The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Marxism and Tripartism

[ 1 ] It is impossible to get out of the social turmoil in which Europe finds itself if certain social demands that are raised remain unclear for a long time, as they are currently distorted. One such demand is widely held to be that which Friedrich Engels expressed in his book "The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science" with the words: "The administration of things and the management of production processes take the place of the government of persons." Numerous leaders of the proletariat, and with them the proletarian masses themselves, profess the view from which this statement originated. It is correct from a certain point of view. The human contexts from which modern states have developed have formed administrations which not only regulate things and production processes, but also govern the people employed in the branches of production and with the things. The administration of things and branches of production comprises economic life. In modern times this has assumed forms which make it necessary that its administration can no longer be concerned with the government of men. Marx and Engels recognized this. They turned their attention to how capital and human labor are active in the economic cycle. They felt that the life of modern mankind was striving to transcend the mode which this activity had assumed. For this mode is such that capital has become the basis of power over human labor. It serves not only for the administration of things and the management of production processes; it provides the guideline for the government of men. From this Marx and Engels concluded that the government over people must be removed from the economic cycle. They were right. For modern life does not permit people to be regarded merely as appendages of things and production processes and to be administered along with them.

[ 2 ] But Marx and Engels believed that the matter was simply settled by throwing out of the economic process the governing of men and allowing the new purified economic administration developing out of the state to continue. They did not see that there was something in government that regulates the relations of men to each other, which cannot remain unregulated, nor can they regulate themselves if they are no longer regulated in the old way by the demands of economic life. Nor did they see that in capital lay the source from which the forces flowed for the administration of things and the management of branches of production. The human spirit directs economic life in a roundabout way through capital. By managing things and directing branches of production, one does not yet cultivate the human spirit, which emerges from ever new creation of existence and which must also constantly supply economic life with new forces if it is not first to solidify and then completely degenerate.

[ 3 ] What Marx and Engels saw is correct: that the administration of the economic cycle must not contain anything that signifies a government over people, and that capital, which serves this cycle, must not be given power over the human spirit that shows it the way. But it has become fatal that they believed that both, the relations of men to each other regulated by government and the guidance of economic life by the human spirit, would then be able to exist by themselves when it no longer emanates from economic administration.

[ 4 ] The purification of economic life, that is, its limitation to the administration of things and the management of production processes, is only possible if something exists alongside economic life that takes the place of the old governing and something else that makes the human spirit the real leader of the economic cycle. The idea of the tripartite social organism meets this requirement. The administration of spiritual life, left to itself, will supply economic life with the human spiritual forces that can progressively fertilize it anew, if it merely administers things and regulates branches of production on its own ground. And the legal element of the social organism, separated from the spiritual and economic sphere, will regulate the relations of men in such a way as can be regulated democratically by man who has come of age towards man who has come of age, without the power which one man may have over another through stronger individual powers or through economic foundations having any part in this regulation.

[ 5 ] Marx and Engels' point of view was correct with regard to the demand for a reorganization of economic life, but one-sided. They did not see that economic life can only become free if it is accompanied by a free legal life and a free cultivation of the mind. What forms the economic life of the future must take can only be seen by those who realize that the economic-capitalist orientation must pass over into the directly spiritual, the regulation of human relations resulting from economic power into the directly human. The demand for an economic life in which only things are managed and production processes are directed can never be fulfilled if it is raised for itself alone. Whoever nevertheless raises it wants to create an economic life that throws out of itself what it has hitherto carried within itself as a necessity of existence, and which should nevertheless exist.

[ 6 ] From other foundations of life, but from thorough experience, Goethe coined two sentences that are fully valid for many social demands of our time. One is: "An inadequate truth continues for a time; but instead of complete enlightenment, a dazzling falsehood suddenly enters; that is enough for the world, and so centuries are beguiled." The other is: "General notions and great conceit are always on the way to causing terrible misfortune." It is true that Marxism, which has not been taught by the conditions of our times, is an "inadequate truth" which, despite its inadequacy, is effective in the proletarian world view; but after the catastrophe of the world war it becomes a "blinding falsehood" in the face of the true demands of the times, which must be prevented from "beguiling centuries". Those who recognize the misfortune into which the proletariat is running through its "inadequate truth" will tend towards this striving for prevention. This "inadequate truth" has really become "general concepts" whose bearers, out of a truly not small conceit, reject everything as utopia that endeavors to replace their utopian generalities with realities of life.