The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge

GA 336 — 19 August 1919, Dresden

13. The Threefold Social Organism II

Where expert and professional judgment is needed, the majority cannot decide. One-sided economic thinking cannot lead to a solution of the social question.

In order to properly initiate the transformation of the credit system, it is also necessary that knowledgeable and competent personalities are active. Confidence in persons or groups of persons is creditworthiness.

Not three parliaments, but only one for political life. In the intellectual and economic fields, not the majority, but knowledgeable and competent personalities who lead and guide.

Centralized administration is nothing but the product of politically mature thinking. Economic life will not be depoliticized if it is merely separated from the political parliament and centrally administered alongside it with politically mature thinking. Rather, this administration must be carried out quite differently, as envisaged in the threefold order.

Production should not be for profit, but rather for consumption. The motive for production should not be the entrepreneur's profit, but rather what the people need.

Is there anything underlying this essentially correct demand that can lead us to a proper solution of the social question?

The abolition of the prevailing wage system and the right to vote for all those with equal rights – these are in fact demands that had been raised up to the Eisenach Program. Then came the Erfurt Program: nothing more of these two demands, but something quite different: the abolition of all private property and the transfer of all property, of all means of production, into state administration. The old social order had its good support in throne and altar. But now it no longer has that. Instead, it has the office and the factory, and we no longer have that “good support” from them. Overall accounting instead of church administration, nationalization and so on. This is already being done in the East, and what is being done and what is going on there is terrible. This is the grave of the entire modern civilization. One does not notice this immediately, because there are still spiritual and political forces from the past in the circumstances.

Hypnosis of the spirited Lenin.

Spiritualism of [blank in transcript] Trotsky.

Capital: sum of the means of production and land.

The developmental leap of all humanity in the fifteenth century, as in the individual human life in the sixth [to] seventh and thirteenth [to] fourteenth years. And this developmental leap boils down to the fact that man wants to be seen as a personality - each individual.

And this now leaps out in the social question. In the past, the patriarchal relationship, now industry. What about the means of production now? In the past, land was in the hands of a few people, and others worked on this land, which created a special relationship. Today, the means of production have to be procured with large sums of money and are managed by these owners. But these managers have failed to change the relationship with the workers. If there is damage somewhere, statistics are kept. But ideas for change are not found. People were without ideas. The time must come when ideas may again guide the facts. Today, people who have such ideas are branded as utopians, idealists, impractical people.

Talking about abolishing private property is nothing more than childish. Individual initiative is not anti-social, but social. Capital should be centralized by those who have the ability to do so in the right way through their own initiative. In the intellectual field, ownership passes to those who can best manage it for the general public thirty years after the owner's death. People still look perplexed today when this principle is applied to the economy.