The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. What a "new Spirit" Demands

[ 1 ] In the unfruitful discussions that are currently being held in many circles about works councils, one can clearly see how little nodi understanding there is for the demands that have arisen for humanity from its historical development for the present and the near future. Most of those who take part in such discussions have no idea that democracy and social organization of life are two drives inherent in the human nature of modern times. Both drives will continue to have a disturbing and destructive effect on public life until institutions are created in which they can unfold, but the social drive, which will have to live in the economic cycle, cannot, by its very nature, manifest itself democratically. What matters to it is that in economic production people take account of the legitimate needs of their fellow men. A regulation of the economic cycle demanded by this drive must be based on what the economic agents do for one another. This action, however, must be based on contracts that grow out of the economic positions of the people doing business. Two things are necessary for the conclusion of these contracts if they are to have a social effect. Firstly, they must be able to arise from the free initiative of individuals based on insight; secondly, these individuals must live in an economic body in which it is possible, by means of such contracts, to provide the performance of the individual to the whole in the best conceivable way. The first requirement can only be fulfilled if there is no political administrative influence between the economic man and his relationship to the sources and interests of economic life. The second requirement is met if contracts are not concluded according to the demands of the unregulated market, but according to the conditions that arise when branches of industry associate with each other and with consumer cooperatives in accordance with their needs, so that the circulation of goods takes place in accordance with these associations. Through the existence of these associations, the path is marked out for the economic persons which they should take in each individual case to the contractual regulation of their activity.

[ 2 ] There is no parliamentarization for economic life organized in this way. There is only the competent and professional standing in a branch of business and the connection of one's own position with others in the most socially expedient way. What happens within such an economic body is not regulated by "votes", but by the language of needs, which by its own nature responds to what is done by the most knowledgeable and skilled person and is directed to the right place of its consumption through federative association.

[ 3 ] But just as in the natural organism one organ system would have to dissolve through its own activity if it were not regulated by another, so also one member of the social organism must be regulated by others. What is done in the economic body by economic men would, in the course of time, have to lead to the damages corresponding to its nature, if the development of such damages were not counteracted by the political-legal organization - which must rest on a democratic basis just as surely as economic life cannot. In a democratic constitutional state, parliamentarization is justified. What arises there has a balancing effect in the economic activity of people on the tendency of economic life to lead to harm. If someone wanted to harness economic life itself to the administration of the legal structure, he would deprive it of its efficiency and flexibility. The law must be received by the economic people from a place outside economic life and only applied in economic life.

[ 4 ] The discussion about such things should be held where the establishment of works councils is discussed. Instead, there is an argument based on points of view that correspond to the old principle of shaping political legislation according to the interests of economic groups. The fact that other groups currently want to proceed according to this principle than in the past does not change the fact that a new spirit is still lacking today where it is already urgently needed.

[ 5 ] The circumstances today are such that a recovery of public life can only occur when a sufficiently large number of people see through the true social, political-legal and spiritual demands of the present. By people who have the good will and the strength to convey the necessary understanding in this field to others. But things are also such that the remaining obstacles to this recovery will disappear as the insight described here spreads. For it is only a political-social superstition that these obstacles are of an objective nature lying outside of human insight. This is only claimed by those who never understand the real relationship between idea and practice. Such people say: the idealists have good or well-meant ideas; but, "as things are, these ideas cannot be realized". No, it is not like that, but rather that the only obstacle to the realization of certain ideas in the present are those people who have the belief just described and the power to have an inhibiting effect in the sense of this belief. And such power is also possessed by those with whom the masses are united from earlier party groupings as their "leaders", and whom they obediently follow. Therefore, a basic condition for recovery is the dissolution of these party groupings and the raising of understanding for the formation of ideas that grow out of practical insight itself without any connection to former party and group opinions. It is a burning question of the present that ways and means be found to replace party opinions with these independent formations of ideas, which can provide crystallization nuclei for the unification of people from all sides of the party. By such people who are able to recognize that the existing parties have outlived their usefulness and that the social conditions of the present are full proof of this outlivedness.

[ 6 ] It is understandable that this realization does not come easily to those who need it. Not for the masses, because their members do not have the time and leisure and often not the preliminary training that is required. Not the leaders, because their prejudices and their power are rooted in what they have represented up to now. The fact that both exist makes it all the more urgent to seek the true progress of humanity beyond the party traditions of the present, not within them. Today it is not enough merely to know what institutions should replace the present ones; it is necessary to work to bring the new formations of ideas in such a direction that they bring about the dissolution of the old party system as quickly as possible and lead people to strive for new goals. Those who do not have the courage to do so can contribute nothing to the recovery of social life; and those who have the superstition that such aspirations are a utopia are building on ground that is sinking in.