Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice II

GA 337b — 12 October 1920, Dornach

16. Questions on Economic Life II

Roman Boos: It should be noted that today's lecture will be followed by a discussion, and that it will also be necessary to have a further discussion on specific economic questions after this lecture in a smaller group.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! It has already been said that these two lectures or discussions, Sunday and today, are essentially taking place at the request of individual circles and that the main purpose is to say a few words in response to certain questions and requests that have been expressed. Today, after I mentioned a few preliminary remarks on Sunday, I will therefore address the specific questions and requests that have been put forward. First of all, the problem of associations in economic life seems to be causing a few headaches for many people. I would like to say something about this in general terms.

You see, my dear attendees, when you think practically, it is always a matter of considering the very nearest circumstances and taking the point of application for your actions from these very nearest circumstances. Just consider how little fruitfulness there is in imagining all kinds of beautiful, theoretical images of the situations we are facing today, of this or that association and of everything that should or should not be done in such associations. Once you have discussed such matters at length and have formulated all kinds of fine utopian ideas, you can confidently go home and believe that you have done a great deal to solve the social question; but you have not actually done much. What is needed is to intervene in what is immediately at hand. We are, after all, dealing with specific economic conditions, and we have to ask ourselves: what are the most urgent things to be done? And then we have to try to bring about the possibility of intervening in these most important things. Then it will be much better to move forward – which, given the circumstances, really must be very rapid if it is not to be too late – than to come up with all kinds of utopian schemes or to raise questions that are no less utopian. However, we also have to recognize to a certain extent the underlying causes of the great damage of the present. And then, with a certain overview of how these problems have arisen, we may be more likely to muster enthusiasm for the next necessary step than we are for all kinds of utopian phrases. And here I am now in a position to tie in with one of the questions that, incidentally, recurs among the 39 questions – it is the question:

How can we not only carry the impulse of threefolding into the rural population, but how can we specifically think about agriculture as such in terms of the threefolding of the social organism?

Now, no one will come to terms with this thinking who does not see the radical difference in the whole way of production, in all economic contexts, between agriculture and industry. It is necessary to see this because, before the world war catastrophe struck, we were stuck in a completely materialistic, completely capitalist way of thinking - it was, so to speak, international capitalist thinking and and because, precisely, a departure in the direction conditioned by capitalism and which capitalism will continue to pursue, because precisely in that an ever-widening divergence of the agricultural and industrial enterprises must emerge. Agriculture, by the very nature of its being, is incapable of fully participating in the capitalist economic order. Don't misunderstand me; I am not saying that if capitalist thinking became general, agriculture would not also participate in capitalist thinking; we have seen to what a high degree agriculture has participated in capitalist thinking and action. But it would be destroyed in its essence, and it would no longer be able to intervene in the appropriate way in the whole economic process. That which is most eminently suited in economic life, not only to develop in a capitalist way, but which tends to lead to outright over-capitalism – please allow me to use this word, people today will understand it – that is, to assume a complete indifference to the way it works, even to the product of labor, and to be concerned only with acquiring something: that is industry; industry carries quite different forces within it than agriculture. This can only be understood by someone who has really taken a long, hard look at how it is quite impossible to transition to large-scale capitalist agriculture as it is the case in industry. If agriculture is really to be properly integrated into the economy as a whole, then – simply because of what has to happen in agriculture – a certain connection between the human being and the whole of production, the nature of production, and thus all that is to be produced in agriculture, is necessary. And a large part of what is needed for production, if it is to be produced in a truly rational way, requires the most intense interest of those who work in agriculture. It is quite impossible for something like that absurdity to arise within agriculture – it is an absurdity that I will describe in a moment – that absurdity, for example, that has always been held up when you have had to discuss with the proletariat in recent decades. You see, the absurdity I mean is the following.

