Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice II
GA 337b — 9 August 1920, Dornach
3. The Basis for the Threefold Social Order from the Laws of Social Development
Richard Eriksen will give a lecture on 'The Philosophical Basis for the Threefold Social Organism'. This will be followed by a discussion, at the end of which Rudolf Steiner will comment again on various questions.
Rudolf Steiner: Dear participants, the questions that have been asked and that I would like to address are as follows. First, the first question:
What should be the answer when the outside world asks us the practical question: How should the worker in the threefold social organism get his money?
Now, I believe that this question in its purely external nature is clearly answered in the “Key Points”. The point is that, in the sense of the key points - from those conditions that are stated there - the structure of the social organism must be such that there is a manager for those who need such a manager and work under his leadership, and that the manager will essentially also be the mediator for how the products produced jointly with the worker are to be brought into the market. This will naturally also bring about a different attitude in the administration of what figures as money in the threefold social organism. In accordance with those contractual agreements, which are also characterized in the “key points”, the worker will receive his money from the supervisor. This is a purely external process, which, as an external process, will hardly differ much from what is customary now. But, ladies and gentlemen, we are not concerned with such external processes, but with the question of what functions money will play in the threefold social organism. Today, when it is paper money, money itself is a commodity inserted among other commodities. In the threefolded social organism, money must gradually lose this character. And of course, pricing can only take place within the economic part of the social organism. The banknotes must increasingly become part of the large accounting that takes place between all people who are involved in economic life - and that includes all people in any closed area. When this large-scale bookkeeping comes about of its own accord, then the banknotes simply represent what is to be recorded on the assets side. Those who think in the abstract, who think in the way that one thinks in bourgeois circles, think that such bookkeeping already exists. This is nonsense, of course, because it is not desirable as it is. But such an accounting, as one will need it, it forms itself completely by itself, it will not be abstractly a large accounting somehow, but it is then simply present in reality. And what matters is that a certain relationship arises between the work manager and the person who has to work under the direction of the work manager. And for such a relationship it is meaningless if the worker receives the money from the foreman, just as it is meaningless now if, say, you are a civil servant somewhere and receive the money from the till. These things must be seen in the context of the whole complex of questions of capital and human labor; only then does it, I would say, acquire the right nuance.
The second question:
How should one imagine the transition from today's social and economic conditions to the practical realization of threefolding?
Actually, the basic ideas of my “Key Points of the Social Question” do not allow for such a question to be asked. This is because what is advocated in the “Key Points” is not some utopia that is to take the place of what is there now and where a transition would have to be created between the present conditions and those that follow. Rather, the point is to bring about this threefold order, if only the threefold idea is understood by a sufficiently large number of people, and if, out of this understanding, people will take care of their spiritual, state and economic conditions. This threefold social order comes into being in the same way that a skirt comes into being when a tailor has learned how to sew a skirt; then he can also realize it. And so, because it is conceived as something thoroughly practical, the threefold social organism will be realized. There is no need for a transition. That is why I said in the key points: what is meant here can be tackled at any moment, and there is no need to worry about a transition. It is just as unnecessary to think about a transition as it is to worry about the question: Yes, I have a person who is now 17 years old and will be 18 next year; what will the transition be like between the 17th and 18th year?
There is no need to ask such questions when one is concerned with a practical idea that simply looks at what is now and asks: What do present conditions demand? If they are to develop naturally, not unnaturally, they demand precisely what threefolding gives; and there is no need to think of a special transition. Today's social and economic conditions are such that one can either continue to treat them unnaturally or set up some utopia, such as Leninism or Trotskyism, and try to shape them from that starting point. Or one can approach them naturally, and then one has threefolding. And that is what it is really about. So you cannot ask how the transition to practical realization happens, but you must always grasp these things in the concrete. But, you see, in the concrete, people do not like to grasp things.
