The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Socialist Obstacles to Development

[ 1 ] Ideas that reckon with the reality from which today's agitated human demands have arisen, and that are in harmony with the conditions under which people can live together spiritually, politically and economically, are currently being drowned out by those that are alien to life in both directions. The people who, out of their present living conditions, long for other conditions, or who have already been actually torn out of these conditions by world events: up to now they have been so far removed from the forces that have driven these conditions to the historical surface that they completely lack insight into the mode of action and significance of these forces. The proletarian masses, out of a dull consciousness, demand a change in the living conditions in which they see themselves placed and in which they see an effect of the newer economic life administered by capitalist forces. But they have not been initiated into the workings of these forces by the nature of their previous participation in this economic life. Therefore they cannot arrive at fruitful ideas about the sense in which this mode of operation must undergo a transformation. And the intellectual leaders and agitators of the proletarian masses are blinded by theoretical-utopian ideas, which originate from a social science that is still oriented towards economic views that are in urgent need of transformation. These agitators do not even have an inkling of the fact that they have no other ideas about politics, economics and intellectual life than the "bourgeois thinkers" they are fighting against, and that they are basically striving for nothing other than to have the previous ideas realized not by the people who have realized them up to now, but by others. But nothing truly new arises from the fact that the old is done by other people in a slightly different way than before.

[ 2 ] One of the "old ideas" is to want to dominate economic life with political and legal means of power. This is an "old idea" because it has brought a large part of humanity into a situation whose unsustainability has indeed been proven by the catastrophe of the world war. The new idea with which this old one must be replaced is: the liberation of economic administration from any political-legal interference with power; is: the management of the economy according to guidelines that arise only from the sources of the economy and from its interests.

[ 3 ] It is impossible to imagine the organization of economic life without the economic people managing this life in political-legal relationships. This is the objection raised by people who pretend to believe that anyone who talks about the threefold organization of the social organism has no insight into such a self-evident fact. In truth, however, the person who raises this objection does not want to gain an insight into the significant consequences it must have for the transformation of economic life if the political-legal views and institutions prevailing in it are not regulated within the economy itself according to its interests, but by a management outside it, which can only be determined by points of view that lie within the sphere of judgment of every person who has come of age. What is the reason that even many socialist thinkers do not want to gain such an insight? It lies in the fact that, through their participation in political life, they have formed ideas about the way in which political and legal affairs are conducted, but not about the nature of the forces inherent in economic life. Therefore, they can imagine an economy whose management proceeds according to the principles of political and legal administration, but not one that is organized according to its own conditions and needs, and into which the legal statutes originating elsewhere have an effect. Most of the leaders and agitators of the proletariat are in a situation characterized by this. If its masses are without sufficient insight into the possible form of transformation of economic life as a result of the facts mentioned above, its leaders are no better off. They alienate themselves from such an insight by not allowing their whole thinking to leave the political sphere.

[ 4 ] One consequence of this confinement of thinking to the one-sidedly political is the way in which various sides want to bring the establishment of works councils into being. Striving for such an institution in the present must either take place in the spirit of the "new idea" described above, or all work devoted to this endeavor will be wasted. The "new idea", however, demands that a first institution be created in the works council, which the "state" is not concerned with and which can be formed out of the purely economic thinking of the people involved in economic life. And it is left to the body thus created to provide the impetus for the associations through whose social cooperation in the economy should henceforth take place what was previously created by the egoistic competition of individuals. It is the free social organization of the individual branches of production and consumption that is important, not the administration of central offices from a political administrative point of view. It is the economic initiative of the working people that is promoted by such organization, not the paternalism of offices and higher offices. Whether an administration based on political considerations is imposed on economic life by a state law, or whether a "council system" is devised for the economy by people who think only according to political considerations and can organize only according to such considerations: it amounts to the same thing. There may even be people among the latter who theoretically demand a certain independence of economic life; in practice, their demands can only result in an economic system that is tied into a political system, because it is planned on the basis of political thinking. One will only think about such an institution in a way that corresponds to the present living conditions of mankind if one has a precise idea of how the state-legal and spiritual parts of the social organism are to develop properly alongside the economic system. For one will only be able to form a picture of independent economic life if one sees in the overall shape of the social organism that which should not be in its proper place in the economic cycle. If one does not see the right places for the development of spiritual and legal life, one will always be tempted to merge both in some way with economic life.