From a Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism
GA 334 — 26 April 1920, Basel
8. The Current Economic Crisis and the Recovery of Economic Life through the Threefold Social Order
I could imagine that the editor of a wit-breathing could be tempted to take the floor at a sample fair event about the recovery of economic life, the builder of the Dornach Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum. For it is already generally recognized that nothing could be further apart than what people who know the matter superficially imagine by the nebulous mysticism of the Dornach Goetheanum and what can be seen as a living practice. And yet, it might seem even more paradoxical and amusing that precisely in recent times, in the last few weeks, in a place in southern Germany – and Switzerland will follow suit in the very near future – the founding is being undertaken, precisely by the current of thought and world view represented in Dornach, of a company for the promotion of economic and spiritual real values.
As I said, this could appear even more paradoxical. For one sees in such a spiritual movement, as it is, for which the Dornach building is to be the representative of the external expression, one sees in it something completely impractical, which only has to be discussed when one has to turn away from the real practical goals in life, more or less for Sunday rest.
Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I do not want to keep you for long with introductory remarks about the tasks of the spiritual movement represented by the Goetheanum. But I would just like to say that this spiritual movement, precisely because of its special nature, wants to be the basis for the practice of life that we really need for the present, in order to get out of that which has driven us into that which has always been regarded as so practical and which has shown itself to be so particularly practical in the ruining of European civilization in the last five to six years!
Certainly, in the free school of spiritual science referred to here, people's attention should not only be directed to what confronts man in the external material world, but humanity should once again be made aware that everything material is based on the spiritual, and that one cannot understand the material if one does not understand the underlying spiritual. But how the spiritual world is to be opened up, which paths the individual person has to take to come to this real, actual spiritual world, that is not what I want to talk about today. That has been discussed in the various books that have been published on this subject. But what I would like to talk about is the fact that the particular kind of spiritual activity that must be cultivated in order to achieve something in man through this particular kind of spiritual activity and effort, something that is not impractical but practical, in that it opens up a healthy, illusion-free view of reality. However strange it may sound, the aim of the Dornach School is not to escape from reality, but quite the opposite. The aim of the Dornach School is to acquire a healthy view of reality, the acquisition of such a healthy view that can see what is going on in every reality, which must be directed by man himself, above all in economic reality.
And to express myself even more clearly, I would like to illustrate what I have to say with the following comparison.
You see, my dear audience, if a chemist were to claim to have invented a new way to bleach laundry, and then tried to use this method, and lo and behold, the laundry turned a dirty brown from this method, he would probably not be considered a good chemist, and it would be said that he actually understands nothing of real chemical science. This is certainly true today in the fields of technology and external life, insofar as these fields depend on scientific thinking. But it is not at all true when it comes to the technology that arises in economic life, in the management of economic life, and that is supposed to depend in some way on healthy economic thinking, on a real, let us say, national or social economy or the like. Let me give you an example of this. A long time ago, there was a lot of arguing in the international world among those people who thought about economic issues, about how best to give validity to the economic movement called the free trade movement. From a certain point of view, they examined the damage that international economic life suffers as a result of customs duties and the like being levied at national borders; customs duties that are based on the most diverse intentions. In short, there were once parliaments - now they are long gone, the times - in which the free trade movement was seen as an ideal, as an economic ideal. Then, in certain circles, they thought about a way to promote free trade, especially tariff-free trade. They argued so fiercely that they said: love and the protective tariff issue are the greatest cause of madness in the world. At that time the supporters of the gold standard and the supporters of metallism, the gold and silver standard, were at loggerheads. The supporters of the supposed gold standard were those people who said, based on their scientific economic insight: By promoting the gold standard, we promote free trade. That was an economic and scientific conviction.
What did reality show, then? It so happened that just after these scientific-economic declamations were let loose, significant gold finds were made in Africa, and those countries that had little of the areas where gold was found were able to mint the gold in particularly abundant amounts. But one would always have to expect such things, and above all the chemist would have to calculate with the analogy of what I have mentioned for clarification. But in reality, what happened? It turned out that the introduction of the gold standard led to the introduction of protective tariffs everywhere, that is, reality showed exactly the opposite of what was predicted theoretically from economic thinking.
It is exactly as if a chemist, with a product that is supposed to bleach the laundry, made the laundry a dirty brown color. As I said, there are many examples where economic thinking does not come close to reality, where reality takes an opposite course. There are many such examples.
Anyone who raises the question today: Is there an economic crisis, an international economic crisis? – they truly only need to look at the conditions. This economic crisis is everywhere on the doorstep. However, people have very different ideas about its specific nature and causes. But can we really hope that with such thinking, in the face of reality, such a complicated phenomenon, such a complicated fact as the international economic crisis, can be readily understood?