During the time when the threefold social order was still the subject of discussion within a relatively small circle, the question was posed somewhat differently than it is now, because at that time there was a terrible fear that everything could be broken. The question was: What should the government actually do? You simply had to say what was practical for the government: namely, simply to acknowledge that the spiritual and economic life should be more free. When a labor minister once asked me what he should do, I had to answer: You see, the difficulties arise from the fact that the three limbs of the social organism have been thrown together; they now stand in such a way that on the one hand they have mandates that only belong in the state under the rule of law, and on the other hand only in economic life. And so one would actually like to see — which I do not exactly want to happen to you personally — one would actually like to see you beaten in half by the honest Swabian in the middle, like the Turk. The division would have to begin with the labor minister in question. Now you see, these are the things that must be pointed out again and again: that threefolding must be thought of as an eminently practical matter. Then people will not ask questions like the one about the transition from today's conditions to the practical realization of threefolding.
A third question:
A member of the Group for the Threefolding of the Social Organism is an authorized signatory for a large corporate society whose activities span a network across the north of England; it has 10 million members. He would like to know to what extent such a corporate society is in line with the principle of threefolding and where it deviates from it.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the person in question will probably only be able to answer that for himself personally, because he will very soon notice that this company, for which he is an authorized signatory, has very little to do with the threefold social order; he will either be able to be an authorized signatory for that company or want to work for the threefold social order. The two will not easily go together. Whether he will be able to propagate the threefold social order within the corporate society will depend entirely on whether he is able, through the strength of his spirit, through everything he has to say to found the threefold social order, to win the 10 million members over to the threefold social order. If he can win them over, then his work as a procurator is fully justified within these 10 million, and then one would like to congratulate him as a staunch representative of the threefold order. But I don't think these two activities can be reconciled: being a representative of the threefold order and a procurator for a corporate society. But, of course, sometimes they are compatible; in the threefold social order, it all depends on the people involved. We in the threefold order have seen and experienced this over and over again.
Now a few words; it is too late to elaborate on some things today that I would like to. You see, it is indeed the case that certain things are always approached from the wrong angle.
For example, it has been demanded that the proletariat should be spoken to in a way that is understandable to the masses. Yes, you see, the way the proletariat was spoken to in Stuttgart from April 1919 onwards was so understandable to the masses that very soon thousands and thousands of workers came together and found the language to be perfectly understandable. Then people came along who spoke in old Marxist phrases. Yes, my dear audience, if an audience, I would say a socially inexperienced audience, an audience that had not yet been stuffed full of Marxist buzzwords, had listened to what these leaders sometimes said to their flock in Marxist phrases and the like, then these people would have said: totally incomprehensible. They only found it understandable because they sometimes picked up a word – “surplus value” and so on – that the people who were the leaders at the time poured into a socialist sauce that was truly not meant to be understood by the masses; it was often incomprehensible because it was nonsense. Yes, but “common understanding” – a lot of nonsense is done with such things. It must be said that what is often referred to today in working-class circles as “common understanding” is actually something - I have indeed shown such heirlooms in my “Key Points of the Social Question” - that the proletariat has received from the bourgeoisie. What is called incomprehensibility there is also something that the proletariat has taken over from the bourgeoisie.
This common understanding, yes, you see, that too must have been experienced in practice. Once, many years ago, I was invited to Berlin to speak about Goethe's “Faust.” The audience included people who truly were not workers, but rather citizens with wallets and many others who were not workers either. At that time I had tried to speak about Goethe's “Faust” in the way one must speak. There were also people who said afterwards: Yes, Goethe's “Faust”, you can't really have that in the theater in the evening; that's not a play the way Blumenthal makes plays; that's a science; you don't want that in the evening, such a science. And when one remembers the viewpoints from which popular education is and has been practiced, especially in the last few decades, let us say, for example, by theater poets who made in popular understanding – but actually only for their pocket – then one only gets a historical idea of what is meant by popular understanding. And you realize that this demand for popular understanding is something that the working class still has to get rid of as a remnant of what it has inherited from the bourgeoisie, from this comfortable, sleepy bourgeoisie that does not want to think. For common comprehensibility is actually the demand to listen to something that does not require thinking. But we have come into this catastrophic time precisely because people do not want to think. And we will not get out of it until people decide to think.
