# Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice I

## GA 337a — 30 July 1919, Stuttgart

### 3. The History of the Social Movement

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! This evening I will not be anticipating what is actually supposed to be taking place here as study evenings based on the book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. Instead, I will try to give you a kind of introduction to these evenings. I would like to evoke in you through this introduction a sense of the perspective from which this book was written. Above all, it was written from the immediate present, from the conviction that the social question has also taken on a new form through the events of the present and that it is necessary to talk about the social question today in a completely different way than it was talked about from any side before the world war catastrophe. With this book, it has been attempted, so to speak, at this point in human development, in which the social question is becoming particularly urgent and in which actually every person who consciously lives today, who does not sleepily and sleepily live the life of humanity, should know something about what has to happen in the sense of what is usually called the social question. It may be helpful to look back a little today. I may mention things that are partly known to you.

You probably know that the issues raised today on the social question have been raised for a relatively long time. And today, the names Proudhon, Fourier, and Louis Blanc are mentioned as the first to have addressed the social question in the mid-19th century. You are also aware that the way in which the social question was treated until the middle of the 19th century is referred to by today's representatives, at least by many of today's representatives of the social question, as “the age of social utopias”. It is good to be clear about what is actually meant when one says: in its first stage, the social question arose in an “age of utopias”. But one cannot talk about this matter in the absolute sense, but one can actually only talk about the feelings of the representatives of the social question in the present. They feel the way I am about to describe it. They feel that all social questions that arose in the age of which I want to speak first were in the stage of utopia. And what do people understand by saying that the social question was then in the stage of utopia? They understand by this – and this was already noticed at the time; Saint-Simon and Fourier noticed it well – that there are, even after the French Revolution, people of a certain social minority who are in possession of the means of production and also of other human goods, and that there are a large number of other people – in fact, the majority – who are not in possession of such things. These people can only work on the means of production by entering the service of those who own the means of production and also the land. They have basically nothing but themselves and their labor. It has been observed that the life of this large mass of humanity is one of hardship, and that it lives largely in poverty in contrast to those who are in the minority; and attention has been drawn to the situation of the minority and the situation of the majority.

Those who have written about the social situation of humanity, such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, as well as Proudhon, have started from a certain premise. They have started from the premise that it is necessary to point out to people: Look, the great mass lives in misery, in bondage, in economic dependence; this is not a humane existence for the great mass. That must be changed. And then all kinds of means were devised by which this inequality among people could be changed. But there was always a certain prerequisite, and that prerequisite was that one said to oneself: If one knows the reasons for this inequality and if one has enough words of warning, if one has enough moral awareness to point out that the great majority of people live in economic and legal dependence and are poor, then this speech will touch the hearts and souls of the minority, the wealthy, the more favored minority. And if this minority realizes that things cannot remain as they are, that changes must be made, that a different social order must come, then a different social order will be brought about. So the prerequisite was that people would deign to do something to liberate the great mass of humanity out of their innermost soul urge. And then they suggested what should be done. And it was believed that if the minority, if the people who are the guiding, leading people, realize that what is wanted to be done is good, then a general improvement in the situation of humanity will occur.

A great deal of extraordinarily clever things have been said from this side, but all that has been undertaken in this direction is felt today by most representatives of the social question to be utopian. That is, one no longer counts on the fact that one only needs to say: This is how the world should be organized, then the economic and political and legal inequality of people would end. Today, it is of no use appealing to the understanding and insight of those who are favored, who have the privilege, who are in possession of the means of production and the like. If I am to express what was lost in the course of the second half of the 19th century, I have to say that faith in the insight and goodwill of people was lost. Therefore, the representatives of the social question, whom I now mean, say to themselves: it is all very well to think up beautiful plans for how to set up the human world, but nothing comes of it; because no matter how beautiful the plans are preached, no matter how touching the words of appeal to the hearts and souls of the ruling minorities, nothing will happen. All these are worthless ideas, and worthless ideas, which paint the future, are in reality, to put it popularly, utopias. It is therefore useless, so they say, to imagine anything that should happen in the future, because there will be no one who lets go of his interests, who can be moved in terms of his conscience, in terms of his moral insight, and so on. Faith in conscience and moral insight has been lost in the broadest circles, especially among the representatives of the social question. People say to themselves, people do not act according to their insight when they make social arrangements or when they lead their social lives, they act according to their interest. And the haves naturally have an interest in keeping their possessions. The socially privileged have an interest in maintaining social privileges. Therefore, it is an illusion to count on the fact that one only needs to say that people should do this or that. They just don't do it because they don't act out of their insight, but out of their interest.

