The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The true shape of the social question, grasped from the life of modern humanity

[ 1 ] Does not the modern social movement reveal itself out of the catastrophe of the world war through facts which prove how inadequate were the thoughts by which for decades the proletarian will was thought to be understood?

[ 2 ] What is currently forcing its way to the surface of life from demands of the proletariat that were previously held down, and in connection with them, makes it necessary to ask this question. The powers that caused the suppression have been partly destroyed. The relationship that these powers have established with the social driving forces of a large part of humanity can only be maintained by those who are completely unaware of how indestructible such impulses of human nature are.

[ 3 ] Some personalities, whose situation in life made it possible for them to have an inhibiting or promoting effect on the forces in European life that pushed towards the catastrophe of war in 1914, indulged in the greatest illusions about these driving forces. They could believe that a victory for their country would calm the social onslaught. Such personalities had to realize that it was only through the consequences of their conduct that the social instincts fully came to the fore. Indeed, the present catastrophe of mankind proved to be the historical event through which these impulses received their full force. The leading personalities and classes always had to make their behavior in the last fateful years dependent on what lived in the socialist-minded circles of humanity. They would often have liked to have acted differently if they could have ignored the mood of these circles. The effects of this mood live on in the form that events have currently taken.

[ 4 ] And now that a decisive stage has been reached in the development of mankind's life, which has been in preparation for decades: now it is a tragic fate that the thoughts that have arisen in the development of these facts are not equal to the facts that have become. Many personalities who have trained their thoughts on this becoming in order to serve what lives in it as a social goal are today able to do little or nothing with regard to questions of destiny posed by the facts.

[ 5 ] Some of these personalities still believe that what they have long thought necessary for the reorganization of human life will be realized and then prove powerful enough to give the demanding facts a possible direction for life. - We can disregard the opinion of those who still believe that the old must be able to withstand the newer demands of a large part of humanity. We can focus on the will of those who are convinced of the necessity of a new way of life. We cannot help but admit to ourselves: Party opinions walk among us like mummies of judgment that are rejected by the development of the facts. These facts demand decisions for which the judgments of the old parties are not prepared. Such parties have indeed developed with the facts; but they have lagged behind the facts in their habits of thought. There is perhaps no need to be immodest towards views that are still considered authoritative today if one believes that one can infer what has just been indicated from the course of world events in the present. One may draw the conclusion from this that it is precisely the present that must be receptive to the attempt to characterize that in the social life of modern mankind which, in its peculiarity, is far removed from the habits of thought of socially oriented personalities and party tendencies. For it may well be that the tragedy which emerges in the attempts to solve the social question is rooted precisely in a misunderstanding of true proletarian aspirations. In a misunderstanding even on the part of those whose views have grown out of these aspirations. For man by no means always forms the right judgment about his own will.

[ 6 ] It may therefore seem justified to ask the question: what does the modern proletarian movement really want? Does this will correspond to what is usually thought about this will by the proletarian or non-proletarian side? Does what is thought by many about the "social question" reveal the true form of this "question"? Or is a completely different way of thinking necessary? One will not be able to approach this question impartially if one has not been enabled by the destinies of life to familiarize oneself with the mental life of the modern proletariat. And indeed that part of this proletariat which has the greatest share in the form that the social movement of the present has taken.

[ 7 ] Much has been said about the development of modern technology and modern capitalism. It has been asked how the present proletariat has arisen within this development, and how it has arrived at its demands through the unfolding of modern economic life. There is much that is true in all that has been said in this direction. But the fact that this does not touch on a decisive point can be obvious to those who do not allow themselves to be hypnotized by the judgment that external circumstances determine the character of a person's life. It reveals itself to those who retain an unbiased insight into the spiritual impulses working from the inner depths. It is certain that the proletarian demands have developed during the life of modern technology and modern capitalism; but the insight into this fact does not at all reveal what actually lives in these demands as purely human impulses. And as long as one does not penetrate into the life of these impulses, one can probably not come to grips with the true form of the "social question".