Surely that cannot be the case! Now you will say: Aha, there is someone who claims that the economic thinkers are all stupid, they all know nothing; the economy is running, and the economic thinkers are all stupid. No, I do not claim that they are all stupid, I claim rather that there are very clever people among economists, in some respects much cleverer than in all the other professions of life, but that what what the monometallists, the supporters of the gold standard, said and what happened was the opposite of what the very clever people advocated in very clever sentences and turns of phrase and theories. No, I am not saying that all economists are stupid. Rather, I want to start from the strange fact that modern civilization has brought about the peculiar phenomenon that one can be a brilliant economic thinker and think exactly the opposite of what is reality in economic life! This is a remarkable phenomenon, but one that is also evident from the fact that people are actually quite helpless in the face of today's European confusion, especially in the circles of those who have learned economic thinking best in the traditional way.
And here you see, I would just like to claim that what one has simply acquired as a thinking technique can be seen through by the healthy spiritual science that is practiced in the movement for which Dornach is the external representative , it is possible to see through things in their outer reality, of which one can easily prove by countless examples that they are not seen through by those who are regarded as experts.
You see, above all when economic crises are being discussed – people usually think of the things that lie in the constellations between consumption and between production – one talks about an economic crisis occurring when there is overproduction that cannot be used up by consumption. It can just as well be proved that the economic crisis does not come from overproduction but from underconsumption, simply from the fact that people, who perhaps do not have enough money to buy what has been produced, buy too little. And the strange thing is, you can prove one thing or the other. If you go back only as far as the economic crises of 1919, you will find that one was caused by overproduction, the other by underconsumption, and the third by entirely different causes, such as an imbalance between capitalism and labor, or, which also applies to individual cases, that economic crises are bound to occur when there is too much saving in a large community of people, and so on. Now, all these things do not take into account what is most important for the economic life of the present day.
Here I can really speak from a kind of personal experience. It was a long time ago, at the end of the nineties of the last century and the beginning of this century, that I got to know the Central European working class thoroughly. I was a teacher at a workers' educational school, but it was only through this that I was really able to get to know the labor movement from all sides. And I got to know it, firstly, because the various lectures I had to give were sometimes followed by very lively discussions that showed what was being thought in the broadest circles of the growing workforce. On the other hand, I was received with my own lectures and was able to see how one can take in what is not just economic and so on. And anyone who, I would say, has lived with a certain observant sense of human conditions and without prejudice in such a way knows how to say what the error is when one thinks today that mere economic categories, such as capital and wages and the like, or import and export, trade, finance, balance of payments, currency and other things, there is more than what is only on the surface. No, in these things there is really, for the present crisis, what is only on the surface. For everything that happens in economic life ultimately originates with people, with people's thoughts, and what people do, so that qualifications of capital and wage relationships arise, of import and export and so on, of currency fluctuations. Ultimately, this depends on what arises from people's thoughts.
You see, I can speak without prejudice, because I was a teacher among workers for five or six years and I managed to get a large following among the workers, but one fine day the leaders of the workers' movement realized that there is one who cannot be tolerated, that there is one who teaches not orthodox Marxism, that there is one who endeavors to instill into the hearts and minds something quite different from the orthodox teaching.
A meeting was held with my students. Hundreds of my students were present at the meeting at the time, along with labor leaders, second-string players, but sent by the first string, who said all sorts of things, including that I was an impossible personality in the labor movement. I said: Yes, but do you want to cultivate something in the future that is good for the future, and you do not understand the simplest thing, freedom of teaching? Then one of the leaders managed to utter the word: freedom of teaching? No, we only know reasonable compulsion! And yet, although the vote was unanimous against the four, against the four leaders, my activity was of course completely impossible.
That, you see, that entitles me, precisely on the basis of the facts, to speak with some impartiality about what is actually taking place today in economic life in the context of an increasingly international Europe.
But one must also really be able to study that which comes from within the human being himself, and which the categories I have mentioned, which are usually enumerated, actually bring about. One must first ask oneself: what peculiarities does the belief have that has gradually spread among the European proletariat?
You see, the most characteristic feature of the way millions of people think is that, first of all, they think of the spiritual life in such a way that everything that man produces spiritually, including what he produces out of his spirit as law, as custom, as religion, as science, that this is nothing more than something that the human brain gives birth to in an abstract way, which is a kind of ideological superstructure on the only reality, the substructure, the only reality: the economic life of production and consumption.
This has become established in the minds of millions upon millions of people. I do not want to examine now to what extent this can be traced back to the theory of Marx and Engels, but it has become established in millions upon millions of people: the whole of intellectual life is an ideology, something that has merely grown out of economic life.
Yes, perhaps in the circles of those who feel very clever about economics, people will think little of this belief of the proletariat with regard to the current economic crisis in international life. But that is precisely the great mistake: today people think little of the most important things. For one does not learn to recognize the source of the crisis, namely, what lives in the unconscious of men, and from which the economic disaster arises, if one does not turn one's gaze to the soul life of the masses. One must take into account the spiritual life of the masses; for it may be possible to believe that intellectual life is only an ideology, but it is impossible to live with that, and the human being becomes desolate, the human being loses his footing in life.
