108. The Social Question
Today, many people talk about the “social question” as if it were a matter of replacing existing social systems with others in which certain demands will be met that are raised by broad masses of people as being necessary for a dignified existence. Some institutions are seen as anti-social and efforts are made to develop social ones. When one speaks of the transfer of the means of production from private to common ownership, this is currently based on such a way of thinking. Under the influence of this way of thinking, one does not notice that the administration of the means of production by the community can have just as unsocial an effect as private-capitalist administration if those administering behave unsocially towards their fellow human beings.
In recent times, we have had to experience that the social order has taken on an anti-social character. We are looking for the causes of this. We see that we live in private capitalist economic systems. We form the judgment from this that these economic systems have undermined social justice. We exclude the human element by forming this judgment. One believes that the institutions, by their own nature, impose their character on social life.
As long as such insights remain within the circle of “scientific thinkers”, they are harmless. Other such “thinkers” come and refute the one-sidedness. The harmlessness ceases as soon as one sets about making institutions that have been conceived out of such one-sidedness. The present is faced with the danger of reshaping the order of life in a way that corresponds to the one-sidedness described. In large areas of Eastern Europe, things are happening that put humanity in such danger.
Recognizing the fatal errors that are made when such a transformation of social life is undertaken is one of the most important tasks of the present day. Realized errors kill life. The temptation to fall into such errors is great. This is because it is brought about by recognizing the damage in what already exists. These are there; and they show that something new must be created. Whether the new does not lead to even worse damage is not considered as long as one is hypnotized by one-sided ideas that one wants to realize.
Karl Marx thoroughly understood the damage of previous economic systems. He saw that this damage resulted from private capitalism. In it arose the idea: If there is no private capitalism, the damage will be eliminated. This idea hypnotized him. And the hypnosis caused him not to penetrate to the question: How did private capitalism produce the damage?
Anyone who asks this question and has a sense of the realities of life will find that private capitalism as such is not the cause of the damage. It is not because individuals or groups of people manage capital that life becomes anti-social, but because these individuals or groups exploit the results of their management in an anti-social way. Private capitalist management makes it possible for the individual with ability to extract the greatest conceivable value from the management. The social interests themselves demand that this should happen. If management by the individual with ability is replaced by management by the general public, the productivity of management is undermined. For within this generality, free initiative, the full effect of individual ability and willingness to work, cannot be realized.
The Marxists saw how the modern relations of production concentrated the masses of capital in the hands of a few. They formed the opinion that the administration of the concentrated masses of capital could one day pass over to the generality. They did not see that with this transition everything that can be achieved through the power of individuals must disappear with concentration. The point is not to eliminate these achievements based on the power of individuals, but to introduce them into the cycle of the social organism in the right way.
Let us face the facts. The demands of the modern economy have brought private capitalist management to a certain level. Its productivity depends on this level. At the same time, however, this productivity has given rise to an anti-social structure of the social order. If we strive to make economic life itself social, we will take away its productivity.
A truly social way of thinking must strive for a way of life that does not detract from the fertility of economic activity. It must leave the management of the means of production to the individual. It will therefore have to ask: How can the anti-social aspects that are necessarily brought about by this management be transformed into a social one?
It will not be possible to achieve the social through a retrogressive transformation of economic activity. But it is a retrogressive transformation to endanger what has become fruitful through the fact that the individual has been able to fully apply himself in economic life. We must not go back to economic forms in which the individual is again more bound by the community. The opposite must be striven for. The effect of the power of the individual must be encouraged.
With this impact, the power of the individual grows, if this growth depends solely on economic life. Within economic life, institutions cannot be created that would remove the disadvantages that arise when the individual comes to a power that harms his fellow human beings. They must arise outside of economic life.
The idea of the threefold social order does not seek to shape economic life in an impossible way, but rather to channel the social flow of forces into the economic cycle through the separate administration of the legal and spiritual life, which it can never develop from within itself. By its own nature, economic life can be neither social nor anti-social. It can only be administered in such a way that the goods needed by the community are produced by the economic activity of people with the appropriate expertise and skills. People attain their positions within economic life through their expertise and professional skills. They can only act in these positions in a socially just manner if no other relationships arise with their fellow human beings as a result of holding them. But this can only be the case if the tendency of economic life to produce such other relationships can be continuously counteracted. Man cannot do this in a position in which he is economically active. He can only work fruitfully in it if he does not need to have any other considerations in mind than to satisfy the manifest needs of his fellow human beings from the economic sources available to him. The other relationships must be established in a way that economic life has no influence on. Such other relationships are the cultivation of spiritual and legal-political life.
It is only because the results of economic work, the cultivation of spiritual life and the legal and political institutions are organized in each other in the whole of life that people believe they must also manage the interacting factors from a central point. Because a person must have the abilities to work profitably in economic life, people believe that they must also obtain the institutions through which these abilities are developed from economic life. But this does not promote the cooperation of spiritual life with economic life, but hinders it. The only thing that can be decisive for how a person works when he holds an economic position is what economic life demands. Economic life cannot do anything to develop abilities for this position. Therefore, he should not be able to get such a position through something that is based in economic life itself. The head of a business should work in such a way that goods are produced in the most appropriate way through his work. The independent spiritual life should ensure that the abilities for such leadership are developed in the human being. Abilities only develop when they are cultivated from a spiritual point of view. To cultivate them, it is necessary that there is an area of life in which the abilities of people are developed appropriately from their own being.