As I have often related, I was a teacher at a workers' training school for many years. This brought me into contact with the people of the proletariat, and I had the opportunity to discuss a lot with them, and also to get to know everything that was there in terms of psychological forces. But certain things, brought forth by the whole development of modern times, simply lived as an absurdity precisely within the proletarian endeavors. Suppose that, as a rule, the proletarians' deputies rejected the military budget. But in the moment when, in the discussion, the proletarians were reproached: Yes, you are against the military budget, but you still let yourselves be employed or hired by the cannon manufacturers as workers; you still fabricate with the same state of mind as anywhere else – they did not understand that, because that was none of their business. The quality of what they produced was none of their business; they were only interested in the amount of their wages. And so the absurdity arose that on the one hand they manufactured cannons, that they never went on strike anywhere because of the quality of what they produced, but at most because of wages or something else, but on the other hand, out of an abstract party line, they fought the military budget. Combating the military budget should have led to the production of no cannons, according to the laws of the triangle. And if they had done that, for example, at the beginning of the century, much of what happened from 1914 onwards could have been avoided. Then you have, regardless of whether they are capitalists or proletarians who participate in any kind of production, absolute indifference to the quality of what they are working on; but the whole organization of industry depends on that. This is not possible in agriculture; it would simply not work in agriculture if there were such indifference towards what is being worked on. And where this indifference has occurred, where agriculture has been infected, I would say, by the industrial way of thinking, it withers away. It withers away in such a way that it gradually takes on the wrong position in the whole of economic life.

What is actually happening there? The following is actually happening to what I have called the original cell of economic life: with agriculture on the one hand and industry on the other, and with agriculture by its very nature constantly resisting capitalization, while industry, on the other hand, strives towards over-capitalization, a complete falsification is taking place, a real falsification of the original economic cell. But because the products have to be exchanged – because, of course, the industrial workers have to eat and the agricultural workers have to clothe themselves or have to be consumers of industry in some other way – because the products have to be exchanged, a counterfeit arises quite radically in the exchange of agricultural products and industrial products. This economic unit cell, which in a healthy economy simply consists of everyone having to receive as much for a product they have produced – if you include everything else they have to receive, which is, so to speak, the expenses and so on – as they need to satisfy their needs to produce an equivalent product. I have often hinted at this by saying, in a trivial way, that a pair of boots must be worth as much as all the other products - be they physical or intellectual - that the shoemaker needs, that he needs in order to make another pair of boots. An economic life that does not determine the price of boots by some kind of calculation, but that tends to the fact that this price emerges by itself, such an economic life is healthy. And then, when economic life is really healthy through its associations, through its mergers, as I characterized them the day before yesterday, then money can also be inserted in between, then no other means of exchange is needed, then money can be inserted as a matter of course, because money then quite naturally becomes the right representative between the individual products. But in recent times, on the one hand, agriculture, by its very nature, increasingly resisted capitalization – it was, of course, capitalized, but it resisted it, and that was precisely the corrupting factor – and, on the other hand, other hand, industry was striving towards over-capitalism, it was never possible for any agricultural product to be priced in such a way that it would have corresponded to an industrial product in the way I have just characterized the economic primordium. On the contrary, it became more and more apparent that the price level for the industrial product was different from what it should have been. As a result of this price level of the industrial product, money, which had now become independent, became too cheap, thereby disrupting the whole relationship between what should have come from agriculture to the industrial worker and from the industrial worker to agriculture.

Therefore, the first thing that is opposed is associations that are formed precisely between agriculture and various branches of industry. Certainly, this is the first, I would say most abstract principle, that the associations consist of different sectors. These associations will work best when they are formed between agriculture and industry, and in such a way that the creation of such associations actually leads to efforts being made towards a corresponding price structure. But now you cannot do much in associations that would first have to be created, of course – this would soon become apparent. If associations could be created in such a way that industrial enterprises were linked together with agricultural enterprises, and if the matter were handled so cleverly that they could supply each other, then some things would immediately become apparent – I will mention the conditions under which this can happen in a moment; some things can of course be done immediately.

But what is necessary first? Yes, my dear attendees, it is first necessary to be able to establish something like this in a truly rational and meaningful way. Let me give you a concrete example. In Stuttgart, the “Der Kommende Tag” has been founded. The “Der Kommende Tag” naturally proceeds from its idea, which is to be given by the principles, by the impulses of the threefold social order. It would therefore have the primary task of introducing the associative principle between agriculture and industry, to the extent that the association of mutual purchasers would actually [influence prices] by turning those who are consumers in some areas into producers in others. In this way, a great deal could be achieved in a relatively short time in establishing a truly correct price. But take the coming day in Stuttgart: it is quite impossible to appear reasonable now, for the simple reason that you cannot purchase all goods independently because they would come up against today's corrupted state legislation everywhere. Nowhere is it possible to produce what is economically necessary because the state is opposed to it everywhere. Therefore, the first thing to do is to realize that strong associations must first be created that are as popular as possible and that can thoroughly prevent state intervention in all areas of economic life in the broadest circles. Above all, every economic action must be able to be based on purely economic considerations.

