4. Realistic Attempts to Solve the Social Questions on the Basis of a Spiritual-Scientific View of Life

Rights can only exist in a state context. Economic interests can only exist in the economic body. And they must go side by side and together independently. That is it, if you look more closely, however little most people still believe it today, that is it, which has brought about such misfortune in modern life, which encompasses a representative body, an administration, economic life, and the state-regulating legal life. An independent system of representation is necessary for the purely political state. For the legal life, an independent representation, independent administration, for example in the Reichstag or in any ministry, is necessary. An independent administration, an independent ministry, but, to put it bluntly, for economic life, which is inherent in itself in terms of its administration and its perpetual further development, this will arise by itself. While the legal life of the state is concerned with the relationship between people, in that we must all be equal before the law, and while the legal life, if it is properly understood, can only result in a complete democracy, the economic life must be based on independent associations, on such associations that arise from the way people grow together, like the natural conditions previously characterized, in their economic life. Entire systems of associations will develop that, in a corresponding way, interpret the economic organism from the self-regulation of forces in such a way that it must and can be viable for everyone. These things are basically beginnings, yes; but beginnings in which many misunderstandings prevail. We have cooperatives – fine; we have trade unions, we have various other associations; certainly, such things have arisen out of the urge to serve the developmental forces of modern times. But partly from the form that such things have taken, partly from the fact that it is thought that economic life can be handed over to the state, to the community – in all these things it can be seen that in these new structures one does not want to include only what arises from the laws proper to economic life, but what must develop alongside economic life as an independent link in the social organism, namely, the political and legal life of the state, as described in the narrower sense. In contrast to all the concepts of labor and the position of labor in the social organism, as they haunt today, there will be, when these two elements of the healthy organism are juxtaposed, there will be, above all, as there is ownership in the old social organism, such a very different labor law in the new, healthy social organism, which will correspond to the present and the future.