And this is the strange thing: with an unparalleled fanaticism the great masses cling to these doctrines. The masses, especially those who today set the tone in certain economic circles of laborers, cling with fanaticism to these doctrines; but in so doing they become more and more desolate.
How did this come about? Materialism did not arise from the working class itself; materialism arose in the leading circles over the last four centuries. Only, the leading circles have preserved the old traditions out of a certain half-heartedness. On the one hand, they have begun to think materialistically about the external life in which they are immersed, but on the other hand they have preserved the old traditions as their religion, as their morality and so on, and basically lead a double life.
The worker cannot do this, having been called away from what he used to stand by, what he had grown together with: from the trade, the products of which he loved, into which he put his life. He has been called to the abstract machine, placed in the abstract factory. He seeks his salvation in that which the others only take halfway. You can only judge it when you have stood in it. This has gradually emerged. And so that great lack of understanding arose in Europe.
This lack of understanding hangs over Europe like a terrible fate today. There are those at the top who have to manage the capital, there are those at the top who have to direct economic life, who could direct it if they only wanted to, who could also transform materialism into a healthy world view, who could also be practical. There are those who could do anything if they wanted to.
Then there are those at the bottom who have taken seriously the materialism that has developed in these leading circles, who can do nothing, who believe that by saying, “Capitalism must be fought,” they can achieve something with this phrase; who do not know that economic life in the modern sense of the word cannot be had at all without capitalism, that without capitalism one can only return to barbarism. The worker has become helpless in his thoughts, helpless in the face of reality, throughout Europe, the worker who has been forced into the machine, who seriously imagines those theories that, I might say, arise as by-products of life with the others, with which one cannot live and certainly not manage, as shown by such things as metallism and monometallism and the like.
This great misunderstanding, what has brought it about? Well, you can see what it has brought about in the development of European conditions. Look at Russia. In Russia, something has arisen in accordance with the peculiarities of the people that is difficult to study for someone who looks at these things impartially and without prejudice, without being an agitator. There were many differentiations of socialist and social ideals in Russia. What was there in this Russia until 1914? The broad masses of people, held down by Russian militarism and the hated tsarism, had something that could not be bridged to the other thing that existed in the ruling circles. They did not want to achieve what they should have achieved: to build the bridge, as leaders, as intellectuals, to build this bridge. We see the emergence of modern capitalism. We see the emergence of modern individualism with the calling in of a million-fold crowd into factories, to machines. What would have been necessary there was to resort to a new practical thinking, and it would have been necessary for the intellectuals to make themselves leaders, to gain trust, to make the masses understand that they understand, to actually carry out the airs and graces of economic life in earnest. They did none of that. They lived for themselves, an upper class. They let the others study. The proletariat, in particular, studied an extraordinary amount, simply devoted to what were the waste products of education, materialistic waste products of education.
Today the fruits of this are present in the economic crisis in Europe. It is a spiritually conditioned, tragic fate.
Then, out of what held it down, what one did not want to penetrate spiritually, what one did not want to penetrate spiritually with reasonable views, what one wanted to hold down through the external physical violence of militarism and that of the absolute monarchy or of any other powers, out of what was needed to neutralize that which one did not want to conquer spiritually, out of that came the European war catastrophes.
And what came about then? For Russia, Leninism and Trotskyism emerged. Not out of Russian socialism, oh no, Leninism and Trotskyism were born out of Russian socialism. Nothing like Leninism and Trotskyism could ever have been born out of Russian socialism. Something quite different would have emerged if the intellectuals had sought to reach an understanding with the broad masses of the population in a reasonable way. No, Lenin and Trotsky did not grow out of the revolution! Lenin and Trotsky grew out of the circles of those who were affected by the war, of those who were affected by the war as the ultimate consequence of militarism. The results of the war have taken root in Russia and have once again suppressed that which wanted to come from below, with which one should have come to an understanding. Lenin and Trotsky are not heroes of socialism; they are the sons of the European war catastrophe and only became possible because the misery of the war's aftermath spread across Russia. And what happened in the rest of Europe – read Keynes's very fine book (you can find it in a very good English translation), The Economic Consequences of the Peace. What happened in the rest of Europe – what was it? Is it the confession of economic thinking? Is it the economic striving up to 1914 that brought us into the terrible catastrophe? No, it is not that, but what we are experiencing, including all the exchange value worries of individual countries, is not a healthy return to healthy views that one believes can be obtained by the fact that the disease has been reduced to absurdity by the catastrophes. What we are experiencing is the result of the war. Out of a very, very short-sighted judgment, a German general coined the words that have been repeated many times during this war catastrophe: “War is only politics carried out by other means.
During the war, I repeatedly compared this dictum with the word: Divorce is just marriage continued by other means! But with a certain correct variant, one could still say: This peace is, especially in the field of economic life, just the continuation of the war by other means. This is not said by someone with an agitational or one-sided view of the current economic situation, but by even the most objective critics, from the side that would have the most reason to judge objectively today, from the side of the English, Keynes says this in his book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace Agreement”.