[ 8 ] A word that is often spoken in the proletarian world can make a meaningful impression on those who are able to penetrate the deeper driving forces of the human will. It is this: the modern proletarian has become "class-conscious". He no longer follows the impulses of the classes outside himself instinctively, unconsciously, so to speak; he knows himself to be a member of a particular class and is willing to assert the relationship of this class to the others in public life in a way that corresponds to his interests. Anyone who has a grasp of psychological undercurrents is made aware by the word "class-conscious", in the context in which the modern proletarian uses it, of the most important facts in the social outlook on life of those working classes who stand in the life of modern technology and modern capitalism. Such a person must above all become aware of how scientific teachings about economic life and its relation to human destinies have struck an incendiary blow into the soul of the proletarian. This touches on a fact about which many who can only think about the proletariat, not with it, have only very hazy, indeed, in view of the serious events of the present, harmful judgments. With the opinion that the "uneducated" proletarian has had his head turned by Marxism and its continuation by the proletarian writers, and with what one can often hear in this direction, one does not arrive at an understanding of the historical world situation necessary in this field in the present. For in expressing such an opinion one only shows that one does not have the will to direct one's attention to an essential aspect of the present social movement. And such an essential is the filling of the proletarian class consciousness with concepts that have taken their character from the more recent scientific development. What lived in Lassalle's speech on "science and the workers" continues to have an effect on this consciousness. Such things may seem insignificant to some who consider themselves "practical people". But anyone who wants to gain a really fruitful insight into the modern workers' movement must turn his attention to these things. What moderate and radical proletarians demand today is not economic life transformed into human impulses, as some people imagine it to be, but economic science, by which the proletarian consciousness has been seized. This is so clearly revealed in the scientific and journalistic literature of the proletarian movement. To deny it is to close one's eyes to the real facts. And a fundamental fact that determines the social situation of the present is that the modern proletarian allows the content of his class consciousness to be defined in scientific terms. No matter how far removed from "science" the man working on the machine may be, he listens to the explanations of his situation from those who have received the means for this enlightenment from this "science".

[ 9 ] All the arguments about modern economic life, the machine age, capitalism, however plausibly they may point to the factual basis of the modern proletarian movement; what decisively enlightens the present social situation does not flow directly from the fact that the worker has been put to the machine, that he has been harnessed into the capitalist order of life. It flows from the other fact that quite certain thoughts have developed within his class consciousness at the machine and in dependence on the capitalist economic order. It may be that contemporary habits of thought prevent some people from fully recognizing the implications of this fact and cause them to see in its emphasis only a dialectical play with concepts. On the other hand, it must be said: All the worse for the prospects of a prosperous attitude in the social life of the present for those who are unable to grasp the essentials. Whoever wants to understand the proletarian movement must above all know how the proletarian thinks. For the proletarian movement - from its moderate reform efforts to its most devastating excesses - is not made by "extra-human forces", by "economic impulses", but by people; by their ideas and impulses of will.