In the broadest sense, it can be said that Karl Marx gradually – but really only gradually – came to accept this view. One can describe a whole series of epochs in the life of Karl Marx. In his youth, Marx was also an idealistic thinker and still thought in terms of the realizability of utopias, in the sense that I have just characterized it. But it was precisely he, and after him his friend Engels, who in the most radical way possible abandoned this calculation of people's insight. And when I characterize in general what is actually a great story, I can say the following: Karl Marx ultimately came to the conviction that the world could not get better in any other way than by calling on those people who do not have an interest in their goods and privileges being preserved. As for those who have an interest in keeping their goods, these cannot be looked at at all, they must be left out of the reckoning altogether, because they would never deign to enter into it, no matter how beautifully it is preached. On the other hand, there is the great mass of proletarian laborers, [who have no goods to lose]. Karl Marx himself became convinced of this during the period when what is today called the proletariat was basically only emerging in Central Europe; he saw the proletariat emerging in Central Europe out of different economic conditions. When he later lived in England, it was somewhat different. But at the time when Karl Marx was developing from an idealist into an economic materialist, it was still the case that the modern proletariat was only emerging in Central Europe. And now he said to himself: this modern proletariat has completely different interests than the leading minority, because it consists of people who possess nothing but their labor, of people who cannot live in any other way than by placing their labor in the service of the propertied, namely in the service of those who own the means of production. If these workers leave their jobs, then they are thrown out on the street – this was particularly true in the most radical way for the time. They have no other prospect before them than the possibility of serfdom for those who own the means of production. These people have a completely different interest from the propertied classes. They have an interest in the entire previous social order being abolished, in this social order being transformed. They do not need to be preached to in such a way that their understanding is seized, but only in such a way that their selfishness, their interest, is seized. You can rely on that. To preach to those whose understanding one should count on, nothing comes of it, because people do not act out of understanding, they only act according to interests. So, one cannot appeal to those who should be appealed to for understanding, but one must appeal to the interests of those who cannot but advocate for the newer times out of inner compulsion. That is the egotism to which Karl Marx has developed. Therefore, he no longer believed that the progress of humanity to newer social conditions could come from any other human work than from the work of the proletariat itself. The proletariat could only, according to Karl Marx, strive for a renewal of human social conditions from its interests, from its own selfish interests. And in so doing, the proletariat will also liberate all of the rest of humanity, not out of philanthropy but out of selfish interest, because there can be nothing left but what people can achieve, people who are not attached to old goods and have nothing to lose from old goods in a transformation.

So one says to oneself: On the one hand, there are the leading, guiding circles, they have certain rights that were granted to them in earlier times or that were enforced by them in earlier times, that have been inherited in their families, they hold on to them. These leading, guiding circles are in possession of this or that, which they in turn pass on within their circles, their family and so on. These circles always have something to lose in a transformation, because of course, if they lost nothing, no transformation would happen. The point is that those who have nothing should get something, so those who have something can only lose. So one could only appeal to reason if this reason would give the propertied, leading class the impulse to want to lose something. They will not go for that. That was Karl Marx's view. So you have to appeal to those who have nothing to lose. That is why the “Communist Manifesto” ends with the words: “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, but they have everything to gain. Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

Now you see, since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, this has become a conviction, so to speak. And today, when certain sentiments, which are already influenced by this view, are alive precisely in the majority of the proletariat, today one can no longer properly imagine what a tremendous turnaround in socialist thought took place around the mid-19th century. But it would be good if you would take something like The Gospel of a Poor Sinner by Weitling, a journeyman tailor who wrote it not so long before the Communist Manifesto, and compare it with all the things written after the Communist Manifesto appeared. In this “gospel of a poor sinner” that is truly inspired by genuine proletarian sentiment, there is a language that is, one might say, in a certain sense even poetic, glowing language, but it is definitely a language that seeks to appeal to people's good will, to their insight. That is Weitling's conviction, that you can do something with people's good will. And this conviction only disappeared around the middle of the 19th century. And the event that caused it to disappear is precisely the publication of the Communist Manifesto. And since that time, since 1848, we can actually follow what we call the social question today. Because if we wanted to talk today like Saint-Simon, like Fourier, like Weitling – yes, we would really be preaching to the deaf today. For to a certain extent it is absolutely true that one cannot achieve anything in the social question by appealing to the insight of the leading and guiding circles, who have something. That is quite right. The leading and guiding circles have never admitted this, and they are hardly likely to admit it today either – they don't even know if they do, because unconscious forces in the human soul play an extraordinarily important role there.

You see, in the course of the 19th century, our intellectual culture has almost entirely become a cliché. And the fact that we live with clichés when it comes to intellectual culture is a much more important social fact than is usually thought. And so, of course, the members of the leading and ruling circles also talk about all kinds of nice things when it comes to the social question, and they themselves are often convinced that they already have the good will. But in reality they only believe that; it is only their illusion. The moment something real is tackled in this regard, it immediately becomes clear that it is an illusion. We will talk about this later. But as I said, today we can no longer talk as we did in the age of utopias. The real achievement that came through Karl Marx is that he showed how humanity today is so enmeshed in illusionism that it is nonsense to count on anything but egoism. It must be reckoned with one day; therefore, nothing can be achieved if one wants to somehow count on selflessness, on goodwill, on people's moral principles - I always say “in relation to the social question”. And this change, which has led to the fact that today we have to speak quite differently than it was possible to speak in the first half of the 19th century with regard to the social question, this change has come with the Communist Manifesto. But it did not all come at once. Even after the Communist Manifesto, it was still possible, as you all know – some younger socialists have already forgotten the time – that this very different kind of social thinking, the kind of Ferdinand Lassalle, took hold of hearts and souls well into the 1860s. And even after the death of Lassalle, which occurred in 1864, what was Lassallean socialism continued. Lassalle is one of those people who, despite the fact that the other way of thinking had already emerged, still counted on the power of ideas. Lassalle still wanted to reach people as such in their insight, in their social will above all. But this Lassallean tendency gradually diminished, and the other tendency, the Marxist tendency, which only wanted to take into account the interests of that part of the human population that only had itself and its labor power, gained the upper hand. But it did not happen so quickly. Such a way of thinking only developed gradually in humanity.

In the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, it was quite common for people who belonged to the proletariat or who were politically or socially dependent – even if they were not exactly proletarians – to judge their dependency morally, so to speak, and to morally condemn the non-dependent circles of the human population. In their minds, it was the maliciousness of the leading and guiding circles of the human population that they kept the great mass of the proletariat in dependency, that they paid them poorly and so on. If I may put it trivially, I can say that in the 1960s, 1970s, and well into the 1980s, a lot of social indignation was manufactured and, from the point of view of social indignation, spoken. Then, in the mid-1980s, the strange turnaround actually only really occurred. The more leading personalities of the social movement then stopped talking about the social question out of moral indignation altogether in the 1980s. That was the time when those social leaders who were younger and more or less still glowing with youthful zeal, whom you, who are younger, only saw dying: Adler, Pernerstorfer, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Auer, Bebel, Singer and so on. It was precisely during that period in the 1880s that these older leaders increasingly stopped preaching this indignation socialism. I would put it this way: these leaders of socialism expressed their innermost conviction when they transferred the old indignation socialism into their newer socialist worldview. You will find what I am telling you now is not in any book about the history of socialism. But anyone who lived through those times knows that when people were left to their own devices, this is how they spoke.