Now, state thinking is so strongly ingrained in our present humanity that people do not even notice how they basically long for the state everywhere. For decades I have repeatedly characterized this by saying: The greatest longing of modern man is actually to go through the world with a police officer on the right and a doctor on the left. That is actually the ideal of the modern human being, that the state provides both for him. To stand on one's own two feet is not the ideal of the modern human being. But above all, we must be able to do without the police and the doctor provided by the state. And until we take this attitude on board, we will not make any progress.

Now, however, all those institutions are in place that do not allow us to get close to the people who come into consideration for such an education of associations. Take one of the last great products of capitalism, take the one out of which the strongest obstacles for our threefolding movement have arisen, apart from the lethargy and corruption of the big bourgeoisie: that is the trade union movement of the proletarians. This trade union movement of the proletarians, ladies and gentlemen, is the last decisive product of capitalism, because here people join together purely out of the principles, purely out of the impulses of capitalism, even if it is supposedly to fight capitalism. People join together without regard to any concrete organization of economic life; they join together in industries, metalworkers' associations, book printers' associations, and so on, merely to bring about collective bargaining and wage struggles. What do such associations do? They play at being the state in the economic sphere. They completely introduce the state principle into the economic sphere. Just as the production cooperatives – the associations formed by the producers among themselves – are opposed to the principle of association, so too are the trade unions. And anyone who really wants to study the development of the present-day revolutions, which are so sterile, so barren, so corrupt, without prejudice, should take a closer look at trade union life and its connection with capitalism. By this I do not just mean the capitalist affectations that have already been drawn into trade union life, but I mean the whole intergrowth of the union principle with capitalism.

This brings me to what is now certainly necessary in a certain sense. The day before yesterday I characterized the associations: they go from sector to sector, they go from consumer to producer. This is how the connections between the individual sectors arise, because it is always the case that whoever is the consumer of something is also a producer at the same time; it all goes hand in hand. It is only a matter of beginning to associate. As I mentioned the day before yesterday, it is best to start by bringing together consumers and producers in the most diverse fields and then, as we have seen today, begin to form associations primarily with what is close to agriculture and what is pure industry. I do not mean an industry that still extracts its own raw materials; that is closer to agriculture than an industry that is already a complete parasite and only works with industrial products and semi-finished products and so on. One can get quite practical there. If one is willing and has sufficient initiative, one can start forming these associations. But above all, we need to recognize that the associative principle is the real economic principle, because the associative principle works towards prices and is independent of the outside world in determining them. If the associations extend over a sufficiently large territory and over related economic areas, over areas related to some economic branch, then a great deal can be achieved. You see, the only thing that hinders progress is that when you start forming an associative life today, you immediately encounter people's displeasure at associative formations in the outside world; you can notice this in the most diverse fields. People just don't realize what things are actually based on. Therefore, allow me to come back to an example that we have already practiced ourselves. It is, of course, an example where one has to work economically with intellectual products, so to speak, but in other areas we were not allowed to work.

Now, you see, that is the peculiarity of our Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, as I have already mentioned. At least at first it works in complete harmony with the associative principle, because of course it has to connect with printers and so on in many ways, and so it enters into other economic areas. This makes it difficult to achieve anything drastic, but it can serve as a prime example. All that is needed is for what is being carried out in it to be extended to other sectors, and for the associative principle to be further expanded. And the first step is to gather together those who are interested. For example, if someone were to set about gathering a thousand people who would agree to buy their bread from a particular baker, I would specify a certain number. So it was that in the Anthroposophical Society — which of course was not founded merely for this purpose, but everything also has its economic side — so it was that in the Anthroposophical Society the people came together who were the consumers of these books, and so we never had to produce with competition in mind, but we only produced those books that we knew for sure would be sold. So we did not needlessly employ printers and paper makers and so on, but we only employed as many workers as were necessary to produce the quantity of books that we knew would be consumed. Thus, goods were not unnecessarily thrown onto the market. This really does establish an economic rationality within the limits of book production and book sales, because unnecessary work is avoided. I have already pointed out that otherwise you print editions, throw them onto the market, and then they come back again - so much unnecessary paper production work is done, so many unnecessary typesetters are employed and so on. The fact that so much unnecessary work is done is what destroys our economic life, because there is no sense of working together rationally through associations, so that production actually knows where it is selling its products.