[ 10 ] It is not in what the machine and capitalism have transplanted into the proletarian consciousness that the determining ideas and volitional forces of the present social movement lie. This movement has sought its source of thought in the newer direction of science, because the machine and capitalism could give the proletarian nothing that could fill his soul with a humane content. Such content came to the medieval craftsman from his profession. In the way in which this craftsman felt humanly connected with his profession, there was something that made life within the whole of human society appear to him in a light worth living in before his own consciousness. He was able to look at what he did in such a way that he could believe he had realized what he wanted to be as a "human being". On the machine and within the capitalist order of life, man was dependent on himself, on his inner self, if he was looking for a basis on which to build a view of what he was as a "human being" that would support his consciousness. Nothing emanated from technology, from capitalism, for such a view. Thus it came about that the proletarian consciousness took the direction of scientific thought. It had lost the human connection with immediate life. But this happened at a time when the leading classes of mankind were striving towards a scientific way of thinking which itself no longer had the spiritual power to lead human consciousness to a satisfying content according to its needs. The old world views placed man as a soul in a spiritual context of existence. Before the newer science he appears as a natural being within the mere order of nature. This science is not perceived as a stream flowing into the human soul from a spiritual world, which carries the human being as a soul. Whatever one may think about the relationship between the religious impulses and what is related to them and the scientific way of thinking of modern times, one will have to admit, if one looks at the historical development impartially, that the scientific conception has developed from the religious one. But the old world views, which rested on religious foundations, have not been able to communicate their soul-bearing impulse to the newer scientific mode of conception. They placed themselves outside this mode of conception and continued to live with a content of consciousness to which the souls of the proletariat could not turn. To the leading classes this content of consciousness could still be something valuable. It was connected in one way or another with their situation in life. These classes did not look for a new content of consciousness, because the tradition of life itself made them hold on to the old one. The modern proletarian has been torn out of all the old contexts of life. He is the man whose life has been placed on a completely new basis. For him, with the removal of the old foundations of life, the possibility of drawing from the old spiritual sources was also lost. These stood in the midst of the areas from which he had become alienated. With modern technology and modern capitalism, modern science developed at the same time - in the sense in which the great currents of world history can be described simultaneously. The trust, the faith of the modern proletariat turned to it. From it it sought the new content of consciousness it needed. But its relationship to this scientificity was different from that of the leading classes. The latter did not feel compelled to make the scientific mode of conception their soul-bearing conception of life. No matter how much they were imbued with the "scientific conception" that in the natural order a straight causal connection led from the lowest animals to man, this conception remained a theoretical conviction. It did not generate the impulse to take life sensitively in a way that is completely appropriate to this conviction. The natural scientist Vogt, the scientific popularizer Büchner: they were certainly imbued with the scientific way of thinking. But alongside this way of thinking, something was at work in their souls that made them cling to contexts of life that could only be meaningfully justified by their belief in a spiritual world order. Just imagine how differently scientificity affects those who are anchored in such contexts of life with their own existence than the modern proletarian, before whom his agitator steps and speaks in the few evening hours that are not filled with work in the following way: "In recent times, science has driven people out of the belief that they have their origin in spiritual worlds. They have been taught that in primitive times they lived indecently as tree-climbers, taught that they all have the same purely natural origin. The modern proletarian saw himself confronted with a scientific approach oriented towards such thoughts when he was looking for a soul content that would allow him to feel how he stood as a human being in the world. He took this scientificity completely seriously and drew his conclusions for life from it. The technical and capitalist age affected him differently from the members of the leading classes. He was part of an order of life that was still shaped by soul-bearing impulses. He had every interest in incorporating the achievements of the new age into the framework of this order of life. The proletarian was mentally torn out of this order of life. This order of life could not give him a feeling that illuminated his life with a humane content. The only thing that could make the proletarian feel what he was as a human being was the only thing that seemed to have emerged from the old order of life with faith-awakening power: the scientific way of thinking.

[ 11 ] It might make some readers of these remarks smile when reference is made to the "scientific nature" of the proletarian way of thinking. Those who can only think of "scientificity" as that which one acquires through many years of sitting in "educational institutions", and who then contrast this "scientificity" with the consciousness of the proletarian who has "learned nothing", may smile. He smiles at the facts of present life which are decisive for fate. But these facts bear witness to the fact that many a highly-educated man lives unscientifically, while the uneducated proletarian orients his attitude to life towards science, which he perhaps does not possess at all. The educated man has absorbed science; it is in a drawer inside his soul. But he stands in contexts of life and lets these orient his feelings, which are not guided by this science. The proletarian is led by the conditions of his life to conceive of existence as it corresponds to the mindset of this science. What the other classes call "scientificity" may be far removed from him; the direction of this scientificity orients his life. For the other classes the determining factor is a religious, an aesthetic, a general spiritual basis; for him "science", even if often in its very last outflows of thought, becomes faith in life. Some members of the "leading" classes feel "enlightened", "free religious". Certainly, scientific conviction lives in their ideas; in their feelings, however, pulsate the unnoticed remnants of a traditional belief in life.

[ 12 ] What the scientific way of thinking has not received from the old order of life is the awareness that it is rooted as a spiritual way in a spiritual world. The member of the leading classes could ignore this character of modern scientificity. For his life is filled with old traditions. The proletarian could not. For his new situation in life drove the old traditions out of his soul. He adopted the scientific conception of the ruling classes as his inheritance. This inheritance became the basis of his consciousness of the essence of man. But this "spiritual content" in his soul knew nothing of its origin in a real spiritual life. What the proletarian could take over from the ruling classes as spiritual life alone denied its origin in the spirit.