Now, if you really look at these things, you have to say: Oh, the causes of the current economic disasters run much, much deeper! And finally, you just have to look at today's economic life as it has developed to see that. There is no need to be captivated by the one-sided declamations about capitalism and anti-capitalism; instead, one only needs to surrender to the objective facts, which are certainly justified by modern conditions, that our economic life is intimately intertwined with what we have to call the money economy.
Now, of course, I am far from entertaining the foolish idea of wanting to fight the money economy. That is out of the question, because I would consider that a foolish idea, just as I would consider it a foolish idea to want to reform money in some way. No, but the issue is that, as a result of all the modern economic conditions, what money represents in economic life has become abstract.
An English economic journalist said quite rightly: the functions that money actually performs in our economic life are extremely complex and cannot really be teased out for examination.
You see, my dear audience, if someone is a thinker of a rather abstract nature, if he always goes from the particular to the general, if he sees all kinds of flowers out in the meadow with a specific name and then says: plants or flowers – and compares “flowers” with animals and so on, he thinks abstractly. He brings abstract thoughts that encompass many things and spreads them out like a carpet over the concrete parts.
This is how it is in real economic life with money. Money brings a completely abstract element into real economic life, into reality. Just think, if I am the owner of 50 francs, then I am the owner of these 50 francs, and it is initially irrelevant whether I have 50 francs in my wallet, whether I buy a rabbit for 50 francs tomorrow, or whether I buy flour or a silver watch, or whether I buy a skirt or something similar. The concreteness of economic life is lost to the abstractness of money. This comes to light in the moment when money is exchanged for money, when you buy with money. You can see best how, just as abstractions hide from the reality of thinking, the abstractness of money hides from reality. If you have followed the newspapers in Germany in the last few weeks, you could see that people were very pleased with the slight improvement in the value of the currency. But then it went down again. And anyone who knows the deeper connections will not be very impressed by a temporary improvement in this currency. Well, the blame was shifted to all sorts of causes, although in the background nothing else stood, than that German notes available in Spain were bought by Americans on the stock exchange through some special constellation, through some special intention, and that this caused the little bit of a surge in the German currency. This escaped notice for the simple reason that whenever money as such circulates in trade, when money as such is traded, it is far removed from the concrete economic life, and one no longer sees the connections. Just as when someone speaks in abstract terms, a mill wheel goes around in your head and you no longer have any idea what he actually means by his abstractness, so you no longer know with the money manipulations what is actually going on in economic life.
You see, in these matters it is essentially a matter of the medium of exchange becoming alienated in actual economic life; and that is the reason why we have entered into such a terrible economic crisis. For this economic crisis was actually already there before the war, and the war was only the expression of this economic crisis. [Gap.]
You see, someone in, say, 1865 could have had the greatest possible facilities for air travel, but he could not use them because there was no air travel yet! It does not help to be clever in just any area of life. When circumstances lead one away from the direct experience of that which is to be experienced, then every clever thought helps nothing. And the fact that one has been driven away from real life in the economic field, as in other fields, is what modern civilization has produced by welding the three main areas of life – spiritual life, political or legal life and economic life – more and more into a unified state.
The money economy was favorable for welding together in the unitary state. As I said, I beg you not to misunderstand me at all, that I might want to object to something about the money economy. I just want to point out how what has not been grasped by the money economy must lead precisely to the recovery of our economic life!
It has been repeatedly asserted in modern times that the centralized state is a panacea. This panacea has been held up as an ideal by the leading people so far, but also by the socialists; for what do the socialists want? Use the framework, the fully developed framework of the state, to build their socialist fallacies. Even Lenin and Trotsky did nothing other than to use the war to pour their socialist abstractions over what was left of the old Russian tsarist state. The idea of a unified state has only emerged in the last three or four decades (those who really know their history know that it was only a short time ago) among those who believe they want what is best for all public affairs and who, as a result, fail to to see what is maturing in the reality of humanity: that what is maturing in the reality of humanity is the urge towards spiritual life, the urge towards legal or state life and towards economic life to come to completely different constellations than we have had so far. I want to touch on one corner, I would like to say.
In many areas of European life, what we call inheritance law stands out from old institutions. Inheritance law is connected with the relationships of blood ties between people. If you follow the lines of inheritance law into the whole of public life, including the configuration of state and social contexts, you will see how much of economic life depends on this law. Inheritance law has an effect on certain people in these or those economic sectors; it brings people into it, they are in it, and individual things become out of their abilities. But ultimately, a large part of the economy as a whole is made up of these individual things. In short, we have inheritance law closely tied to blood ties, to that which is organized in humanity by nature.
