Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice II

GA 337b — 14 July 1920, Basel

1. The Consequences of Abstract Thinking in Social Issues

During the course of this evening's discussion, questions were asked and various concerns were raised, for example:

Elisabeth Vreede reads out a postcard from Holland calling for the immediate introduction of a council system.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say something in connection with what has just been said. I will start from a book by Professor Varga about the proletarian movement in Hungary. Professor Varga was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs during the Hungarian Council Republic. He was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, along with a few other people, who fled and are now interned at Karlstein. He has now written an extremely interesting book, 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship', in which he explains how he and his colleagues intended to implement this Soviet Republic in Hungary. In between, he intersperses remarks about the experiences gained during the short period of the existence of the soviet republic in Hungary. Now this whole treatise is very interesting because the Hungarian soviet republic was, so to speak, a significant experiment that was so instructive because the consequences can be better surveyed in the relatively small territory of Hungary than in the vast territory of Russia.

The first thing that is remarkable about this book is that it is an eminently professorial work, something quite alien to real life. One gets the distinct feeling that here is someone who has revolutionized an entire country but who has never looked into the real forces of the national economy. Professor Varga stands squarely on the ground of Lenin and Trotsky; only Varga and his colleagues in Hungary had to deal with a smaller area than Lenin and Trotsky in Russia. And that is why many things came to light in Hungary that will only come to light in Russia at a later time. Naturally, Professor Varga does not attribute the failure of the Hungarian experiment to the inherent impossibility of this entire abstract striving and working, but claims that the cause of the failure was that it could not be carried through to the end because the Romanian military power attacked from the flank.

Take one of the main points that we are confronted with. This example is particularly valuable because we are not dealing here with just any Marxist theorist, but with a man who has organized an entire country according to his abstractions, who could do whatever he wanted. He wanted to be a practitioner, and one must ask: could he be one? Professor Varga was indeed obliged to make arrangements that would now bring the Hungarian economy to its feet in a social-democratic sense. He had to emphasize that the real standard-bearers of his reforms are the urban industrial workers, who naturally have the improvement of their living conditions as their driving motive. But now he shows that initially nothing else can come of it than that these actual standard-bearers must experience a significant deterioration in their living conditions during the initial period in which the council republic is introduced; the only ones who gain are the farmers in the countryside. So what does Professor Varga conclude from this? He concludes that the industrial proletariat, those who actually had the only interest in such a revolution, will not achieve what they want to achieve in the near future, but that it is the rural peasants who will achieve it. But he thinks that these conditions will improve for the urban industrial proletariat later on – namely, indirectly through the countryside. All that was needed was to educate the urban industrial proletariat to the point where it would realize that it would have to go hungry and live in rags for a while before things got better.

This is a capital mistake, which is the most absolute consequence of current abstract thinking on social issues. The result would not have been that things would have improved through the detour via the countryside, but that the entire industry would have gradually been wiped out. The cities would have gradually been abandoned and everyone would have moved to the countryside; production would eventually have been limited to the mere exploitation of land and soil. All other forms of life would have gradually disappeared, meaning that we would have reverted to certain primitive human conditions. If you think about it, that must be the conclusion from Professor Varga's remarks.

The second interesting thing is what we find in his social structure. Varga is a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Marxist, so he sees not people, but only categories, in everything that is active in the social organism. He does not see personalities of flesh and blood, but categories. In the existing social organization, he sees the military, the lawyers, the civil servants, and even the proletarians as categories of people. His limitation consists in his wanting to transform the entire existing state into a huge economic cooperative. It is very interesting to see how he deals with the three links of the social organism. He begins by dealing with the second link, the political state. He peels this second link very finely. He lists the individual categories nicely: lawyers, officials, and so on, and declares: all of them will be abolished. - So actually the whole political state will be abolished. And the spiritual life? Professor Varga actually only knows economic life. He says: the intellectual life consists of teachers. He takes comfort from the fact that they generally fall into line, and that for economic reasons, while the first category, the category of lawyers and civil servants, does not fall into line with the new regime and must therefore do proletarian work. Now, in the threefolding movement, we have also found that teachers always ask: Yes, but who pays us? Varga finds that most of them submit and merge with economic life. The others are sent away. So it is not about the intellectual life at all, but about the economic life of the teachers; only the economic life remains.

