The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The Threefolding of the Social Organism, a Necessity of the Times

[ 1 ] It is time to recognize that the party programmes that have survived into the present from the older or more recent past must fail in the face of the facts that have emerged from the catastrophe of the world war. Those of these programs, whose supporters were allowed to contribute to the ordering of social conditions, should be considered disproved by this catastrophe. These promoters should be aware that their thoughts were inadequate to control the development of the facts. These facts have escaped their thoughts and have driven them into confusion and violent discharge. That one must strive for thoughts that are more equal to the real course of the world of facts should be the result of such realization.

[ 2 ] They called practice what was only narrow-minded routine. The so-called practitioners had become accustomed to a narrow area of life. They mastered this routinely. They lacked the inclination and interest to see this area of life in connection with the wider world. They were proud to be a "practitioner" in their narrow area of life. They did what routine demanded and let what they did flow into the general machinery of life. They didn't care how things worked within it. In the end, everything went haywire, and the world catastrophe developed from the tangle of facts. They had surrendered to a "practice" without a dominant thought. This was the fate of the leading circles. - Now that we are faced with confusion, we cannot get away from the old habits of thought. People have become accustomed to believing this or that to be "practically necessary" and have lost sight of how what is believed to be "practically necessary" is inwardly demoralizing.

[ 3 ] In the economic order of recent times, this slipping away of facts from human thoughts has become most evident. In this area of life, the inner attrition caused by the proletarian-socialist movement became apparent. Within this movement, the other kind of party program emerged: the one that emerged from the direct experience of the demoralized and either critically demanded a change in the drifting into confusion or expected salvation from the "development" of the unleashed facts. These programs arose theoretically, out of general human demands, without practically reckoning with the facts. Practice, which was merely routine and despised thought, was opposed by socialist thought, which is theory without practice. Now that the facts demand the intervention of fruitful thoughts living in the world of facts itself, these theoretical "thoughts without practice" are proving to be inadequate. And they will prove their inadequacy more and more, the more it will become necessary to intervene with thoughts to organize the reality of the confused life of the present.

[ 4 ] In contrast to routine without thought and theoretical programs without practice, a good will in a certain direction is necessary today among people who really want to think practically. The routine, but in truth impractical, practitioners should make an effort to realize that unplanned and thoughtless economic activity will not drive us out of the catastrophe, but deeper and deeper into it. At present, people still want to hide the realization that thoughtlessness, which they have confused with practical life, has led to confusion. One has despised the promoters of thought as "impractical idealists" and one does not want to admit that one has done the most impractical thing possible. Indeed, they have proved themselves to be "idealists" in the worst sense of the word.

[ 5 ] On the other hand, where the theoretical "demand without practice" prevails, one wants to fight for a humane existence for that class of people who do not yet feel that they possess one. One does not realize that one wants to fight for it without real insight into the vital necessities of a social order. One believes that if one fights for power for the theoretically raised but impractical demands, then one will, even miraculously, be able to bring about what one is striving for.

[ 6 ] And whoever is honest with humanity, even in that class which raises these demands out of proletarian oppression and which believes that it can reach its goal in the manner described above, must concern himself with the question: What is to become if, on the one hand, programs are insisted upon which are refuted by the course of the world, and on the other hand, power is to be fought for demands which seek no access to what life itself demands for a possible social order?

[ 7 ] Today one may be well-meaning towards the proletariat, but one is not objectively honest if one does not make it understand that the programs it professes do not lead it to the salvation it seeks, but to the downfall of European culture, with whose downfall its own downfall is sealed. One is only honest with the proletariat today if one awakens in it the understanding that it can never achieve what it unconsciously strives for with the programs it has made its own.

[ 8 ] The proletariat lives in a terrible error. It has seen how, over the last few centuries, human interests have gradually been completely absorbed by the economic. It has seen how the legal forms of human social life have been established out of the economic forms of power and need; it has seen how the entire intellectual life, especially the educational and school system, has been built up out of the conditions resulting from the economic foundations and the state dependent on the economy. In the proletariat the destructive superstition has become entrenched that all legal and intellectual life arises naturally from economic forms. Large circles of non-proletarians are already infected by this superstition. - What has developed in recent centuries as a phenomenon of the times: the dependence of intellectual and legal life on economic life, is seen as a natural necessity. One does not realize what the truth is: that this dependence has driven mankind into catastrophe; and one indulges in the superstition that one only needs a different economic order, one that will drive a different legal and spiritual life out of itself. They only want to change the economic order instead of recognizing that the dependence of spiritual and legal life on the economic form must be abolished.

[ 9 ] In the present moment of world-historical development, it cannot be a question of striving for a different kind of dependence of legal and spiritual life on economic life, but of shaping such an economic life, in which only the production and circulation of goods are properly administered, but in which the position of man in the economic cycle has no effect on his legal position in relation to other men or on the possibility of developing his inherent abilities through education and schooling. In the past historical epoch, legal life and spiritual life were a "superstructure" of economic life. In the future, they should be independent members of the social organism alongside the economic cycle. The measures to be taken within the latter should result from economic experience and from the connection of people with the individual economic areas. Associations should be formed from the professions, from the intertwined interests of producers and consumers, which should culminate in a central economic administration. The same people who belong to this economic organization also form an independent legal community with regard to administration and representation, in which everything is regulated that falls within the sphere of judgment of every person who has come of age. Everything that makes every human being equal to every other human being is organized on a democratic basis. Within the administration of this community, for example, labor law (type, measure, time of work) is regulated. This regulation thus falls outside the economic cycle. In economic life, the worker stands as a free contracting party towards those with whom he must produce jointly. Economic expertise must decide on his economic cooperation in a branch of production; with regard to the exploitation of his labor power, he co-decides as a responsible person on the democratic legal ground outside the economic cycle.

[ 10 ] Just as legal life (state administration) is regulated in the autonomous legal sphere of the social organism, which is independent of economic life, so spiritual life (educational and school life) is regulated in complete freedom in the autonomous spiritual sphere of the social community. For as little as a healthy economic life can be merged into one with the legal system of the social organism, in which everything must take place through the judgments of all equal people who have come of age, so little can the administration of spiritual life be based on laws, ordinances, supervision or the like, which result from the judgments of people who have simply come of age. Spiritual life requires self-administration, which can only be shaped from the point of view of human pedagogy. Only in such self-government can the individual abilities inherent in a human community be truly cultivated in the service of social life.

[ 11 ] Whoever is able to impartially examine the conditions of existence of the social organism at the present stage of human development in real life practice can probably come to no other conclusion than that for the health of this organism its threefold division into an independent spiritual, a legal and an economic sub-organism is necessary. The unity of the whole organism is certainly not endangered by this; for this unity is founded in reality by the fact that every person with his interests belongs to all three sub-organisms, and that the central administrations, despite their independence from each other, can bring about the harmonization of their measures.

[ 12 ] The fact that international conditions do not constitute an obstacle, even if only one state initially forms itself into a tripartite social organism, will be discussed in the next essay.