What has happened in those states that have considered themselves the most exemplary in the last three to four centuries? They have learned to organize from nature. Organizing is attributed especially to the Germans. They were only so good at it that they distorted it to the point of mechanization. But it has been poured out over the whole civilized world. Organizing, which is inherent in humanity by nature, has also been carried into social life. And this organizing, which is connected with blood ties, this organizing, which has a very symptomatic one - there are many others - in inheritance law, this organizing, it comes out basically very clearly also in the organization of intellectual life. And finally, although the Catholic Church wants to be a democratic institution that also allows those at the bottom of the social ladder to rise to the highest positions of the church hierarchy under certain circumstances, in practice, what has welded together such things, such as the old organizations that depend on blood ties, has also crept into Catholic church organizations; because, after all, more high-ranking nobles had become archbishops than others, and so on. In short, we see in many respects how what comes from blood ties extends into the modern social order; and what is particularly evident in such things as inheritance law, but the human race, with its innermost consciousness, has actually outgrown. If someone says, “Man is man,” and points to a seven-year-old child and to a forty-year-old adult, you will laugh. You will not say that the forty-year-old person is only the consequence of the thirty-five-year-old, the thirty-year-old and so on, but you will look at the person as if what is in his being develops from his depths. It is only in history that the foolish view has arisen that the following is always only the effect of the preceding, whereas for a long time the human race has been such that the successive phases in its innermost being arise in the same way as, for example, the change of teeth or sexual maturity in the individual. Thus, during the last period, while the elements that arose from the old blood ties and the conditions caused by them have remained as inheritances in the spiritual, economic and legal life, while the old public rights have remained, the urge for a new order has unconsciously taken hold of people, for something different to occur.
So you see, if you want to try to find out what people really want, then something like in my “Key Points of the Social Question” appears. One only does not pay attention to how these things are overheard in true reality and true practice, in what life demands today. Inheritance rights have their origin in the old development of humanity. People want to keep them as if they wanted to keep their twelve or fourteen years of development, just as someone who is twelve or fourteen does not understand that at twenty one must be different than at twelve or fourteen. Of course, in detail, such follies will not be wanted. There we have the right of inheritance. It has become something that people's consciousness does not want to accept. Today, people think too highly of their individuality to cling to the conventional means of inheritance out of convention, even if it is only out of convention. If we are honest and listen to what humanity actually wants, we come to what you find set out in The Essential Points of the Social Question, where it is shown that humanity tends towards a social order in which the individual, who has certain abilities, is connected with the means of production, or, let us say, with capital. If he can no longer combine these abilities with it, then the sum of the means of production or the capital must pass from him to someone else who is qualified. This shows how the old age must grow into the new age. The old age made the economic configuration dependent on blood. The new age makes dependent - in the consciousness of man it already exists - wants to make dependent the configuration of economic life on what is consciously experienced. So that in the new order inheritance law is not spoken of in the usual sense. For this reason, for example, inheritance law is often doubted today; it is doubted that inheritance law can be spoken of at all. It is only to be said that if I have acquired a sum of means of production through my abilities, through which I can achieve something, have accumulated a capital, then I have the obligation, when I myself can no longer be the steward, to transfer it to another, who in turn, according to his abilities, must be connected with it. What was only dependent on blood must be replaced by reason and human individuality.
This may sound radical to some, but it is not spoken out of any radicalism, but only heard from what mankind unconsciously actually wants.
If we look at the development of humanity from this point of view, we see that people have reached such a point in the general science of the human race, in spiritual life, in legal and political life and in economic life through the standpoint they have adopted that they can no longer be compressed into the unified state.
This is where the impulse for the threefold social organism comes in, demanding that spiritual life be completely left to its own devices. This is perhaps the most controversial point today, because it is considered particularly clever to make the state the guardian of spiritual life. But this must be demanded by those who today recognize what humanity unconsciously wants: that spiritual life be completely left to its own devices.
Let us take one of the most important parts: the public school system. From the teacher of the lowest school class up to the highest teacher, everything must be self-governing.
You see, I was called upon to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart because of the pedagogical and didactic principles that arise from such a way of thinking. Emil Molt, the local factory owner of the Waldorf-Astoria factory, set up this Waldorf School. It was my responsibility to give the Waldorf School its spiritual foundation, and to this day, although it is not always apparent from the outside, the actual management and leadership of the school has been entrusted to me. And so, for weeks, I gave a pedagogical course for the teachers, in order to point out the direction in which this school should work.
Yes, I was also obliged – you will still have the opportunity to see how far we have come so far – I was also obliged, you see, to recognize the slippery slope on which spiritual life finds itself in its most important area, the school system. Of course, I also had to develop curricula and, in order to orient myself, I had to see what was there in order to do justice to the current school teaching goals and curricula.