Now, do you know what will disappear? You have to think this through: what will disappear is competition. If you can determine the price in this way, if you can really determine the price by combining the industries, then competition ceases. It is only necessary to support this cessation of competition in a certain way. And it can be supported by [the various industries forming associations]. Of course, there has always been a need for people in the same industries to join forces; but this joining together of people in the same industry actually loses its economic value because, by not having to compete in the free market, it no longer has the necessity to undercut prices and the like. Then, however, the associations, which are essentially based from industry to industry, will be permeated by those associations, which we could then call cooperatives again. These associations, however, need no longer have any real economic significance; they will increasingly drop out of actual economic life. If those who manufacture the same product join forces, that will be all well and good, but it will be a good opportunity for more intellectual interests to develop, for people who work from common lines of thought to get to know each other, for them to have a certain moral connection. Those who think realistically can see how quickly this could be done: the associations of the same industry would be relieved of the burden of setting prices, which would be determined solely by the associations of the unequal industries. I would like to say that the moral aspect would be incorporated into the associations of the same goods, and this would be the best way to create a bridge to the spiritual organization of the three-pronged social organism. But such associations, which have arisen purely out of the capitalist economic system, such as the trade unions, must above all disappear as quickly as possible.

I was recently asked by someone who is involved in economic life what should actually be done now, because it is really very difficult to think of anything to somehow have a favorable effect on the rapidly declining economic life. I said: Yes, if they continue in this way at the relevant government agencies, which are of course still decisive for economic life – and today are more decisive than ever – if they continue in this way, then it will certainly continue into ruin. – Because what would be necessary today? What would be necessary is that those who should gradually work their way out of citizenship to become members of economic associations would be less concerned with the direction that could be seen in Württemberg, for example, where there was a socialist ministry. Yes, especially at the time when we were particularly active, these people sometimes promised that they would come. They did not come. Why? Yes, they were always excused because they had cabinet meetings. You could only ever say to these people: If you sit down together, you can plot whatever you want, but you will not help social life. Ministers and all those who now held lower positions, from ministers downwards, would not have belonged in the cabinets at that time, but everywhere in the people's assemblies, in order to find the masses in this way and work among them; those who had something to teach and do would have belonged among the workers every evening. In this way, we could win the people over, and the trade unions would gradually disappear in a reasonable way. And they must disappear, because only when the trade unions, which are purely workers' associations, disappear will association be able to take place, and it does not matter whether someone today tends towards the direction of the trade union or the employees' association or even the capitalist association of a particular branch - they all belong together, they belong in associations. That is what matters: that we work above all to eliminate the things that tear people apart.

You see, that is the greatest harm we have today. It is quite impossible today to somehow introduce into the rest of the world what is reasonable, especially in economic life. I told you that the Coming Day simply comes up against the laws of the state at every turn; they do not let it do what it is supposed to do. And you see, the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, how could it work in a sensible way? It was able to work in a charitable way by not employing unnecessary workers, unnecessary typesetters, and so on. It was able to work by turning its nose up at the whole organization of the rest of the book trade, trivially — turned up his nose at all these people who act like a state, turned up his nose, didn't care about that, but only cared about the association between book production and book consumption. Of course, all those who constantly and forcefully demanded that the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press should be different did not consider this. Certainly, today we are faced with something quite different from when the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press could work in this way. It needs to have a broader impact. But it is not possible to shape the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House with its production and its prosperity directly in such a way as to shape something that leads into the ordinary, senseless market economy of book production and distribution; if you found an ordinary publishing house, it cannot be any different. Because the point is that things must first be done differently, what is reasonably pursued cannot be incorporated into today's ordinary economic practice.

What does all this teach us? That it is necessary, above all, to form associations in such a way that they aim to make the world as aware as possible of the need to combat unnecessary work and to establish a rational relationship between consumers and producers. At the moment when it is necessary to step out of a closed circle into the public sphere, that is when the great difficulty arises. For example: it was a matter of course that we had to found our newspaper “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Threefold Order of the Social Organism). Yes, but what could this newspaper be if it could stand on the ground that it works economically and is distributed in the same way as the books of the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, that is, that nothing unnecessary would have to be produced! Of course, the corresponding number of subscribers is needed, just the small matter of the corresponding number of subscribers. But as things stand now, all of us who work for the threefold social order newspaper have done unnecessary work, for example in our spiritual production. The distribution of the newspaper today is not enough to prevent this work from being considered wasted in some way. And so I could present it to you in the most diverse fields.