It is interesting to see how the establishment of the council republic was taken in hand with a certain iron energy. The companies were simply expropriated; however, some consideration was given to foreign countries. That is, the companies were taken over with all their assets and liabilities, and this made it possible to treat the foreign owners of companies differently from the domestic ones. The aim was to municipalize certain companies and to nationalize others. And now something interesting happens. The election of works councils was decreed. As a rule, it was decreed that a works council should be elected from the proletarian workforce. These works councils were such that they did not understand anything. And then Professor Varga says: The “success” was that the people who had advanced from manual labor to become works council members just sat around all day doing nothing, and the actual misery remained. He thinks that things have gradually improved. He does not accept that the misery has grown ever greater and greater; nor does it follow from his experiences that it has diminished. So now the works councils were at the head of the companies, and even in the beginning there was a great deal of corruption among them. Now he says: corruption was also present earlier – it was the same with the bourgeoisie – only now there are more people who can steal, and that is why the figures have naturally increased. According to Professor Varga, however, it would have improved later if there had been more agitation. He also says: in order to manage the centralized economic life, there had to be production commissioners. So they first elected works councils from within the factories – not the kind we wanted in Stuttgart and Württemberg, who should have worked hard to familiarize themselves with economic life and then had to form a works council. But that did not suit people like Varga. They simply voted – what else could they do if they wanted to regulate things from a utopia? The production commissioners were pulled out of the works councils. They were involved in general orders, in the shutdown of factories, in the concentration of branches of industry, and so on, but also in the discipline of the workers. These production commissioners were the actual central officials in economic life.

Now, it is interesting: Professor Varga's entire book is a Marxist thicket of the most abstract kind from beginning to end. He describes the reforms that are to become reality with such matter-of-factness that it makes the same impression as if, for example, a person like Lenin were describing them. And Varga knows how to explain these principles in a way that is plausible for most minds today. Anyone who is familiar with these things knows that the most terrible utopian spirit reigns precisely where people want to put things into practice today. You can't think of anything more utopian than what was supposed to be done in Hungary. Wherever Varga talks about his experiences, he talks about something bad and evil. In council-ruled Hungary, corruption, worker revolts, and so on went hand in hand with such confusion that people said it was good for the people that the Romanians came, because otherwise they would have made fools of themselves even more miserably. It would have been a terrible destruction from within.

The entire 140-page book is a Marxist thicket that should have been practical. With such a thicket, they wanted to set up an entire country as an economic cooperative. But in the middle of a few pages, you suddenly find a sentence that completely falls out of the rest of the narrative and that makes you feel like it's not the same Varga at all, but something foreign. For example, he talks about the great usefulness of the production commissioners and remarks in a parenthesis: ... if the right personalities are in their place. — It is the same with the parenthesis that it is not possible at all to get along with these institutions until “the greedy, selfish ideology of these people” has changed. The Marxists always claim that ideology arises from the economic relations of production. So, if Varga had any kind of healthy, consistent thinking, he would have to say to himself: We Marxists have been claiming for more than seventy years that ideology must arise out of the relations of production, that ideology must arise as a superstructure like smoke that develops out of it. So when we set up our big economic house in Hungary, then the ideology must arise from it, which, after all, has no other meaning than to rise like smoke from economic life. — But Varga does not say that; rather, everywhere he talks about the basis of his institutions, it comes to light — even if only in subordinate clauses: it will only get better when people's greedy ideology has changed. That is, he waits for the time when people will have a way of thinking that is not geared towards the greedy and the selfish; he waits for the transformation of the greedy ideology into a selfless one. Now, that cannot follow directly from the economic mode of production, because he admits that it leads everywhere to the opposite. So he simply waits for this transformation to come of its own accord. One sees: Where it was essential to base the new structure on a change of direction in spirit, where it was essential to come across the concrete spiritual, Varga has nothing but a small subordinate clause, which, however, was meaningless for the whole development in Hungary. That is precisely the sad thing.

Today, in the broadest sense, we are faced with the opinion that one comes from the abstract to the concrete. This emerges from the appeal that Miss Vreede just read, which probably comes from the Netherlands. It proposes some sort of council, but it does not contain the necessary subordinate clause that something will only come of it if the appropriate personalities are in the appropriate places as councils. That is what matters: that you approach the matter from the concrete end. You can talk as much as you like, but none of it will help; the only thing that helps is to bring spirit and soul into the personalities. We have been completely squeezed out, no longer have any idea that it is important to bring strength, spirit and soul into the personalities. That is what the threefold social order is striving for.

I have related this about the man in Hungary so that you can see the spirit in which the things that are created today arise and the reasons why they must break down. Everything that appears like this book and then has to make such a strange confession shows us that it cannot be done with the old spirit. This is what can be seen everywhere today: You can claim anything in theory, but when someone like Professor Varga, who was able to set up something new, sets up something according to his ideas – then you can see how it works.

I say this so that you can see how nonsensical such demands are, like the ones on this correspondence card that Miss Vreede just read.