Now, esteemed attendees, I can still remember – though it was a long time ago when I was at school myself or interacted with teachers – that everything in the school program was something printed on one page; now it has become thick books and everything is specified down to the last detail. On the one hand, we have what the pedagogical artists and pedagogical scientists put into their books, what they convey to the teacher. On the other hand, there is what comes from expertise and specialized knowledge. Then there is the bureaucratic aspect, which comes from the state. This is much more important than one might think! There is no justification for anything other than the factually specialized to have a say in the administration of intellectual life. This is clearly evident, for example, in the field of education. How differently people would be educated and introduced to economic life if spiritual life were completely free to govern itself only on the basis of its own foundations! This can only be appreciated by someone who has really formed a sound judgment about the connection between free spiritual life, the development of human abilities out of free spiritual experience, and its significance for economic and state life. The question here is to finally realize: How does spiritual life fit into the whole process of human development?
Well, my dear audience, spiritual life is organized. And the more elementary a field is, the more organized is the spiritual life. Consider the example of the family. Look at how the individual grows out of the family, how a son grows into the artistic, out of what was similar to father or mother, not only outwardly physically, but spiritually and mentally. The further back you go in the years, the more you can see from what grows out of the family, how nature organizes spiritual life.
What exactly do we have to do for the spiritual life? With regard to the individual, we have to bring the individual out of the organization: we have to overcome the organization, the organization that is given by nature; we have to educate the individual into freedom. Freedom must first be acquired in earthly life. Then freedom can only be acquired if we, as teachers, educators or participants in intellectual life, are truly able to understand the human being, to work from the most individual abilities of the human being, and to place the human being in economic life according to the abilities with which he reveals himself to us in the context of nature.
That is the peculiar thing about intellectual life, that one has to say: The very person who thinks honestly about democracy thinks precisely in the way that comes over people in their fourteenth or sixteenth year, when they reach sexual maturity. And so, over the course of the last three to four centuries, humanity has been taken over by the tendency towards democracy. The very person who thinks honestly demands that all the matters that people develop when they come of age be treated in such a way that they, as equals among equals, have to organize things. This will be evident in the education of people in the field of intellectual life. It depends so much on the individual human ability and expertise that it must never be the subject of democratic administration or constitution, but must be left to the self-administration of this intellectual life.
And economic life? Economic life cannot be organized [gap]. Ideological, unworldly people, in all kinds of utopian ideals, indicate which forms economic life should be organized according to, whereby economic life should be brought into this or that structure. That would be the death of economic life! This nonsense began when the so-called German Republic first tried to get itself up and running. The way the planned economy thinks is just as nonsensical: economic life can be organized! But anyone who understands economic life knows that economic life cannot be organized! Economic life can only grow together into a whole in associations. That means: Economic life cannot be organized from above or from any direction, from any side, but economic life can only be successful in associations that grow out of the professions, out of those who belong together in a certain area of production and consumption.
That which has similar interests is linked in associations with that which has related interests. Related interests are linked together. However, a chain or a structure is not formed by organizing it from the outside, but rather by one link attaching itself to these associations through other links. It is a matter of a concatenation and interweaving of such people who stand in it in life, who grow out of life, who have expertise and ability in a certain area of economic life, who have grown into economic life in a certain way, who can also gain trust because they stand in it, because they are related to a branch in a certain sense. But it is necessary that this branch is associated with the next, so that one is not forced in a random way to come out of the abstractness of making money, but because one knows that by being involved in an associative economic work, one turns to the representative of another association for this purpose. He in turn knows how it is.
Yes, you see, my dear audience, that is what happens when you have an economic life built on association, that the cleverness of economic thinking helps you a little! What does cleverness help you when you are faced with an opaque economic life? You can see that in monometallism, in free trade. They have just resulted in protective tariffs. Today, we cannot see through economic life. First, living conditions must be created that allow us to see through connections. We will understand economic connections when, through an association, someone, for all I care, from a different crossroads, can communicate with someone who is part of a different association. If he can turn to this or any other association directly, then cleverness helps a little, as it is connected through the associations, and these connections, these measures must be grasped somehow, and even so far as reality allows through the chain of associations. That was the peculiarity of the previous economy, that there was no possibility of progressing in this way and letting things grow. That, ladies and gentlemen, has still not been understood today.
I am not saying this out of any kind of hubris, but because I believe that everyone can see this today. It has not been recognized that this threefold social order must stand for the independence of spiritual life, of that economic life that is built on associations and on nothing but associations, entirely on associations growing out of the economic underground itself, while the state must remain for what is in between, must have nothing to do with economic life, must have nothing to do with free spiritual life. Spiritual life must be based on the knowledge of the individual human being and on his or her abilities. The economic system must be built on the practical experiences and practices of economic life, which can be acquired in the lively interaction of association with association. The state has nothing to do with either of these. The state has something to do with the people who stand in this way in economic life, on the other hand stand in spiritual life, who will find themselves with all mature people in democratic state life, where public law is established, which then radiates on the one hand into spiritual life, on the other hand into economic life. There is no need to fear that the three members of the social organism will fall apart. They will connect through people. One person is in one circle, the other in the other. The three organizations are separate only for the good of humanity, because the more complicated circumstances of modern times demand this structure of the social organism.
