VI. The Future of Capital and Human Labor

This brings me to the second point to be considered, apart from the socio-psychological fact of seeking trust. From the great mass of the proletariat and the socially minded, the call arises, and it has been arising for a long time, for some kind of socialization of the means of production, which, after all, are essentially the same for the proletariat as for capital. Anyone who, in the sense in which I have dealt with it in my last two lectures here, engages in the development of social and socialist ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may come to the conclusion that there is something in this call for socialization of the means of production that corresponds to the most justified thing that one can see in the more recent development of humanity. But for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the facts as they have changed through the world catastrophe, it will not be difficult to see through how inadequate many of those ideas, party opinions and the like that have also asserted themselves on the socialist side have become, now that the facts arising from the world catastrophe are loudly and powerfully demanding expression and seeking to be shaped. Now the questions must be raised: How can we shape social life? How does the path lead to what is presented as a good goal: socialization of the means of production? How do we arrive at such ideas that not only show us the goal that can satisfy demands born out of suffering and deprivation, but that also open up the path to that goal for us? That is the task of the threefold social organism: to find the way to an end that the broad masses of humanity recognize as their own, feel as their own, and to a certain extent understand as their own. I must again and again emphasize that what I have to say here is not derived from some vague theory, nor is it the product of erudition. It has its source in real life and its present far-reaching demands. But one sometimes wonders how the times, how human thoughts relate to something that has been taken straight from the depths of life. In the form in which the call for socialization sounds today, it comes from a significant world-historical rallying cry, from the so-called Communist Manifesto of the ingenious Karl Marx. And basically, what has been experienced to date and what will continue to be experienced in terms of social and socialist impulses will be branches and shoots of what is given at the root with this Communist Manifesto. But it is remarkable that in the same year that the Communist Manifesto appeared, an honest, realistic book was published. And the thoughts in this book arose from the soul of a man who already knew life and who would have been inclined to profess himself a socialist completely even then, if he had been able to do so based on his knowledge of life. It is Bruno Hildebrand who wrote the book at that time, a seemingly unassuming book, but a symptomatic book, a book that should be thoroughly considered: “The National Economy of the Present and the Future”. I mention this here today in my introduction for a very specific reason. If you take everything that has been put forward by the opponents of socialism since the Communist Manifesto, you can clearly find it all in the work of Bruno Hildebrand from 1848. What is actually the basis of the impulse of this remarkable man? He said to himself, I have to imagine what a social order would look like if it were purely socialist! He visualizes such a socialist social order to a certain extent. If he could consider it possible, as everyone can tell from the man's explanations, then he would immediately profess it. He cannot consider it possible according to his views. Why? Not because he believes that some people who have acquired, inherited or otherwise obtained wealth will suffer, but because because, as a thinker of reality, a genuinely practical thinker, it becomes clear to him that those who want socialism as they imagine it would have to feel unhappy in such a socialist social order in no time. And why should they feel unhappy? The man gives all this. He shows how many of the legitimate human powers would naturally have to disappear if a socialist structure were to take hold of human society. He shows how it would be impossible to establish the relationship between capital and labor in the long term, especially in a socialist society.