7. The Key Points of the Social Question

Anyone who wants to come to terms with private property, or more precisely, wants to come to terms with it, should, above all, be aware that for the social organism, for social life, the ownership relationship can only be a legal relationship. Initially, it is a privilege, a class relationship; but it is a legal relationship by nature. After all, what is ownership? Everything else is wishy-washy. What is important about property in social life is the right to dispose of some thing. That is a right, and it comes into consideration as a right, comes into consideration as a right, in that the right must be the object of the political state, in that this right is determined and regulated from person to person. In a purely democratic way, the economic state is that which arises out of human needs and out of necessary production. Thus, the constitutional state is that which arises out of that in which all people are equal, which concerns all people. We have an understanding from person to person, which must be established on democratic ground. The economic organism will develop out of what has been shown in the beginnings, but only in such beginnings, in the cooperative and trade union systems and so on, out of the various professional groups, out of the interests that develop between production and consumption, where associations are formed, and on the basis of these associations, which are managed purely appropriately, the economic state will be managed, for my part I say the economic state; I could also say the economic organism will be managed, the economic cycle, in which only goods will circulate. And in this economic organism, above all that which is still administered by the state laws today will prevail. Not the state will have to determine by laws what the currency is, which actually causes the strong price fluctuations, but in the economic organism that which is the administration of money can arise out of the mere administration of this economic organism. Money is what, after the natural economy, causes people living in a social organism to engage in a common economy. Money can be nothing other than the instruction that I have, on the basis of the fact that I myself have produced something, the instruction that I have, that at the right time, on the basis of what I have produced, I can get something else from someone else that they have produced. But this can only be achieved on the basis of the economic organism.