This is what can really intervene to heal the economic life that has been shaken by crises. I said in my book The Core Problems of the Social Question: the threefold idea is not some utopian fantasy; the threefold idea can be linked to immediate reality everywhere. This immediate reality should be taken as it is; but it should in turn grow into a healthy state through state-free, associative life in the economic sphere. To separate economic life from the organization of the state and to base this economic life on its own laws, which can only arise from association to association, that is what is necessary. This looks abstract, but my dear attendees, it is not abstract, it is the most concrete thing.
The economists are there, it is only a matter of their striving for the appropriate association, regardless of political boundaries, according to the related relationships that prevail between production and consumption, between one branch of industry and another. And in the long run, a unified effort by people internationally involved in economic life should actually succeed in overcoming the efforts that are currently being made here or there to improve the value of currencies and so on. Just think how mere abstract economic activity in money can become detached from real conditions. Take Germany before 1914. In one year, about five to six billion capital was saved and earned. New issues, including mortgage bonds, land registry debts and everything that was spent on luxury buildings, new apartments and the like, together amounted to about 11 billion marks before 1914. A capital of 5 to 6 billion was earned or saved, new issues amounted to 1 billion, twice as much! What does that mean? It means that one is moving beyond the real economy, because the real economy has to be earned. Beyond the real economy is the capital value, double that of the real capital value. Because the earned capital value should only have appeared from new issues and mortgage bonds totaling 5 to 6 billion marks. That was actually there. Imagine where this leads when the abstract money economy emancipates itself in this way from the concrete economy of economic life!
The only way to cure this is for people to come into contact with the experiences of economic life itself, that is, for someone who is active in a particular area of economic life to associate with the system in which another person is involved, with the system in a different area. What the threefold social order shows is not a dilettantish thing, it is not utopian, it is something that directly affects practical life everywhere. And people today cannot come to terms with this idea of threefolding for a very specific reason: they do not yet want to reckon with the fact that we are in a state of great confusion. They always want to help with little mixtures and little remedies. That will not work, my dear attendees! When someone is seriously ill, they must also resort to strong medicines. We shall not manage with the social remedies that are otherwise recommended. It must be admitted that what is proposed under the idea of the threefold social organism wants to be a strong remedy. But the saying applies not only that a rough wedge belongs on a rough log, but also that a severe illness also requires a radical remedy. And I believe that anyone who can see through the ever-increasing confusion of international economic life in Europe, this slide into barbarism, will be serious enough to take a closer look at what he believes can lead out of this decline to a new ascent, what he believes can be achieved precisely by a real study of the conditions, not as the monometallists did, but from a real study of the conditions, so that one stands, as the one who treats the laundry with a chemical agent and then makes it black or brown - opposite reality -, I believe that when one realizes the magnitude of the European danger, one will then seriously approach the study of the remedy. That is what matters, and that is what I have wanted to draw attention to in a variety of ways for so long, and what I once again wanted to point out in the most serious way today, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I was asked:
Will capital ownership be abolished in the threefold social organism?
You see, in reality it is about something different from capital ownership. The point is that it is possible to work on a capital basis in the first place. It is not possible to abolish capital as such in our complicated modern life, as so many incomprehensibly demand. Of course capital is needed, even if only in the form of the means of production. Capital is needed to set the modern economic apparatus in motion. So capital must be there.
I have explained this in more detail in my book “The Crux of the Social Question”. But the point is to find ways of managing capital that are indicated in my book ” The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life Today and in the Future” about this capital, that he administers this capital, or rather production, only as long as he himself can be present. Then, whether it is land or other means of production, it passes to someone else in the way that the person concerned can still manage it, who is now linked to it through his abilities. In this way, it will gradually become clear that the more capable people there are, the more fruitful economic life can become, because the management of capital can really pass to capable people.
You see, it is not a matter of being anything other than the steward of that which is to be understood as capital. People cannot yet imagine this. But just take something that, I would say, is already exemplary in a certain way, like the Dornach building, which I had to mention several times in the lecture.
The question may arise: Who does it belong to? It does not really belong to anyone in the old sense. It only makes sense if it passes to those who can manage it in the appropriate way. The means and ways must be found to manage it.
What can be achieved with a more or less ideal institute can also be achieved with every practical institution, with every factory, especially if it is done in a practical spirit. And you can easily imagine a social structure that replaces the old ownership based on blood ties with a new ownership based on the management of those who have capital based on skills.
I would like to link this directly to the question that was asked orally by a gentleman earlier:
To what extent will these institutions be able to eliminate so-called exploitation?
It is quite clear that this exploitation can only exist as long as personal power also exists in the economic sphere. In my book 'The Core of the Social Question', I explain how the social organism appears in three parts, and how economic life is shaped entirely from an economic point of view. Let us say, for example, that a company has a manager and employees, perhaps also hierarchically structured with a senior manager, middle managers and so on, right down to the manual workers. In economic life, no one has power over another. This is because the relationship between an adult and an adult is not regulated in economic life. In economic life, we are dealing with economics. But the position of the emancipated person in relation to the emancipated person is precisely the subject of the state or legal system; the measure, the duration of work, is somehow mutually ordered in the state, political or legal sphere. This threefold structure of the social organism, I have been told, is what Plato already advocated when he divided human society into the nourishing, defending and teaching classes. No, dear attendees, it is the exact opposite of what Plato said.