Let us assume that in the 1980s, leading representatives of socialism met for a discussion with those who were bourgeois in their attitudes, and let us assume that there was a third group present: bourgeois who were idealists and wished all people well, who would have agreed to make all people happy. Then it could have happened that the bourgeois declared that there must always be people who are poor and those who are rich, and so on, because only that could maintain human society. Then perhaps the voice of one of those who were idealists would have been raised, who were indignant that so many people had to live in poverty and dependence. Such a person might then have said: Yes, it must be achieved that it is made clear to these wealthy people, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, that they must let go of their possessions, that they must make arrangements through which the great masses come into a different situation, and the like. Very nice speeches could be made on the basis of these words. But then someone would have raised his voice who was just finding his way into socialism at the time and said: What are you talking about, you are a child; that is all childishness, all nonsense! The people who are capitalists, who are entrepreneurs, they are all poor wretches who know nothing but what they have been taught by generations. If they also hear that they should do it differently, they couldn't even do it, because it wouldn't occur to them how they should do it. It doesn't even occur to them that something can be done differently. You must not accuse people, you must not morally condemn people, they cannot be morally condemned; those guys have grown into this, these poor souls, into this whole milieu, and that inspires them with the ideas they have. To morally accuse them means to understand nothing of the laws of human development, means to indulge in illusions. These people could never want the world to take on a different form. To speak of them with indignation is pure childishness. All this has become necessary, and again, it can only become necessary through necessity. You see, you can't do anything with such childish fellows who believe that they can preach to the propertied, to the capitalists, that a new world order should be established; you can't establish a new world order with them; they only indulge in the belief that you can accuse these poor capitalists of wanting to make a different world. I have to make the matter clear, so some things are said in sharp contours, but in such a way that you could hear the speeches I am talking about absolutely everywhere. When they were written, they were retouched a bit, written a bit differently, but that was the basis. Then they continued: With these guys - they are idealists, they imagine the world in terms of an ideology - there is no starting point. We have to rely on those who have nothing, who therefore want something different out of their interests than those who are connected to capitalist interests. And they will not strive for a change of their circumstances for some moral principle, but only out of greed, to have more than they have had so far, to have an independent existence.

In the 1980s, this way of thinking increasingly came to be seen as the development of humanity, no longer in the sense that the individual is particularly responsible for what he does, but that he does what he has to do out of his economic situation. The capitalist, the entrepreneur, exploits the others in the highest innocence. The proletarian, on the other hand, will not revolutionize out of a moral principle, but in all innocence out of human necessity, and will take the means of production, the capital, out of the hands of those who have it. This must happen as an historical necessity.

Well, you see, it was actually only in 1891 at the Erfurt Party Congress that all Lassallianism, which was still based on the insight that people could be educated, was abandoned in favor of belief in the so-called “Erfurt Program”, which was intended to make Marxism the official view of the proletariat. Read the programs of the Gotha and Eisenach party conferences, and you will find two demands that are genuinely proletarian demands of the time, still connected with Lassallianism. The first demand was: the abolition of the wage relationship; the second demand was: the political equality of all people, the abolition of all political privileges. All proletarian demands up to the 1890s, up to the Erfurt Party Congress, which brought about the great turnaround, were based on these two demands. Take a close look at these two demands and compare them with the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress. What, then, are the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress? They are: the transfer of private ownership of the means of production into common ownership; the administration of all production, of all manufacture, by a kind of large cooperative, into which the existing state must transform itself. Compare the former program, which was the proletarian program of the 1880s, with what emerged from the Erfurt Party Program and has existed since the 1890s. You will see that in the old Gotha and Eisenach programs, the demands of socialism are still purely human demands: political equality for all people, the abolition of the degrading wage relationship. At the beginning of the 1990s, what I have characterized to you as the attitude that emerged during the 1980s was already taking effect. What was still more of a human demand has been transformed into a purely economic demand. You no longer read about the ideal of abolishing the wage relationship, you only read about economic demands.

Now, you see, these things are connected with the gradual development of the idea that one had about the external creation of a better social condition for humanity. It has also often been said by such people, who still had ideals: Oh, what harm can it do to smash everything, a different order must be brought about; so, a revolution must come, everything must be smashed, the great Kladderadatsch must come, because only from that can a better social order arise. - That was still said by many people in the 1880s who were good, idealistic socialists. To which the others replied, who were in touch with the times, who had become the leaders, those who, as I said, are now buried – they said: There is no sense in any of this, such sudden revolutions are senseless. The only thing that makes sense is that we leave capitalism to its own devices. We see that in the beginning there were only small capitalists, then there were big ones; they joined forces with others and became capitalist groups. Capital has become more and more concentrated. We are in the process of capital becoming more and more concentrated. Then the time will come when there will actually only be a few large capitalist trusts and consortia. Then it will only be necessary for the proletariat, as the non-possessing class, to peacefully transfer the capitalist property, the means of production, into community property one fine day, through parliamentary channels. This can be done quite well, but we must wait and see. Until then, things have to develop. Capitalism, which is actually an innocent child, can't help it that it is exploitative – that is brought about by historical necessity. But it also prepares the way, because it concentrates capital; it is then nicely together, then it just needs to be taken over by the community. Nothing of rapid revolution, but slow development.