What, then, do we need first of all? And here I come to another class of questions, which also keep coming up: What, then, do we need first of all? Above all, we need the movement for the threefold social order to become strong and effective itself and, above all, to be understood. You see, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed due to the circumstances of the time and the inner essence of the matter, and it is not a coincidence, not some quirk of mine or a few others, that this threefolding movement has grown out of the Anthroposophical Society. If it had grown out of it in the right way, if I could say that the Anthroposophical Society was the right one out of which the threefold social order movement grew, then it would already have developed into something different today. Well, what did not happen can be made up for later. But it must be emphasized that one must first recognize that it would have been possible to work in the right way on the basis of anthroposophy in the field of threefolding. Above all, it would have been necessary to realize how necessary human commitment is for such far-reaching principles - which are practical in the most eminent sense, as described in my “Key Points” - and how human commitment is necessary, a right human commitment. Something like this could have been learned on the soil of the anthroposophical movement. Of course, people resented it when, for example, certain cycles were given only to a prepared number of people, but there were good reasons for this. And if people did not constantly say out of silly vanity that this person may receive a cycle and that person may not, and so on, if all these things were not confused in silly vanity but were understood inwardly, then one would arrive at the right thing. But then one would also have seen at the right time, where it is necessary, how much and how little printing ink can do. It would be good if the threefolding newspaper had 40,000 subscribers today for my sake. But how could it get them? It could only get them if it were helped not by what is the printing ink, but if it were helped by personal intervention, by real personal intervention in the matter, according to the demands of the situation. But that is what has been understood least of all.

You see, I have to touch on this point, but today these points have to be touched on because they are vital questions of threefolding; for example, I gave the lecture to the workers of the Daimler-Werke in Stuttgart. Now, my dear audience, the point was to speak to a very specific group of people who, in their thinking about social conditions, had very specific thoughts and spoke in a very specific language. This lecture was given to these workers and similar workers. It would have been necessary to see this, to understand it and to do it in such a way that one would have spoken to the people from their circumstances. Instead, people today strive to have something that only needs to be said in a certain way to certain people - not, of course, to say one thing to one person and another to another, but to be understood by people - printed as quickly as possible, entrusted to the printing press. And then this printed matter is handed over to quite different people, who now become angry because they do not understand it. This is something that could not be learned from the anthroposophical movement; instead, the opposite was done. One should have learned to recognize the situation and to work from a human point of view. Therefore, it would have been important - and it will continue to be important if things are to move forward and not backward - that as many people as possible would have realized that the time is past when one generally expresses one's opinion as one according to one's own class, social, university-teacher or high-school teacher consciousness, or whatever, that one holds this view, regardless of the audience one speaks to. No, one holds this view regardless of whether one is invited to address an assembly of proletarians and one's lecture, prepared page by page, is placed on the highest possible lectern and one reads or recites it page by page, depending on whether one has memorized it or whether one is invited to address a meeting of Protestant pastors and one speaks the same lecture. This is how we destroy our social life. This is not how we move forward. We do not want to learn the language of the people we are speaking to. But it is precisely important that we learn the language of the people we are speaking to. And that could have been learned in the Anthroposophical Society, where it has always been cultivated, where it was really about achieving just what could be achieved at that moment.

Sometimes it was so grotesque that one could not go further in what had been achieved. For example, let me give you an illustration of what I mean. I was once invited to give an anthroposophical lecture at a spiritualist society in Berlin. Well, of course I did not talk to the people about spiritualism, but about anthroposophy. They listened to it. They listened to it in their own way, of course. I did not speak to the people as I would have spoken to natural scientists, because they would have understood little of me, the spiritists, who had large beer glasses in front of us. What happened then? The audience liked the lecture so much – I am telling you a fact – that they elected me president afterwards. Some Theosophists went with me at the time, they were there and they were terribly afraid, because I could not become president of the Spiritualists' Association. What should happen now? they asked me. I will not go there anymore, I replied. That way the presidency was automatically annulled. But you could talk to these people and they did get something out of it, even if it was only a little at first.

