!

Representatives of art and science, religion,

education and instruction!

Can you feel like free intellectual workers? Are you able to base what you produce on the needs of a free, independent intellectual life, or are you forced to make concessions at every turn, to take things into consideration and to organize your work according to the demands of the previously all-powerful capitalist state?

In Germany, capitalism, which has dominated you almost completely in the last half-century, has collapsed as a result of the world war catastrophe, for which it shares the blame. It has spoken its own judgment by destroying itself. It does not need to be destroyed first. It is only eking out a sham life, and in the very near future its complete collapse will no longer be able to be disguised.

Do you not want to create the possibility for a free spiritual life to arise, before complete chaos sweeps over us and destroys all culture? Only a liberated, independent spiritual life will be able to save humanity from the terrible fate of becoming dehumanized, 'to which it would be doomed by the gagging of spiritual life by a political or economic power. Only a free spiritual life, in close contact with the whole nation, will be able to participate in the shaping of a healthy, socialized economic life.

The broad masses of the working people are about to throw off the yoke of soul-destroying capitalism, under which they have suffered as a result of human labor being turned into a commodity. These people demand your cooperation. It wants the construction of a new economic order to be directed and guided by people who are inspired by a free spiritual life and who therefore have a heart and mind for the legitimate social demands of the time. Our future depends on whether you join forces with them now.

The manual workers are in the process of joining forces with the intellectual workers in the economic sphere to form works councils and a works council. Unite in the field of intellectual life to form a cultural council that sets itself the task of liberating intellectual life and thereby saving culture from impending doom! Then the possibility of harmonious cooperation between intellectual and economic life will be given; then a healthy socialization of intellectual and economic life will occur; then we will be saved both from a reactionary regression into capitalist coercion, which could then only be a coercive domination of capitalism of our Western enemies, and also from the tragic fate of the Russian Revolution, which is rooted in the fact that head and hand did not work together, but against each other.

The League for

Threefolding the Social Organism

Secretariat: Champignystraße 17