[ 13 ] I am not unaware how these thoughts will affect non-proletarians and also proletarians who believe themselves to be "practically" familiar with life, and who from this belief regard what is said here as a view alien to life. The facts of the present world situation will increasingly prove this belief to be a delusion. Anyone who can see these facts impartially must realize that a view of life which is only concerned with the external aspects of these facts is ultimately only accessible to ideas which no longer have anything to do with the facts. Ruling thoughts have "practically" adhered to the facts until these thoughts no longer bear any resemblance to these facts. In this respect, the current world catastrophe could be a taskmaster for many. Because: What did they think could happen? And what has become? Is this also how social thinking should go?

[ 14 ] I also hear in my mind the objection that the confessor of the proletarian view of life makes out of the mood of his soul: another one who wants to divert the real core of the social question onto a track that seems comfortable for the bourgeois-minded. This confessor does not see through how fate has brought him his proletarian life, and how he seeks to move within this life through a way of thinking that has been handed down to him as a hereditary trait by the "ruling" classes. He lives proletarian; but he thinks bourgeois. The new age not only makes it necessary to find oneself in a new life, but also in new thoughts. The scientific mode of conception will only be able to become a life-supporting content when it develops in its own way such an impetus for the formation of a fully human content of life as the old conceptions of life developed in their way.

[ 15 ] This describes the path that leads to finding the true form of one of the members within the newer proletarian movement. At the end of this path, the conviction resounds from the proletarian soul: I strive for the spiritual life. But this spiritual life is ideology, is only what is reflected in man from the external world processes, does not flow from a special spiritual world. What has become of the old spiritual life in the transition to the new age is perceived by the proletarian conception of life as ideology. Anyone who wants to understand the mood in the proletarian soul, which is expressed in the social demands of the present, must be able to grasp what the view that spiritual life is ideology can bring about. One may reply: What does the average proletarian know of this view that haunts the minds of more or less educated leaders? He who speaks in this way is talking past life, and he is also acting past real life. Such a person does not know what has been going on in proletarian life in recent decades; he does not know what threads are spun from the view that intellectual life is ideology to the demands and deeds of the radical socialist, whom he considers to be merely "ignorant", and also to the actions of those who "make revolution" out of dull life impulses.

[ 16 ] Therein lies the tragedy that is spreading over the comprehension of the social demands of the present, that in many circles one has no feeling for what is forcing its way to the surface of life from the mood of the broad masses, that one is unable to direct one's gaze to what is really going on in the minds of men. The non-proletarian listens fearfully to the demands of the proletarian and hears: Only through socialization of the means of production can a humane existence be achieved for me. But he is unable to form any idea of the fact that his class, in the transition from an old to a new age, has not only called upon the proletarian to work on the means of production which do not belong to him, but that it has not been able to give him a supporting soul content to this work. People who, in the manner indicated above, look past life and act past it, may say: But the proletarian simply wants to be placed in a position in life that is equal to that of the ruling classes; where does the question of the content of the soul play a role here? Yes, the proletarian himself may claim: I demand nothing from the other classes for my soul; I want them to be unable to exploit me any further. I want the class distinctions that now exist to cease. Such talk does not get to the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of the true shape of this question. For such a consciousness in the souls of the working population, which would have inherited a true spiritual content from the ruling classes, would raise the social demands in a completely different way than the modern proletariat does, which can only see an ideology in the spiritual life it has received. This proletariat is convinced of the ideological character of spiritual life; but it becomes more and more unhappy through this conviction. And the effects of this unhappiness of its soul, which it is not consciously aware of but which it suffers intensely, far outweigh in their significance for the social situation of the present anything that is merely the demand for improvement of the external living situation, which is also justified in its nature.

[ 17 ] The ruling classes do not recognize themselves as the originators of that attitude to life which at present confronts them in the proletariat ready to fight. And yet they have become these originators through the fact that they have only been able to pass on something of their intellectual life to this proletariat that must be perceived by it as ideology.