So it is a matter of bringing the real out of the situations if we want to win people over to economic things, economic cooperation today. And we will not get anywhere if such things cannot be realized. We must look at such questions as were raised in a smaller meeting yesterday, where a gentleman who is very much involved in economic life said: Yes, threefolding really is the only way out of the calamities, but it must be understood. Above all, we need the technique of personal agitation to make it understood. We can and must, of course, also have newspapers such as the “Threefolding of the Social Organism”, which must be transformed into a daily newspaper as soon as possible. We must have it, but it means nothing more than yet another amount of wasted labor, if it is not backed by energetic personal action. Such conscious personal action, however, really dares to say that in the future people want something other than police officers and state-stamped doctors, so that they are neither robbed nor sick. There are other ways to ensure that you are neither robbed nor sick than this. So it is mainly a matter of bringing together the leaders of companies and the manual workers, especially in the event of a dissolution of the trade unions, because, after all, the manual workers are in their trade unions on the one hand and the managers are in their associations on the other, and they speak different languages and do not understand each other. You wouldn't believe how different the language is. I can assure you that anyone who does not study the language of the proletarian with an honest intention will only create prejudices against himself if he speaks as a bourgeois to proletarians today, no matter how radical his language may be. On the contrary, he makes things worse if he has no honest desire to really go into the state of mind, into what is in the soul of today's proletarian population. It is not the radical phrases that make the difference, but being inside the matter.

And that brings me to another type of question. For example, I am asked:

Who should be considered when the threefold social order is to be propagated? The wealthy cannot be considered because they have no other aspirations than to preserve their wealth undisturbed.

They do not think of adopting different ideas from those by which they have gained their wealth. Furthermore, they all sleep through the important events of the present; they know nothing about them. At most, they know that the Poles have the upper hand again; they made their plans earlier when the Russians had the upper hand and so on. The fact that what is emerging in the East is not defeated with some Polish victory, the dear bourgeois of Western and Central Europe do not notice that either. And if that which lives in the East cannot be fought from those impulses that lie in the direction of threefolding, it goes into another head; if it is defeated and killed in one form, it will arise again in a different, new form. So the question is, in a sense, rightly posed; it is true that the propertied classes are hardly being considered, and the proletariat, the proletarians, as it has been shown, do not want to know anything about it at first. But, ladies and gentlemen, we do not need to raise this question at all; instead, we need only try to do the right thing in the direction I have just indicated and really get to know what is there, not sleepwalk past the present. What do the bourgeois as a rule know about what goes on in the trade unions? They know nothing about it. Yes, the most ordinary phenomenon of today is this: as a bourgeois you pass a worker on the street, and actually you pass him in such a way that you have no idea of the context in which you stand with him. The point is that we have done our duty in the direction of progress, as I have now indicated, then the essentials will be found. And the point is, of course, that today, when we are already able to develop concrete efforts, we call the associative principle into life wherever we can, and that we do everything we can to dissolve trade union life and create associative federations between company managers and workers, the employees. If we can work towards the dissolution of trade union life, we can do many other things. Above all, we can strengthen the Federation for the Tripartite Order of the Social Organism on our own initiative. Of course, by “us” I mean all those sitting here, not just the members of the Anthroposophical Society — among whom there are those who still say today: “The real anthroposophist must be aloof from political life; he can only deal with political life if his profession makes it necessary. This does happen, there are such egotists, and they still call themselves Anthroposophists, believing that they are developing an especially esoteric life by meeting with a small number of people in a sect-like manner and satisfying their soul lust by indulging in all kinds of mysticism.

(Applause)

Dear attendees, this is nothing more than unkindness organized in a sect-like way; it is merely talk of human love, while the former has emerged precisely from human love, that is, from the innermost principle of anthroposophical work. What is to be expressed in the threefold social order is what matters, and to understand these things today is infinitely more important than poring over every detail. Because, my dear attendees, these questions, which will be very specific questions, will arise the day after tomorrow in a completely different way than we could ever have imagined, once we have helped some institution or other to get off the ground that really contributes something real to the emancipation of economic life from state life. Only then will the tasks arise.