No, esteemed attendees. It is the very opposite of what Plato said when he said that human society is divided into the productive, the military, and the learned; there he divided people into these three groups, and the individual belonged to one of the three groups. Today, it is not a matter of dividing people up, but of the organization presenting itself as a three-part structure, with each person and their interests represented in all three organizations, in one way or another.
Imagine a person has children. Through the school system, he is part of the spiritual organization. From the outset, like every person who has come of age, he is part of the legal organization, like everyone else, regardless of what he is or whether he has any other profession or activity than anyone else. And he is part of the economic organization, because the teacher, in so far as he must eat and drink, belongs to the economic organism. That is what comes into consideration: it is not that human beings are divided into sections, but that the social organism is divided into sections.
But this makes impossible everything that leads to exploitation in the modern sense. Today, exploitation is caused, firstly, by external political power, including that of the human individual, that is, political power that is politically regulated. Secondly, by economic power. Economic power, for example in the wage relationship, that is impossible. Because in the future – I mean, if one could think of it, that a sufficient number of people would really come together and thereby the healthy conditions would be imprinted on the three-part social organism if it were given a place – there would be no real exploitation in this three-part social organism. But one thing would be recognized: You see, all social ideals are more or less, when they appear so comprehensively today, more or less quackery, for the simple reason that they do not happen taking into account the real conditions. People always think: How must the social organism be organized so that all people are well? Of course, everyone still has their own subjective views on this. The idea of the threefold social order does not ask that question at all! Because of course, if you look at a natural organism, the lion organism or something like that, you can ideally think of something much better organized than the lion organism. You just have to think about its possibilities based on its conditions. In the same way, the ideas of threefolding do not think of a thousand-year Reich, do not believe in a paradise on earth, but the idea of threefolding asks what social structure is possible if human beings are as they are. From this it deduces the social structure that lies in the threefold social organism. It is precisely from the associative organization of economic life that you can see how things are conceived entirely out of reality.
Yes, it is basically quite easy to draw up social programs, comprehensive programs! Oh, I still remember in the eighties of the 19th century: I was quite often in the so-called Café Griensteidl in Vienna, which was so famous because the old 48ers had already frequented it; during the revolution it became the café of the literati. Karl Kraus, who is well known in Switzerland, wrote his little book 'Die demolierte Literatur' (Demolished Literature) about this rather famous Café Griensteidl. It was indeed the case that everyone who went to Café Griensteidl fancied themselves to be a great man. So actually at every table in the afternoon, when you drank your coffee, at every table the social question was solved three times, between two and four o'clock, and by the same people at night, until after midnight, if you didn't exactly attach great importance to the “Sperr-Sechserl”!
So programmatic solutions to this social question can be found very easily!
You see, if you don't look at reality at all, but work from programs and abstract ideals, then organizations can be thought up in abundance.
Goethe satirized the abstract design of worldviews so beautifully in his poem: “The world is an anchovy salad!” You can just as well say that the world, instead of consisting of abstract atoms, as the monists, for example, do, you can just as well say that the world is an anchovy salad, and prove it; or you can go as far as Gustav Theodor Fechner, who proved quite exactly in a very nice little brochure, a small writing, that the moon consists of iodine. You will find very exact proof there. So basically, if you think abstractly, you can prove anything. That is precisely how people fall into so many errors, by pursuing the abstract instead of entering into reality. But it is not enough to be logical. You also have to be realistic. Real thinking must have two things: logic and conformity to reality. One is inconceivable without the other. But above all, conformity to reality is necessary.
And so it is also necessary not to imagine some arbitrary state of the world and then forge programs based on that, but rather to ask: What is possible? That is the fundamental question for the threefold social organism! And there is no possibility at all that exploitation in the modern sense will take place. You see, there are two sides to everything! From his point of view, even the capitalist can say that he is being exploited. Isn't that right? The point is to look at what is possible. Then there is another interesting question:
What has to be done to avert the danger of Bolshevism based on the ideas presented?
You see, it must be said again and again – and it is not for nothing that I repeat it again and again in the Stuttgart Dreigliederungszeitung, which appears every week and I have already expounded the idea in the newspaper dedicated to the threefold order of the social organism here in Switzerland : in the “Social Future”, which is edited by Dr. Boos here and is particularly adapted to Swiss conditions, and in which the threefold order is represented here in Switzerland, that it is necessary above all that the threefold idea take hold in a sufficiently large number of minds. It must first be understood. People must be there to understand it so that it can take root. For, my dear attendees, then this idea of threefolding, or rather what comes from it, is the only real way to avert present evil.