You see, the secret of the view, the public secret of the view, which is based on this, was nicely explained by Engels in the 1890s. He said: What is the point of quick revolutions? What is happening slowly under the development of modern capitalism, this massing of capitals, this concentration of capitals, it all works for us. We don't even need to create a commonality, the capitalists are already doing that. We just need to transfer it into proletarian ownership. Therefore, Engels says, the roles have actually been reversed. We, who represent the proletariat, have no complaints about the development; the others have complaints. Because the guys who are in the circles of the propertied people today have to say to themselves: We accumulate capital, but we accumulate it for others. See, the guys actually have to worry about losing their capital; they get hollow cheeks, they get scrawny from these worries about what will become of it. We, as socialists, thrive in this development. We get, says Engels, bulging muscles and full cheeks and look like eternal life. – That's what Engels says in an introduction he wrote in the 1890s, characterizing what is developing, and how one need only wait for the development, which is actually taken care of by capitalism itself. This development then leads to the transfer of what capitalism has concentrated into the common ownership of those who have had nothing so far. That was actually the mood with which the 20th century was entered by the leading circles of the proletariat.

And so they thought, especially since the time when Marxism was no longer taken as it was in the 1990s, but when it was subjected to a revision, as it was said, in the time when the revisionists appeared, so those who are still alive today, but are old people, such as Bernstein. So the revisionists came. They said that the whole development could be promoted a little, because if the workers only work until the capitalists have gathered everything together, they will still suffer hardship before then, namely in old age they have nothing. Then assurances were made and so on; and above all, it was seen that what the leading classes had as institutions in political life was also appropriated. As you know, the trade union movement also emerged at that time. And within the Socialist Party, there were two strongly divergent directions: the declared trade union party and the actual, as it was then called, political party. The political party was more down-to-earth, a sudden revolution would be of no use, the development had to take place as I have just described it. Therefore, it was a matter of preparing everything for the one point in time when capitalism is sufficiently concentrated and the proletariat has a majority in parliament. Everything had to be driven forward along the path of parliamentarism, of acquiring a majority, so that at the point in time when the means of production were to be taken over into public ownership, the majority would also be there for this transfer. In particular, this group of people, who thought highly of the political party, did not think much of the trade union movement at the end of the 19th century. At that time, the trade unions were advocating the establishment of a kind of organized competition between themselves and the entrepreneurs, in order to repeatedly extract wage increases and similar things from the companies from time to time. In short, they set themselves up to imitate the system of mutual negotiations that existed among the ruling circles themselves, and to extend it to the relationship between the ruling circles and the proletariat. You know, of course, that those who were particularly criticized by the representatives of the actual political socialist system were those who became most bourgeois under the trade union movement. And at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, you could see everywhere among those who were more attuned to the political system a great contempt for those people who had become completely absorbed in trade union life, especially, for example, the printers, who in turn had developed a completely different system of trade union life to the extreme.

These were two very strictly separate directions in social life: the trade unionists and those who were more inclined towards the political party. And within the trade unions, the printers in the printers' association were almost the model boys; they were the model boys who had also earned the full recognition of bourgeois circles. And I believe that just as there was a certain fear, a certain concern about the political Socialist Party, so little by little one saw with great satisfaction that good people like the people in the printers' union came to the fore. People said of them: They are becoming bourgeois, you can always negotiate with them, it's going quite well. When they raise their wages, we raise the prices we charge. That works. And it did work for the next few years, and people didn't think any further ahead. So they were very satisfied with this exemplary development of the trade unions. Well, if I omit some of the more subtle nuances, one can say that these two directions more or less emerged until the times that were then surprised by the world war catastrophe. But unfortunately people did not learn everything from this world war catastrophe that should have been learned with regard to the social question.

Not true, as soon as you look at the situation in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, if you disregard the Anglo-American world and to some extent the Romance world, if you limit yourself to Central and Eastern Europe, you can say that nothing much has come of this history, which has always been defined as follows: the concentration of capital, and, if you have a majority in parliament, then the capital will pass into the ownership of the community, and so on. The catastrophe of the world war has ensured that this cannot be expected to happen so smoothly today. Those who expected some kind of revolution have often been portrayed as childish, but basically, what has happened in the last four to five years? Let us keep clearly and distinctly in mind what has happened. You have often heard what has happened in the last four to five years: In July 1914, the governments went a little bit “crazy” - or went crazy - and rushed the people into the world war. People believed that there was a world war, battles took place - but with the modern means of war, with the machine means, something completely different was there than in previous wars. There was no longer any possibility that someone would become a particularly famous general, because ultimately it only came down to whether one side had a greater quantity of ammunition and other means of warfare, whether one side was better at producing the mechanical means of war than the other or had discovered a gas and the like that the others did not have. First one side won, then the other side discovered something, then the first side again; the whole thing was a terribly mechanical warfare. And everything that has been said about what has happened here and there on the part of people, that was under the influence of the phrase, it was entirely a phrase. And little by little modern humanity will realize, even in Central Europe, what was put into it as a phrase when one or the other, who was actually nothing more than a somewhat twisted average soldier, was made a great commander in Central Europe. These things have only become possible under the influence of the phrase. Well, that was just the case.

But what really happened? People did not notice this because of external events. While people believed that a world war had been waged – which was actually only a mask – a revolution actually took place. In reality, a revolution happened in these four to five years. People just don't know that today, they still don't pay attention to it. The war is the outside, the mask; the truth is that the revolution has taken place. And because the revolution has taken place, the society of Central and Eastern Europe is in a completely different condition today, and one cannot start with what people had in mind for earlier situations. Today it is necessary that all the thoughts that were formed earlier be completely reorganized, that one think about things in a completely new way. And that is what has been attempted with the book “The Crux of the Social Question”: to correctly calculate the situation we have ended up in as a result of the most recent events. It is no wonder, then, that the people in the socialist parties, who cannot keep up fast enough, have shown this book a misunderstanding after misunderstanding. If people would only take the trouble to examine their own thoughts – to examine a little that which they say they want – they would see how much they live under the influence of the ideas they had until 1914. That is the old habit.