We do not need to ask questions based on today's views, for example, how the people from the spiritual organization will arrange the transfer of capital. Just let something happen to bring about the threefold order, just let something energetic come into being, then you will see what significance something like this will have, as compared to what can be asked as a question today. Today, of course, when you look at the spiritual organism, that is, the sum of the lower and higher schools, and ask questions about individual issues, you are asking the questions in relation to a state-corrupted institution. You must first wait to see what questions can be asked when the emancipation of spiritual life has taken place. Then things will turn out quite differently than they do today. And so it is also in economic life. The questions that need to be asked are only just emerging. Therefore, it is not very fruitful to talk in general terms about associations and so on today, and it does not lead to much if you want to get an idea of how one association should really be linked to another. Just let those economic associations arise within which one must then work without state aid, I also mean in the spiritual without state aid, because then the right questions will arise, because then one must work on one's own, then one must think economically so that things can work at all. And that will be of the utmost importance for economic progress.

Just think what would have happened if these things had been understood at an important moment in modern economic life; at the point where transport grew as a result of the railways growing more and more, modern people declared themselves economically impotent and handed over the railways to the state. If the railways had been administered by the economic body, something different would have come of it than what has come of it under the interests of the state, with the greater part of it coming under its fiscal interests. The most important things for economic life have been neglected; they must not be neglected any longer; the concrete questions will arise by themselves. People have forgotten how to think economically because they believed that if something is missing in economic life, then they should elect the appropriate representatives, who will then bring it up in parliament and the ministers will make a law. But people are involved. They will complain, however, if the state does not take care of it – apparently, of course, only then.

From such backward-looking views of progress, I would say, everything that lives in the following question also emerges:

If intellectual life becomes free, will not the Catholic Church occupy a particularly favorable position? Is it not better to tame it with the state?

So far, the greatest damage has been done from the other side, from the favoring of the Catholic Church by the state. In short, these things look quite different when one is really inside what is being brought about by the three-part social organism, which we must first work towards, so that we do not take the third step before the first.

Now, questions arise that are very interesting, of course, because they are obvious, but, my dear attendees, they take on a different aspect than one might think when faced with the impulse of threefolding. For example, someone asked how, in the threefolded social organism, anthroposophy would acquire the money for the Goetheanum, because they believe that capital would not be available. Well, my dear audience, I am quite reassured about this, because the moment we have a free spiritual life, the situation with Anthroposophy will be quite different altogether, simply because of the nature of this free spiritual life, and we can do without the beggar principle on which we unfortunately depend today and to which we have to appeal in the strongest terms. But within a truly free, that is, healthy spiritual life, I would not be at all worried about building a Goetheanum.

Nor has it ever caused me any headaches when the question arises again and again, and that is this:

If the threefold social organism were already in existence, there would also be people in the spiritual organization who would decide in the right way: is this a brilliant artist, whose pictures must be distributed and sold?

If the threefold social organism were already in existence, I can only say that something would have to be created first to get it off the ground. But people think: if it were only there – there are so many artists who, in their opinion, are so terribly talented, so terribly gifted, so terribly ingenious – will there not be a great danger that the number of unrecognized geniuses will increase more and more? As I said, this matter has never really troubled me, because a free spiritual life will be the very best basis for bringing these talents to bear. And above all, you only have to bear in mind that no unnecessary work is done in the threefold social organism. You see, people do not even consider what we will gain in free time when unnecessary work is no longer done; in comparison, the ample unoccupied time of our rentiers and our idlers is a trifle; only with them it extends to the whole of life. But for that which basically cannot flourish if it is paid for, there would be plenty of time in the tripartite social organism to develop it. You can take what I am about to say as an abstraction, but I can only say that you should first try to help the tripartite social organism to get on its feet and you will then see that art will also be able to develop within it in a way that is entirely appropriate to people's abilities.

Dear attendees, I had to divide the questions more by category, because after all, it is not possible to answer all 39 questions in detail. Some questions are only of interest to people because they basically cannot imagine that certain things look quite different, for example, in a free spiritual life. So the question is raised whether the immoral outbursts of the cinema should be allowed to flourish in the threefold social organism, or whether the State should not intervene to prevent people from seeing such immoral films. Those who ask such questions do not know a certain deeply social law. Every time you believe that you can fight something, let's say the immorality of the movies, through state power, you fail to take into account that by such an abolition of immoral cinema plays – if people's instincts to watch such plays exist at all – you divert these instincts to another area, perhaps a more harmful one. And the call for legislation against immoral art – even if it is only in the cinema – expresses nothing other than the powerlessness of the intellectual life to take control of these things. In a free intellectual life, the intellectual life will have such power that people will not go to the cinema out of conviction. Then it will also be unnecessary to prohibit immoral films by the state, because they will be too stupid for people. But with what we bring into the world today as science, we naturally do not cultivate those instincts that flee from immoral films.