[ 18 ] It is not that which gives the present social movement its essential character, that a demand is made for a change in the condition of life of a class of men, although it is the natural thing to do, but the way how the demand for this change is translated into reality from the thought-impulses of this class. Just take an impartial look at the facts from this point of view. Then you will see how personalities who want to keep their thinking in the direction of proletarian impulses smile when it is said that through these or those intellectual endeavors they want to contribute something to the solution of the social question. They smile at it as ideology, as a gray theory. They believe that nothing can be contributed to the burning social questions of the present day from the thought, from mere intellectual life. But if one looks more closely, it becomes obvious how the real nerve, the real basic impulse of the modern, precisely proletarian movement does not lie in what today's proletarian speaks of, but lies in thought.

[ 19 ] The modern proletarian movement, like perhaps no other similar movement in the world - if one looks at it more closely, this becomes apparent in the most eminent sense - is a movement that has sprung from thoughts. I am not saying this merely as an aperçu gained in thinking about the social movement. If I may insert a personal remark, let it be this: For years I taught proletarian workers in various branches of a workers' education school. I believe I have come to know what lives and strives in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. From there I have also had the opportunity to follow what is at work in the trade unions of the various professions and occupations. I mean, I am not just speaking from the point of view of theoretical considerations, but I am expressing what I believe I have gained as a result of real life experience.

[ 20 ] Those who have become acquainted with the modern labor movement where it is carried by workers - which is unfortunately so rarely the case with the leading intellectuals - know what a significant phenomenon this is, that a certain direction of thought has seized the souls of a large number of people in the most intense way. What makes it difficult at present to take a stand on the social puzzles is that there is so little possibility of mutual understanding between the classes. The bourgeois classes today find it so difficult to empathize with the soul of the proletarian, so difficult to understand how such a way of thinking - whatever one may think of its content - as that of Karl Marx, which applies the highest standards to the demands of human thought, could find its way into the still unspent intelligence of the proletariat.

[ 21 ] Of course, Karl Marx's system of thought can be accepted by some and refuted by others, perhaps the one with as good reasons as the other; it could be revised by those who viewed social life after the death of Marx and his friend Engels from a different point of view than these leaders. I will not even speak of the content of this system. It does not seem to me to be the most significant thing in the modern proletarian movement. The most significant thing seems to me to be the fact: Within the working class a system of thought acts as the most powerful impulse. The matter can be expressed in the following way: A practical movement, a pure life movement with the most commonplace demands of humanity, has never stood so almost entirely alone on a pure intellectual basis as this modern proletarian movement. To a certain extent, it is even the first such movement in the world that has placed itself purely on a scientific basis. But this fact must be considered correctly. If one looks at everything that the modern proletarian has to say consciously about his own opinions, will and feelings, then what is expressed in terms of program does not appear to be the important thing when one observes life with great intensity.

[ 22 ] But it must appear to be really important that in the proletarian feeling has become decisive for the whole man what with other classes is anchored only in a single member of their mental life: the basis of thought of the attitude to life. What is inner reality in the proletarian in this way, he cannot consciously admit. He is prevented from this concession by the fact that the life of thought has been handed down to him as an ideology. In reality, he builds his life on thought, but perceives it as an unreal ideology. There is no other way of understanding the proletarian conception of life and its realization through the actions of its bearers than by seeing through this fact in its full significance within the recent development of mankind.

[ 23 ] From the way in which the spiritual life of the modern proletarian has been described in the foregoing, one can recognize that in the description of the true form of the proletarian-social movement, the characterization of this spiritual life must appear in the first place. For it is essential that the proletarian should feel the causes of his unsatisfactory social situation and strive to eliminate them in such a way that his feelings and aspirations receive their direction from this spiritual life. And yet at present he cannot but mockingly or angrily reject the opinion that there is something in these spiritual foundations of the social movement which constitutes a significant driving force. How could he realize that spiritual life has a power that drives him, since he must perceive it as an ideology? One cannot expect an intellectual life that is perceived in this way to find a way out of a social situation that one no longer wants to endure. From his scientifically oriented way of thinking, the modern proletarian has not only come to regard science itself, but also art, religion, custom and law as components of human ideology. He sees in these branches of intellectual life nothing of a reality breaking into his existence that can add anything to material life. To him they are only a reflection or mirror image of this material life. They may, after all, when they have arisen, have a formative effect on material life in a roundabout way through human imagination or through their absorption into the impulses of the will: originally they rise from this life as ideological entities. Not they can of themselves give anything that leads to the elimination of social difficulties. Only within the material facts themselves can something arise that leads to the goal.