Now, basically, what is called socialism today is the ultimate in abstraction. Isn't it true that we often hear people grumble about “-ists” and “-isms.” In addition to “idealism,” “spiritualism,” “realism,” “mechanism,” “idealists,” and “spiritualists,” in more recent times we have also been given: “Bolshevism” and “Bolshevists,” “Marxists” and “Marxism.” At least one concept can be associated with 'mechanism': 'mechanical'; 'spiritualists', 'spiritualism' can be associated with the concept 'spiritual'; 'idealism' still contains the word 'ideal'. But 'Bolshevism' and 'Bolshevists', 'Marxists', 'Marxism' — there is nothing at all left in the words. It is the “ism” of Marx, Marxists are those who want Marx. It is the bitterest irony, the ultimate in abstraction that one could ever have pushed; it is indeed something grotesque when one considers how far abstraction has come precisely in a movement that wants to be universally understood.
And now, in conclusion, something about what has been said about the two social laws, as I formulated them, the law of individualism and the law of socialism. I formulated one of these laws in connection with a book by Ludwig Stein. At the time, I had to discuss a book by Ludwig Stein, a thick book about the social question from a philosophical point of view. It was not easy to wind one's way through the web of Ludwig Stein's thoughts, this typical philosopher of the present day. It is the same Ludwig Stein who, because he had written so much, had to write so quickly that the following once happened to him: When he wanted to prove in a book that only people in the temperate zone of the earth can develop a culture, he said that it was quite natural that only people in the temperate zone can develop a real culture, because at the North Pole they would have to freeze to death and at the South Pole they would have to burn. Well, you see, that is the enunciation of a philosopher who taught at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bern for many years. And that philosopher enjoyed a certain reputation.
You see how grotesque such abstractness can become, that occurred to me once in Weimar. Another Bernese professor worked with us in the Goethe and Schiller Archive, and this other professor told the following story. We got into a conversation about the early works of Robert Saitschick. Saitschick really did produce some first works that were quite respectable; it was only later that he became such a “Kohler” as he is now. Robert Saitschick was a private lecturer at the University of Bern at the time, the Ludwig Stein Professor. Robert Saitschick was a poor fellow; and Ludwig Stein, in addition to being a professor at the University of Bern, owned a whole row of houses on Köpenickerstraße in Berlin. And that is why this Professor Ludwig Stein was also known in Berlin. For example, I couldn't get rid of him at all; when I was in Berlin from time to time, Stein also came, who then, after I had written this review, said to me: I would like to speak as their positive with my comparative again. - That was the constant joke he made. Well, Stein was a full professor in Bern, Saitschick a private lecturer, and the professor who told me – he was, by the way, a very honest, dear gentleman, but still very much caught up in university ideas – said: That Robert Saitschick, he's a completely unqualified guy, you can't talk about him at all. I said: He actually wrote some pretty nice books. “Yes,” said the professor, ”but just think what he did. He's a very poor fellow, and he asked his professor for a loan. The professor gave him the money, and when it took too long, he asked Saitschick to give the money back. And this is what he did: he said, “Professor, now that you have said that, I demand that you sign a document stating that you are a mean fellow.” And the professor signed this document! The professor told me that; I am only repeating what he told me: Well, you see, a private lecturer who forces his professor to issue him with such a document, that's a pretty mean guy. — That's just the university's view.
Yes, well, I had to review this book by Ludwig Stein, and I had to point out that the natural course of human development in social terms is that people first live in bonds, in associations, and then the individual works his way out of the associations to achieve individuality. Later, I tried to formulate the other law, the law of social life, from an independent point of view, and showed that the whole social constitution can only develop if the individual, in the economic context, does not live on what he himself but when he gives what he earns to the community and when he in turn receives from the community - how this happens is shown by the “key points”, and I have explained this in Zurich. Now, anyone who can see through social connections today knows - even if it looks different at first - that the one who makes a skirt for himself today does not actually produce it in reality. That he produces it – in a field where we have such an extensive division of labor today, that is only an illusion, because what he produces is consumed by himself. But this law of social life is absolutely valid. The situation is such that this law can only be consciously realized by those who break away from the associations and become individuals. These two things are perhaps in contradiction in the abstract; in reality they demand each other, they belong together. First the individuality must free itself from the associations, so that out of the individuality the social can be realized. That is the solution of the riddle in this case. And so various apparent contradictions would be resolved if one were willing to go into them.
Of course there would be an enormous amount to add to what has been said today; but time is so advanced and I believe that these threefolding evenings will continue, so that we may be able to talk about such things next time.