You would find many questions answered if you were to look more closely at the literature on the threefold social order. I have tried to pick out at least the most important questions. I will mention just one more, the twenty-eighth:

Would it not be possible to contribute to the popularization of both anthroposophy and the threefold social order by not using terms that are not understood by the broadest sections of society.

I can only say: do it as much as you can, and you will see that you can do it to a high degree. But I think you have to take more what the whole tendency of such a discussion is today, rather than the details; and this tendency is to point out that this impulse for threefolding is a thoroughly practical one. And so we should not just chat and discuss what the details will look like in this or that aspect of the threefolded social organism, but above all we should understand this threefold social organism and really spread this understanding, carry it into everything, because we need people who have an understanding for it. And then, when we have these people, we only need to call on them for the details. But we must have them first. We must first gain a healthy following – but as quickly as possible, otherwise it will be too late.

Well, this is what I have wanted to say for a long time, because more than a year ago I tried to write an appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World”. It was certainly understood, as shown by the large number of signatures. But those who work for its realization remain a small number. The Appeal should have become better known, and the core points should have become known quite differently, namely through the work of individuals. You don't make a movement, as we would need to today, by just sending out writings, by just sending out brochures, by just sending out principles; you make it in a completely different way. The Federation for the Threefold Order of the Social Organism must have life in it; above all, it must be a union of people. It does not matter whether we send this or that, if it is just sending. Above all, care must be taken to ensure that within the Federation for the Threefold Order, no bureaucratic principle or the like is allowed to arise. It is necessary to distribute our literature and our newspapers, but at the same time, work must be done humanely. It must be understood that we are working towards transforming the newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” into a daily newspaper as soon as possible. But above all, it is necessary to realize that our institutions must flourish.

Dear attendees, if things continue as they are, with us constantly stuck in the difficulties we are in today, where we don't really know how to continue the Waldorf school, how we should found more schools like this and how we should actually complete this Goetheanum, if we do not take hold of what people can really muster in terms of understanding for such things on all sides — then of course it will not continue. We need understanding, but not an understanding that only sees idealism, that only admires the ideas and puts its hands firmly on its pockets because the ideas are too great, too spiritual, for it to want to let dirty money near them. Money is kept in one's pocket and ideas are admired, but ideas are too pure to be defiled by spending dirty money on them. I meant what I said figuratively, but here it is a matter of learning to think practically and then also to bring it to practical deeds.

I said when the Waldorf School was founded: It's nice, the Waldorf School is nice; but just because we founded the Waldorf School, we have not done enough in this area. At most, we have made a very first start, just the beginning of a beginning. We have only really founded the Waldorf School when we have laid the foundations for ten new such Waldorf Schools in the next quarter. Only then does the Waldorf School make sense. — In the face of the current social situation in Europe, it simply makes no sense to found a single Waldorf School with four or five hundred or, for that matter, a thousand children. Only if the founding of Waldorf Schools is followed by more, if it is followed everywhere, does it make sense – only what arises out of the right practical attitude makes sense. If those who are enthusiastic about the ideas of Waldorf education cannot even develop enough understanding to realize that it is necessary to fight for independence from the state, to do everything in their power to ensure that the state releases the school, you do not also have the courage to strive for the school's independence from the state, then the whole Waldorf school movement is a waste of time, because it only makes sense if it grows into a free spiritual life.

In addition to this, we need what I would call an international effort for all school systems, but an international effort that does not just go around the world spreading principles about how schools should be run – that is already happening as funding is being provided for such schools. What we need is a world school association in all civilized countries, so that the largest possible sum of funds can be raised as quickly as possible. Then it will be possible to create, on the basis of these funds, the beginnings of a free spiritual life. Therefore, wherever you go in the world, try to work to ensure that the work is not done merely through all kinds of idealistic efforts, but that it is done through such an understanding of the freedom of the spiritual life that money is really raised on the broadest scale for the establishment of free schools and colleges in the world. What will be the flowering of the spirit in the future must grow out of the fertilizer of the old culture. Just as the fields yield the food that men must consume, so must that which is ripe for transformation into fertilizer be gathered from the old culture, so that one day the fruits of the future's spiritual, political and economic life may flourish from this fertilizer.