These ideas that we had until 1914 have become so engrained in our environment that they will not come out again. And what is the result? The result is that although a new approach is needed today, although the revolution has taken place in Eastern and Central Europe, although we now need to build up, not according to old ideas but according to new ones, despite all this, people are preaching the old ideas. And what are the parties today, including the socialist parties? The socialist parties are those who continue to preach this or that socialist gospel in the old way, as they preached until July 1914, because there is no difference in these party programs from the earlier ones – at most the difference that comes from outside. For those who know the issues, there is terribly little that is new, nothing at all that is new, in the individual party groups. The old shopworn ideas are still being peddled today. Well, there is a slight difference: if you have a copper kettle and tap it, it makes one sound; if you tap a wooden barrel in exactly the same way, it makes a different sound; but the tapping can be exactly the same. It depends on what you are tapping whether it sounds different. And so it is today, when people talk about their party programs. What is contained in these old party programs is actually the old party storekeeper; just because there are different social conditions now, it sounds a little different today, just as it sounds different with a copper kettle or with a wooden barrel. When the Independent Socialists or the Majority Socialists or the Communists speak, they speak the old party phrases, and it sounds different because it is not a copper kettle but a wooden barrel. In truth, many sides have learned nothing, nothing, nothing. But what matters is that one learns something, that one is told something by this terrible world war, as it is called, but which was actually a world revolution.

And here one can really say: In the broad masses, people are prepared to hear something new. But with the broad masses it is like this: they listen to what the leaders say. There is a good understanding, a good, healthy common sense in the broad, uneducated masses, and one could actually always count on understanding when one presents something truly contemporary, something that can be called contemporary in the best sense of the word. This is partly due to the fact that the masses are uneducated. But as soon as people enter into the kind of education that has been available for the past three to four centuries, this quality of being unspoiled ceases. If you look at what today's bourgeois school education is, from elementary school up to university – and it will be at its worst if the socialist unified school is founded now, because everything that has been done wrong by the bourgeois elementary school will be present to the greatest extent – you can see that what is taught in schools distorts minds and alienates them from life. We have to get out of all this stuff, we really have to stand on our own two feet in the spiritual life if we want to get out of this education. But you see, it is through this education that the great and small proletarian leaders have become so. They had to acquire this education; this education is in our schools and in popular writings, it is everywhere. And then you start to get a dried-up brain and are no longer open to facts, but to party programs and opinions that you have grafted and hammered into yourself, you stick with them. Then even the world revolution can come, you still whistle the old programs at it.

You see, this is essentially what this book, “The Key Points of the Social Question,” and the lectures in many directions have been intended to achieve. For once, the proletariat was really reckoned with in terms of what it absolutely needs today, what is necessary given the current situation. This was understood at the beginning [in the proletariat], but then it was not understood by those who are the leaders of the proletariat in the various party groupings. That is, I do not want to be too unjust, and I do not want to press the truth; I do not want to claim, for example, that these leaders do not understand this book, because I cannot assume that they have read it, that they know it. I would not be stating something that is true if I said that they cannot understand the book. But they cannot bring themselves to understand that something different should be necessary than what they have been thinking for decades. Their brains have become too dry and too rigid for that. And so they remain with what they have thought for a long time and find that what is the opposite of all utopia is a utopia. Because, you see, the book 'The Core Points' fully recognizes that today one can no longer operate in utopia in the sense of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and so on, but also that one can never again take the standpoint: development will happen by itself. For what Marx and Engels saw, what developed [in their time], from which they drew their conclusions, cannot be drawn from today, because the world war has swept that away, it is no longer there in its true form. Anyone who says the same thing today as Marx and Engels says something that Marx would never have said. He was afraid of his followers, because he said: As for me, I am not a Marxist. — And today he would say: At that time the facts were still different; at that time I drew my conclusions from facts that had not yet been modified and changed as much as the world war has changed everything since then.

But you see, those people who cannot learn from events, who today are of an attitude as the old Catholics were towards their bishops and popes, they cannot even imagine that something like Marxism must also be further developed in the sense of facts. They still see the old facts before them, and that is why people still whistle and hiss the same things that they whistled and hissed before the world war. That is how the socialists do it, but the conservatives do it too. The broadest circles do it that way. The conservatives, of course, do it very drowsily, with completely sleepy souls. The others do it in such a way that they are indeed in the thick of it and see the collapse, but they do not want to reckon with the facts that it reveals. Today, we simply have to bring something new to the people. And therefore it is necessary to understand something [like threefolding] that is not utopian but that takes the facts into account. If those on the other side call what takes the facts into account obstruction, then one could actually be quite satisfied. For if people call what they are pushing forward a straight line, then, in order to pursue something reasonable, one has to shoot into the way in order to bring the unreasonable into another, reasonable direction. But you see, those who do see the reasonable after all should delve into what is being presented here. And these evenings can be used for that.