[ 24 ] The newer intellectual life has passed from the leading classes of mankind to the proletarian population in a form that eliminates its power for the consciousness of this population. When we think of the forces that can bring a solution to the social question, this must be understood above all others. If this fact were to remain effective, the spiritual life of mankind would have to see itself condemned to impotence in the face of the social demands of the present and the future. A large part of the modern proletariat is indeed convinced of this impotence; and this conviction is expressed in Marxist or similar creeds. It is said that modern economic life has developed from its older forms into the capitalist forms of the present. This development has placed the proletariat in an intolerable position vis-à-vis capital. The development will continue; it will kill capitalism through the forces at work within it, and the liberation of the proletariat will arise from the death of capitalism. This conviction has been stripped of the fatalistic character it assumed for a certain circle of Marxists by more recent socialist thinkers. But the essence has remained. This is expressed in the fact that anyone who wants to think in a genuinely socialist way at the present time will never be able to say: if somewhere a life of the soul, rooted in a spiritual reality and supporting human beings, emerges from the impulses of the time, then the power that gives the right impetus to the social movement will be able to radiate from it.

[ 25 ] The fact that the man of the present who is forced to lead a proletarian life cannot have such an expectation of the spiritual life of this present gives his soul its basic mood. He needs a spiritual life from which the power emanates that gives his soul the feeling of his human dignity. For when he was drawn into the capitalist economic order of modern times, the deepest needs of his soul were directed towards such a spiritual life. But the spiritual life which the leading classes handed down to him as an ideology hollowed out his soul. The fact that in the demands of the modern proletariat there is a longing for a different connection with the spiritual life than the present social order can give it: this is what gives the present social movement its guiding force. But this fact is not properly grasped either by the non-proletarian section of mankind or by the proletarian. For the non-proletarian part does not suffer from the ideological character of modern intellectual life, which it itself has brought about. The proletarian part suffers from it. But this ideological character of the intellectual life inherited by it has robbed it of its faith in the sustaining power of the intellectual good as such. Finding a way out of the turmoil of humanity's present social situation depends on a proper understanding of this fact. The social order, which has arisen under the influence of the leading classes of men with the advent of the newer form of economy, has closed the way to such a path. One will have to gain the strength to open it.

[ 26 ] In this area, we will come to rethink what we currently think when we learn to correctly perceive the weight of the fact that a social coexistence of people in which spiritual life acts as an ideology lacks one of the forces that make the social organism viable. The present one suffers from the impotence of spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to recognize its existence. By recognizing this fact, one will gain a basis on which a way of thinking corresponding to the social movement can develop.

[ 27 ] At present the proletarian seems to strike at a fundamental force of his soul when he speaks of his class consciousness. But the truth is that, since he has been ensnared in the capitalist economic order, he has been searching for a spiritual life that can support his soul, that gives him the consciousness of his human dignity; and that the spiritual life that is perceived as ideological cannot develop this consciousness for him. He has searched for this consciousness, and he has replaced what he could not find with the class consciousness born of economic life.

[ 28 ] His gaze has been directed, as if by a powerful suggestive force, merely towards economic life. And now he no longer believes that elsewhere, in something spiritual or mental, there could be an impulse to what must necessarily occur in the field of social movement. He alone believes that through the development of unspiritual, unsoulful economic life the condition can be brought about which he feels to be the humane one. Thus he was urged to seek his salvation solely in a reorganization of economic life. He was urged to the opinion that by a mere reorganization of economic life all the harm resulting from private enterprise, from the egoism of the individual employer and from the impossibility of the individual employer to do justice to the claims to human dignity that live in the employee would disappear. Thus the modern proletarian came to see the only salvation of the social organism in the conversion of all private ownership of the means of production into communal enterprise or even communal property. Such an opinion has arisen from the fact that one has, as it were, diverted one's gaze from all that is spiritual and mental and directed it only to the purely economic process.

