The Rudolf Steiner Archive

24. The Path of the “Tripartite Social Organism”

Flyer, Spring 1919

[ 1 ] The call for a reorganization of social coexistence and cooperation between people is going around the world. The economic, legal-political and spiritual conditions of life that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the horror-filled world catastrophe of that time. An economic system that was unsocial, a legal-political life that was incapable of overcoming the class antagonisms perceived as unjust by the consciousness of the great majority of contemporary humanity, a spiritual culture that, despite its "progress", has proved incapable of being a leader out of an unsocial economic life and a state based on class antagonisms: they must make way for a new one.

[ 2 ] Whether one person today understands socialization to mean this, another that: all those who do not want to live through our time spiritually blind could agree that socialization must call upon all those who have hitherto seen these conditions imposed on them by the power of classes superior to them spiritually, legally or economically to shape their own social conditions. Class struggles can only disappear with the cessation of the intellectual, legal and economic class antagonisms themselves.

[ 3 ] The fact that this is the call of the times is shown by the movement of the proletariat, but also by the correctly understood development of history itself.

[ 4 ] The goal is felt.

[ 5 ] The impulse wants to show the way towards the tripartite social organism.

[ 6 ] This impulse calls for the complete independence of intellectual life, including the educational and school system. It sees the causes of the intellectual inability of our time in the absorption of intellectual culture by the state. He demands the complete self-administration of this culture from a purely objective and general human point of view. It will only be properly educated when no one has any say in the question of how to educate all people to become true people capable of living, except those who can only judge from the depths of human nature itself.

[ 7 ] This impulse demands the restriction of state life to all those living conditions for which all people are equal before one another. On this ground, in a strictly democratic way, with the transformation of the present private capitalist property and forced labor relations, above all such a general human right is to be achieved that confronts the worker as a completely free personality with the labor leader (who is only a spiritual worker).

[ 8 ] This impulse demands an economic life in which the worker confronts the labor manager in such a way that a free social relationship can be established between the two by contract, so that the wage relationship ceases completely. This requires the complete socialization of economic life. Only from the proper participation of all people in appropriate cooperatives, which arise from the professions on the one hand, and from the needs of consumers and producers on the other, can a regulation of the value of goods emerge that ensures a decent existence for all people. Such a regulation of the value of goods can only realize the principle: people must not produce in order to profit, but only in order to consume. It is only possible if, after the detachment of intellectual and state life in the economy, we are dealing with nothing other than the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Any interest in the unobjective, mere utilization of capital, any wage system based on competing economic interests and acting out of such interests, hinders a correct reciprocal pricing of goods and therefore a just distribution of goods.

[ 9 ] In all details of social life, the impulse wants to follow the tripartite social organism:

[ 10 ] 1. development of man in all his faculties through independent spiritual life;

[ 11 ] 2. the establishment of human rights through the exclusion of all non-general human interests from the legal sphere;

[ 12 ] 3. equitable distribution of goods in a correct relation of value of goods (commodities) by reorganizing the present capital and wage system;

[ 13 ] The German people can only hope to be integrated into the international world conditions if it removes the inhibitions that have arisen in its economic, legal and intellectual life as a result of their inorganic fusion in the previous state system through the organic threefolding of the social organism. In this way it can be brought about that through the free development of each of the three members and the higher unity arising from it, the highest economic productivity compatible with the healthy body and soul of man, the true satisfaction of a genuine folkish sense of justice and the all-round revelation of the forces inherent in the German spirit become possible.