What has been derived from the facts has long been tried to be put into practice. And so we have been meeting for weeks - I do not need to repeat all these things, you can still ask questions or discuss the pros and cons after this lecture - we have been meeting for weeks to get what we call the works council up and running. We have tried to create this council out of the facts that are currently necessary, to really create it in such a way that it comes from the mere economic life, that it does not come from political life, which cannot provide the basis for economic life. For if we look the facts in the face today, we must stand firmly on the ground of the threefold social organism. And anyone who does not want this threefold structure today is acting contrary to the historical necessity of human development. Today it must be as I have often explained: that spiritual life is taken care of, that economic life is taken care of, that legal or political life is administered democratically. And in economic life, the first step towards a truly social organization is to be taken with the works councils. But how can this be done? Only by first asking the question: Now that the impulse of the threefold social organism exists, it is new compared to all previous party mummies; is there anything else new? Today, fools claim that ideas are just buzzing through the air. If you listen to the discussions, they bring up all sorts of negative things, but they don't bring up anything that could be put alongside the threefold order of the social organism. It is all wishy-washy when people on the socialist side claim that ideas are just floating around in the air — as was said in a newly founded magazine in a review of the threefold order.

The first thing to do is to raise the question and be clear about it: is there nothing else? Then one should stick to the threefold social order until it can be refuted in an objective way, until one can objectively put something equivalent alongside it. One can no longer discuss the old party programs; the world war has discussed them; anyone who really understands knows that these old party mummies have been refuted by the world war catastrophe. But if one cannot answer this question by putting something factually equivalent alongside it, and if one wants to go further, then one can honestly say to oneself: So let us work in the sense of the threefold social order. Let us honestly say to ourselves: the old party contexts have lost their significance; we must work in the sense of the threefold social order.

When I spoke in Mannheim the day before yesterday, a gentleman came forward at the end and said: What Steiner said is nice, but it is not what we want; we do not want another new party in addition to all the old parties. The people who want something like that should join the old parties and work within them. I could only say: I have been following political life very closely for a long time, when the gentleman who spoke was far from being born. And although I have become familiar with everything that has somehow functioned as a social force through my life, I have never been able to work within any party or be part of one, and it does not occur to me, now at the end of my sixth decade of life, to somehow become a party person: I want nothing to do with any party, even one founded by myself. So I want nothing to do with a party founded by myself either; no one need fear that a new party will be founded by me. For I have learned that every party, through the necessities of nature, becomes foolish after some time, precisely because I have never got involved with any party. And I have learned to pity those who do not see this. Therefore no one need fear that a new party will be added to the old ones. That is why we have not founded a new party either, but the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has come together to represent the ideas of the threefold organism, whose non-utopian character, whose real character is seen by a number of people. But those people who understand this should also honestly and sincerely admit it.

And this must not be allowed to happen either: there is a play in which a cock crows in the morning, and every time the cock crows, the sun rises. Now, the cock cannot see the connection, so it believes that when it crows, the sun follows its call, comes because it has crowed, and that it has caused the sun to rise. If someone in a non-social life indulges in such a delusion, like this cockerel crowing on the dung heap and wanting to make the sun rise, it does not matter. But if, under certain circumstances, the idea of a truly economic works council were to flourish on the soil of the threefold organism and those people who cultivate it were to deny the origin, namely that the impulse the impulse of threefolding has brought this idea into being, and if these people believe that because one crows, the works councils will come, then that would be the same error, and a very disastrous error. But that must not happen. What is happening in this direction [of the works councils], what has been tackled here, must not be detached; it must remain in connection with the correctly understood impulse of the threefold social order. And those who want to realize the works council in the sense of this impulse can never allow themselves to be drawn into the one-sided establishment of the works council alone, with the constant crowing of “works councils, works councils”. That is not enough. It only makes sense if, at the same time, one strives for everything that is to be achieved through the impulse of the tripartite social organism. That is what matters. Because if you really want to understand what is written in the “Key Points”, then you have to take the point of view that can be learned from the facts that the last four to five years have presented. If you look at these facts, they will seem as if you had lived through centuries, and the party programs will seem as if their supporters had slept for centuries. Today, this must be clearly and unreservedly faced.

What I have told you now, I could just as easily have written as a preface to this book. But in the last few months we have seen how rigid and unfruitful the party programs currently are. It would be useful, though, if that were the preface to this book. I have told you today much of what is not in it, because you have, it seems to me, decided to meet here to study the serious social issues of the present in a proper way, building on this book. But before doing so, it must be made clear that one cannot simply carry on in the old style of party programs and party patterns, but that one must decide to take a realistic approach to the facts today and put an end to everything that does not take into account these new facts. Only in this way will you grasp in the right way what is to be achieved with this impulse of the threefold social organism. And you will grasp it in the right way if you find that every sentence in this book is capable of becoming an act, of being transformed into immediate reality. And most of those who say they do not understand it or that it is utopian and the like, they simply lack the courage to think so strongly today that their thoughts can intervene in reality. Those who always crow about “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “seizing power,” “socialism,” they usually think very little about it. Therefore, these word templates cannot be used to intervene in reality. But then they come along and say that [with the “key points”] only something utopian is being offered. A utopia only comes into being in the minds of people who understand nothing about it.

Therefore, one should make clear to these people what Goethe once said, with reference to something else, in a somewhat modified form, laughing at the physiologist Haller, who was an ossified naturalist. Haller had coined the word:

> No creative spirit  
> penetrates into the depths of nature.  
> Happy he to whom she  
> presents only the outer shell.

Goethe objected to this and said:

> “Into the depths of nature”  
> Oh, you philistine!  
> “No creative spirit can penetrate.“  
> ...  
> “Happy he who sees  
> Only the outer shell!”  
> I have heard this repeated for sixty years,  
> I curse it, but furtively.  
> Nature has neither core  
> nor shell,  
> All at once it is everything.  
> You alone are the supreme test, whether you are core or shell!

To those who speak of the threefold social organism as a utopia, one would also like to say: You alone are the supreme test, whether what is haunting your brain is utopia or reality. There you will find that all the crows mostly have utopias in them and therefore the reality in their own heads also becomes a utopia or an ideology or whatever they call it. That is why it is so difficult to get through with reality today, because people have obstructed themselves so much that they cannot access reality.

