IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

Today, due to the advanced hour, I will only point out one thing, but an important one: the second key point of the social movement of modern times. I will point out how it has taken hold – as I said, the one whom his fate has destined to think with the proletariat has seen it again and again – in the minds of the proletarians, the word of Karl Marx, that the modern proletariat must suffer from the fact that its labor power is bought and sold on the labor market like a commodity, that in economic life not only commodities circulate, but human labor power also circulates. Wages are nothing other than the purchase of human labor power as a commodity. Of course, the proletarian was not so educated by the heritage of bourgeois science, which he had inherited, that he could clearly understand in his mind what actually existed. And the proletarian leaders had only just inherited bourgeois science, so they certainly could not. But the proletarian felt the following in his heart in response to the above quote from Karl Marx. He looked back to ancient times and said to himself: There were once slaves, and the capitalist could buy the whole person like a cow or an object. Then came the time of serfdom, when one could buy less of the person, but still enough. Then came the more recent time, the time when people were made to believe that they were free beings. But the proletarian could not enjoy his freedom, because he still had to sell something of himself, namely his labor. You cannot sell your labor like something you have produced. You can take a wagon wheel or a horse to the market and sell it, and then go back. With your labor, you have to go along. There is a remnant of slavery in real life, no matter how much is said and taught scientifically about so-called freedom. This was what was fixed in the feelings of the proletarian, and what should also have been felt by a real spiritual life in the leading and guiding circles. But although they rightly evoked democracy, which fostered this feeling towards human labor, they were short-sighted enough not to accommodate this feeling through any institution. Now, finally, the facts speak in such a way that it is absolutely necessary to raise the second core question of the social movement: How to strip human labor of the character of the commodity? This is only possible if, on the one hand, we separate intellectual life from the actual political or legal state for the reasons given, and, on the other hand, we separate economic life from this political or legal state, if we thus place three independent social organisms side by side, which can only become a true unity if they are independent. Then they will help each other organically from within, whereas the current unity of economic life, state or legal life and intellectual life has led us into chaos. Now, on the one hand, economic life borders on natural conditions. How foolish it would be if some corporation were to sit down and determine today what natural conditions are needed for the year 1920, for example, how many days a year it must rain and how many days there must be sunshine. That would be folly, of course. In this area, where economic life borders on the natural foundations, one understands this folly, but on the other side, where economic life borders on the free state, which is not allowed to engage in economic activity, one does not yet understand a similar thing. Even Walther Rathenau emphasized in his latest pamphlet, 'After the Flood', that the detachment of the worker from the economic cycle would bring about a tremendous fall in the value of money. He cannot even imagine what will be possible as a result of the liberation of economic life from state life – the withdrawal of labor from economic life, so that economic life is left with nothing but that which is objective and independent of man. In the State the worker will have to stand on such ground where every man is equal to every other man. The future of the State, freed from economic and intellectual life, will be such that everything that lives in humanity, and which can be precisely defined, will develop within the State. In relation to this everything will stand completely equal before all men.