The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Social Spirit and Socialist Superstition

[ 1 ] When the causes of the modern social movement are discussed, it is pointed out, among other things, that neither the owner of the means of production nor the worker on the same is in a position to impart to the product anything that derives from a direct personal interest in it. The owner of the means of production has the products manufactured because they bring him profit; the worker because he has to earn his living. Neither the one nor the other derives satisfaction from the manufactured product as such. In fact, an essential part of the social question is met by pointing in this way to the lack of a personal relationship between the producers and their products in the modern economic order. But one must also be aware that this lack is the necessary consequence of the newer technology and the mechanization of the way of working connected with it. It cannot be eliminated within economic life itself. What is produced in a large company with an extensive division of labor cannot be as close to the manufacturer as the medieval craftsman was to his product. We will have to accept the fact that for a large part of human labor the kind of interest that used to exist is gone. But we should also realize that man cannot work without interest. If life forces him to do so, he feels that his existence is dull and unsatisfactory.

[ 2 ] Whoever wants to be honest with the social movement must think of finding another interest for the one that has disappeared. But one will not be able to do so if one wants to make the economic process the sole content of the social organism and the legal order and intellectual life a kind of appendix to it. In a Marxist-regulated large-scale economic cooperative with legal order and spiritual life as an "ideological superstructure", the complete lack of interest in all work would have to turn human life into torture. Those who want to bring about such a large-scale cooperative do not consider that, although some enthusiasm can be aroused by the attraction of striving for such a goal, as soon as it is realized this attraction ceases and being locked into an impersonal social mechanism would have to pump out of people everything that reveals itself in the will to live. That such a goal can inspire broad masses of people is only a result of the fact that with the waning of interest in the products of labor, the growth of another interest has not taken hold. - The awakening of such an interest should be the task of those who, through their inherited share of intellectual education, are still in a position to think of social goods beyond the mere economic needs of man. They would have to come to the realization that two circles of interest must take the place of the old one - in work. In a social order based on the division of labor, work, even if it does not satisfy for its own sake, can do so by being performed for the sake of the interest one has in those for whom one performs it. This interest, however, must be developed in a living community. A legal system in which the individual stands as an equal among equals awakens interest in his fellow human beings. In such an order, one works for others because one establishes one's own relationship to them in a living way. In the economic order, one is only aware of what others demand of one; in the living legal order, one becomes valuable to another from sources of human nature that are not limited to the fact that people need each other in order to create the corresponding goods for their needs.

[ 3 ] In addition to this circle of interests, which arises from a legal system that is independent of economic life, there must be another. A human existence whose spiritual content is to result from the economic order cannot satisfy a lack of interest in the products of labor even if the interest of one person in another is cultivated by the legal order. For in the end the realization would have to dawn that people do business for each other merely for the sake of doing business. Economic activity acquires its meaning only when it shows itself to be of service to a content of human life which lies beyond economic activity, and which reveals itself quite independently of economic activity. Work, which is not satisfying for its own sake, becomes valuable when it is performed in a life that can be understood from a higher spiritual point of view in such a way that man strives towards goals to which economic life is only the means. Such a spiritual point of view can only be gained from an independent spiritual life of the social organism. A spiritual life, which is the "superstructure" of the economic order, appears only as the means of economic life.

[ 4 ] The complexity of the modern economy with its mechanization of human labour makes the free, independent spiritual life necessary as a counterbalance. Earlier epochs of human life tolerated the fusion of economic interests with spiritual drives because the economy had not yet succumbed to mechanization. If man is not to perish in this mechanization, his soul must be able to rise free to the contexts into which he feels himself transported from a free spiritual life at all times while he is inside the mechanical order of work.

[ 5 ] Short-sighted is he who opposes the reference to the free spiritual life and the independent legal order demanded by human equality with the opinion that these two cannot overcome the above all oppressive economic inequality. For the economic order of modern times has led to this inequality by the fact that it has not yet had the legal order and the cultivation of the mind, on which it depends, at its side. Marxist thought believes that each economic form of production prepares by itself the next as the higher, and that, when this preparatory process is completed, this higher must take the place of the lower through "development". In truth, the newer form of production has not developed out of the old economy, but out of the legal forms and the mental conceptions of an old age. These themselves, however, while they have renewed the economic form, are obsolete and need rejuvenation. Of all superstitions, the worst is that which claims that law and spirit can be conjured out of the economic form of production. For it darkens not merely the human imagination, but life itself. It prevents the spirit from turning to its source, because it wants to discover a pseudo-source for it in the unspiritual. But man is all too easily deceived when he is told that the spirit arises of its own accord from the unspiritual; for through this deception he believes himself freed from the effort which he must acknowledge as necessary when he realizes that the spirit can only be worked out through the spirit.