But we must realize that we have to work seriously, otherwise we will not be able to translate our will into action; and that is what it comes down to, to translate our will into action. And if we had to abandon everything because we recognize it as an error, then, in order to move from intention to action, we would have to turn to the truth, which we want to see through as truth, because nothing else can lead from intention to action but the ruthless, courageous pursuit of truth. This should actually be written as a motto, as a motto, in front of the studies of these evenings. I wanted to give you a preface to these study evenings tonight. I hope that this preface will not deter you from cultivating these studies in such a way that, before it is too late, thoughts that carry the seeds of action can be fruitfully placed in the world.

*There will be an opportunity for discussion.*

Rudolf Steiner: The book “The Key Points of the Social Question” is written in a special way in two directions. Firstly, it is written in such a way that it actually comes entirely from reality. This is something that some people do not consider when reading the book. I can also understand that this is not fully appreciated today. I have already spoken here in this circle – but not all those who are here today were present – about how people really think today. I referred in particular to the example of the professor of political economy, Lujo Brentano, who presented it so nicely in the previous issue of the “Gelbes Blatt”; I will briefly repeat it because I want to take something up from it. This luminary of today's economics at the university – he is, so to speak, the first – developed the concept of the entrepreneur and tried to characterize the features of the entrepreneur based on his enlightened thinking. I do not need to list the first and second features; as a third, he states that the entrepreneur is the one who puts his means of production at the service of the social order at his own risk and expense. Now he has this concept of the entrepreneur, and he applies it. He comes to the strange conclusion that the proletarian worker of today is actually also an entrepreneur, because he corresponds to this concept of the entrepreneur in terms of the first, second and third characteristics. For the worker has his own labor power as a means of production; he has control over it, and in relation to it he turns to the social process at his own risk and expense. Thus this luminary of political economy very aptly incorporates the concept of the proletarian laborer into his concept of the entrepreneur. You see, that is precisely how people think who make concepts that have no meaning at all; they have no meaning when concepts are required that are actually to be applicable to reality. But however little you may be willing to accept, it is safe to say that well over ninety percent of everything taught or printed today operates with such concepts. If you want to apply them to reality, it is just as ineffective as Lujo Brentano's concept of the entrepreneur. This is the case in science, in social science, everywhere. That is why people have forgotten how to understand anything that works with realistic concepts.

Take the basis of the threefold social order. No, you can't lay these foundations in the most diverse ways, because life needs many foundations. But one thing is clear: in more recent times, what might be called the impulse of democracy has emerged. Democracy must consist of every person who has come of age being able to determine their legal relationship in democratic parliaments – directly or indirectly with every other person who has come of age. But if we honestly and sincerely want to bring this democracy into the world, then we cannot manage spiritual matters in the sense of this democracy, because then every person who has come of age would have to decide on matters they do not understand. Spiritual matters must be regulated on the basis of an understanding of the matter at hand. This means that they must be placed in their own right and cannot be administered in a democratic parliament at all. They must have their own administration, which cannot be democratic but must be based on the matter at hand. The same applies to economic life; here, too, economic experience and the inner life of economic life must be the basis for administering the matter. Therefore, economic life on the one hand and intellectual life on the other must be excluded from the democratic parliament. From this, the threefold social organism arises.

There is a professor Heck in Tübingen, who – as I have already mentioned – has said that there is absolutely no need to admit that there is something degrading for the proletarian in the ordinary wage relationship, where one is paid for one's work, because Caruso is also in a wage relationship. The difference would be no difference in principle: Caruso sings and receives his salary, and the ordinary proletarian works and also receives his salary; and he, as a professor, also receives his salary when he lectures. The only difference between Caruso and the proletarian is that Caruso gets thirty to forty thousand marks for one evening and the proletarian a little less. But that is not a fundamental difference, only a difference in the amount of the remuneration. And so, says this witty professor, there is absolutely no reason to feel that the remuneration is degrading; he does not feel that way either. That is just by the way. But now this clever professor has also written a long article against the threefold social order. He starts from the premise that if we organize in three, we will end up with three parliaments. And now he shows that this does not work with three parliaments, because he says: in the economic parliament, the small craftsman will not understand the points of view of the big industrialist, and so on. The good professor has formed his ideas about the threefold order, and he attacks these ideas – which I find much more foolish than Professor Heck does; I would also criticize them to no end – but he has made them himself. The point is not to have three parliaments standing side by side, but to extract what does not belong in any parliament. He simply makes three parliaments and says: That's not possible. — So you live in unrealistic terms and judge the rest by them.

Now, in economics, in political economy, almost only those terms have been introduced that are unreal. But you see, I could not write a whole library now, when time is pressing, in which all economic terms are listed. Therefore, of course, a lot of terms can be found in the “key points” that need to be discussed properly. For example, I need only draw attention to the following:

It is true that in times gone by, social conditions arose basically only through conquest. Some territory was occupied by one people or race; another people burst in and conquered the area. Those races or peoples who were there earlier were pushed down to do the work. The conquering people took possession of the land, and that is how a certain relationship between conquerors and conquered arose. The conquerors had possession of the land because they were conquerors. Thus they were the economically strong, the conquered were the economically weak, and a legal relationship developed. Therefore, in almost all older epochs in historical development, legal relationships based on conquest were established, that is, privileges and disadvantageous rights. Now the times came when it was no longer possible to conquer freely. You can study the difference between free and bound conquest by looking at the early Middle Ages, for example. You can study how certain peoples, the Goths, pushed down to the south, but into fully occupied areas; there they were led to do different things in terms of the social order than the Franks, who moved to the west and did not find fully occupied areas there. This resulted in different rights of conquest. In more recent times, not only the rights that arose from conquests and were dependent on land and soil, but also the rights of those people who derived their privileges from property and who, through economic power, were now able to appropriate the means of production. Thus, in addition to what land law is in the modern sense, ownership of the means of production was added, that is, private ownership of capital. This then resulted in legal relationships arising from economic relationships. You see, these legal relationships arose entirely from the economic relationships.