[ 29 ] This gave rise to all the contradictions inherent in the modern proletarian movement. The modern proletarian believes that everything must develop from the economy, from economic life itself, which will ultimately give him his full human rights. He fights for this full human right. It is only within his striving that something occurs which can never arise as a consequence of economic life alone. It is an important and striking fact that at the very center of the various forms of the social question, out of the necessities of life of present-day humanity, lies something which is believed to arise out of economic life itself, but which could never arise out of it alone, but which lies rather in the straight line of development which leads from the old slave system through the serf system of the feudal period up to the modern working proletariat. Just as for modern life the circulation of commodities, the circulation of money, capital, property, the nature of land, and so on have taken shape, within this modern life something has developed which is not clearly expressed, nor is it consciously felt by the modern proletarian, but which is the real basic impulse of his social will. It is this: The modern capitalist economic order basically only recognizes commodities within its territory. It recognizes the creation of value of these commodities within the economic organism. And something has become a commodity within the capitalist organism of recent times, of which the proletarian today feels: it must not be a commodity.

[ 30 ] Once one realizes how strongly, as one of the basic impulses of the whole modern proletarian social movement, there lives in the instincts, in the subconscious feelings of the modern proletarian, a disgust that he must sell his labour-power to the employer just as one sells commodities on the market, a disgust that his labour-power plays its part on the labour market according to supply and demand, just as commodities play their part on the market according to supply and demand, when one comes to realize the significance of this abhorrence of the commodity of labour-power in the modern social movement, when one will look quite impartially at the fact that what is at work there is also not expressed forcefully and radically enough by socialist theories, then one will have found the second impulse to the first, the ideologically perceived spiritual life, of which it must be said that it makes the social question today an urgent, indeed a burning one.

[ 31 ] In ancient times there were slaves. The whole human being was sold like a commodity. A little less of the human being, but still a part of the human being itself was incorporated into the economic process through serfdom. Capitalism has become the power that imposes the character of a commodity on a remnant of the human being: labor power. I do not mean to say here that this fact has not been noticed. On the contrary, it is perceived as a fundamental fact in contemporary social life. It is felt as something that has an important effect on the modern social movement. But by looking at it, one merely directs one's gaze to economic life. The question of the character of commodities is turned into a mere economic question. It is believed that out of economic life itself must come the forces which bring about a condition in which the proletarian no longer feels that the integration of his labor-power into the social organism is unworthy of him. We see how the modern form of economy has arisen in the recent historical development of mankind. One also sees that this economic form has imprinted the character of a commodity on human labor power. But one does not see how it lies in economic life itself that everything incorporated into it must become a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and expedient consumption of commodities. One cannot strip human labor power of its commodity character unless one finds the possibility of tearing it out of the economic process. The endeavor cannot be directed to transforming the economic process in such a way that within it human labor power comes into its own, but rather to the following: How can this labor power be removed from the economic process in order to allow it to be determined by social forces that take away its commodity character? The proletarian longs for a state of economic life in which his labor power occupies its appropriate position. He longs for it because he does not see that the commodity character of his labor power derives essentially from his complete involvement in the economic process. By having to hand over his labor power to this process, he is absorbed into it with his whole person. The economic process strives by its own nature to consume labor-power in the most expedient way as long as commodities are consumed in it, as long as the regulation of labor-power is left within it. As if hypnotized by the power of modern economic life, one directs one's gaze solely to what can work in it. This way of looking will never reveal how labor power no longer needs to be a commodity. For a different form of economy will only turn this labor power into a commodity in a different way. The labor question cannot be made a part of the social question in its true form as long as one does not see that in economic life the production, exchange and consumption of commodities proceed according to laws determined by interests whose sphere of power should not be extended beyond human labor power.

[ 32 ] Modern thought has not learned to separate the quite different ways in which, on the one hand, that which is bound to man as labor power is integrated into economic life, and on the other hand, that which, according to its origin, moves unconnected with man along the paths which the commodity must take from its production to its consumption. If, on the one hand, a healthy way of thinking along these lines reveals the true form of the labor question, then, on the other hand, this way of thinking will also show what position economic life should occupy in the healthy social organism.

[ 33 ] It can already be seen from this that the "social question" is divided into three particular questions. The first will point to the healthy form of spiritual life in the social organism; the second will look at the working relationship in its proper integration into community life; and the third will show how economic life should function in this life.