Now people come and want to have concepts of economic power, of the economic significance of land, they want to have concepts of the means of production, the means of production, the capitals and so on. Yes, but they have no real deeper insight into the way things are. So they take the superficial facts and do not realize what is actually behind the land rights, behind the power relations with regard to the means of production. Of course, all these things are taken into account in my book. There is correct thinking; when speaking of rights, it is spoken from the consciousness of how the right has developed over the centuries; when speaking of capital, it is spoken from the consciousness of how capital has come into being. Care is taken to avoid using a concept that is not fully understood in terms of its origin; that is why these concepts appear differently than in the usual textbooks of today.

But something else has been taken into account as well. Take a certain fact, don't we, the fact of how Protestantism came into being. In the history books, it is often told that Tetzel went around Central Europe and that people were outraged by the sale of indulgences and the like. But that was not the only reason; that is only the superficial view. The main thing behind it was the fact that there was a banking house in Genoa that commissioned this indulgence peddler to travel around Germany – not on behalf of the Pope, but on behalf of this banking house, which had granted the Pope loans for his other needs. The whole story was a capitalist enterprise. From this example of the sale of indulgences as a capitalist enterprise, where even spiritual goods were sold, you can study – or rather, when you begin to study, you gradually come to it – that ultimately all capital power goes back to the superiority of the spiritual. Study how capital actually came to its power and you will find the superiority of the spiritual everywhere. And so it really is. The clever and resourceful have more power than those who are not clever or resourceful. And in this way, much of what is accumulated capital comes into being, justifiably or unjustifiably. This must be taken into account when considering the concept of capital. In such real studies, one comes to realize that capital is based on the development of spiritual power and that to the land rights, to the rights of the conquerors, from another side, the power of the old theocratic spirit has been added. Much of what was then transferred to modern capitalism originated from the old church. There is a secret connection between modern capitalist power and the power of the old church. And all of this has become entangled in the modern power state. Within it, you will find the remnants of the old theocracy and the old conquests. And finally, the modern conquests were added, and the most modern conquest is now supposed to be the conquest of the state by socialism. But in reality, it must not be done that way. Something new must be created that completely does away with these old concepts and impulses. Therefore, it will be important for us to also deal with the underlying concepts in our studies. Today, anyone who wants to talk about social issues must provide precise information about what is right, what is power, and what is actually a [economic] good, a good in the form of commodities and the like. It is in this area that the greatest mistakes are made. I will point out one example; if you are not aware of it, you will misunderstand much of my book.

Today, there is a widespread belief that goods are stored labor, that capital is also stored labor. You may say that it is harmless to have such concepts. It is not harmless, because such concepts poison all social thinking. Do you see how it actually is with labor – labor as the expenditure of labor power? Yes, it is a fact that there is a big difference between, for example, wearing out my physical muscle strength by doing sports and chopping wood. When I do sports, I wear out my physical muscle strength; I can get just as tired and need to replace my muscle strength as someone who chops wood. I can apply the same amount of work to sports as to chopping wood. The difference is not that the labor has to be replaced – of course it has to be replaced – but the difference is that one labor is used only for me, in the selfish sense, and the other is used in the social sense for society. It is the social function that distinguishes these things. If I say that something is stored-up labor, I do not take into account that labor actually ceases to be in something the moment work is no longer done. I cannot say that capital is stored-up labor, but rather I must say that labor is only there as long as it is being performed. But in our present social order, capital retains the power to call labor back at any time. The disastrous thing, as Marx means it, is not that capital is stored-up labor, but rather the institution that capital gives the power to repeatedly put new labor—not stored-up labor—but new labor into its service. Much depends on this, and much more will depend on it, that clear concepts grounded in reality are arrived at for these things. And it is from such concepts, which are now fully grounded in reality, that this book of mine starts. It does not use concepts that were useful for the education of the proletariat. But today, when we are supposed to build something, these concepts no longer make sense.

You see, when I say: capital is accumulated labor – that is good for the education of the proletariat; it was given the feelings it should have. It did not matter that the concept was fundamentally wrong – you can educate with fundamentally wrong concepts. But you can only build something with the right concepts. Therefore, today we need correct concepts in all areas of the economy and cannot continue to work with false concepts. I am not saying this out of frivolity, that you can also educate with false concepts, but rather out of general educational principles. You see, when you tell fairy tales to children, you do not want to build with the things that you develop there; in education, something else comes into consideration than in building in physical reality. There you have to work with real concepts. A concept such as “capital is stored labor” is not a concept. Capital is power and gives power to put newly emerging labor into its service. That is a real concept with a logical connection to the facts. In these areas, one must work with true concepts. That is what was attempted in the Kernpunkte. Therefore, I believe that much of what is not included in the definitions of the terms, in the characteristics of the terms, must be worked out. And anyone who can contribute to this work, which is needed to understand the way of thinking, the basis of this book, will make a very good contribution to these study evenings. So that is what matters, my dear attendees, that is what matters most.

Yes, it would be like writing an encyclopedia if you wanted to clarify all the terms, but what “capital” is can now be done in a single evening of study. Without having clearly understood today: what is capital? What is a commodity? What is labor? What is law? Without these concepts, one cannot make any headway. And these concepts are completely confused in the broadest circles; above all, they must be clarified. One almost despairs today when talking to people about the social order; they cannot keep up because they have not learned to master reality. This is what should be addressed in particular.