The Rudolf Steiner Archive

26. The Threefold Structure of the Social Organism, Democracy and Socialism

[ 1 ] Among the important questions that are currently undergoing a transformation into completely new forms following the catastrophe of the world war is that of democracy. The fact that democracy must completely permeate the life of nations should be a self-evident realization for all those who have an open mind for what has happened in history. The catastrophe of the world war proved the impossibility of the further development of everything that is opposed to democracy. Everything anti-democratic has led itself to destruction. For those who think in any way of re-establishing such an anti-democratic system, it can only be a matter of their insight being proved by what reality has proved with rivers of blood.

[ 2 ] But the question of how democracy is to be realized currently demands a position that could not have been taken in the same way in past times. Before the social movement had entered the historical stage in which it is today, one could think differently about democracy than one must now. The question is becoming more and more urgent: how can the social movement be incorporated into democratic life?

[ 3 ] At the present time, it can truly not be a matter of living out vague political demands and forming political ideals out of what one-sided life interests of this or that group of people raise as such demands in a quite understandable way. A real understanding of the social organism becomes more necessary with each passing day.

[ 4 ] It was not always only the servants of capitalism in whose souls anxiety settled when they thought of what would happen if the social wave were to flood modern life. Alongside the majority of egoists, however, there were a few honest individuals who saw the form this wave was taking as a threat to true democratism. How can a true development of human individuality be possible if all spiritual life becomes an ideological superstructure of economic life, as it has become in the thinking of those who make the social organization of life dependent on the penetration of all people with a materialistic view of history? For without making the free development of human individualities possible, a socialist organization of life will not bring culture out of its capitalist prison, but will cause it to die without the prospect of revival.

[ 5 ] Whoever judges the demands that lie in the social movement not according to the interests that arise from his previous life situation, but whoever is able to see in them a historical necessity that cannot be escaped, the question arises before him with the greatest seriousness: How can these demands be met without leading to the suppression of individual human talents, on the free development of which all future life development must be based? In a social order based on capitalist forms of economy, democratization was something different than it will have to be in one imbued with social impulses.

[ 6 ] The need will be felt ever more urgently to seek possibilities for the development of human spiritual life that can assert themselves alongside social impulses. We must not allow ourselves to be hypnotized by dogma: Socialism in economic life will, as a superstructure, bring forth a healthy spiritual life by itself. Such a dogma can only be accepted by those who do not understand that an economic life left to its own devices without continuous fertilization by a spiritual life based on free human individuality cannot be maintained in progressive development, but must freeze in itself. What is to intervene from human individuality to fertilize social life must be drawn out of human nature by impulses that cannot arise from economic life. The economy forms the basis of human life; but the human being rises above the economic. The forces of economic life are enclosed within narrower limits than the unfolding of human nature as a whole. As self-evident as this is for the understanding of the individual human being, this self-evidence is not realized in modern life; and more and more a way of thinking is coming to the surface of public opinion and above all of public action that contradicts this self-evidence. People live it in conditions of existence and demand conditions of existence which, if they really wanted to reconsider them, would seem impossible to them. They help themselves by numbing themselves to the contradiction of life, by avoiding becoming aware of it.

[ 7 ] A significant fact of life is revealed by this contradiction. The powers of judgment and feeling which are inherent in the human personality, and which ought to be developed in a healthy cultivation of public spiritual life, do not find their way into the social institutions in which modern man lives. These institutions stifle the free development of the individual human being.

[ 8 ] This oppression asserts itself from two sides. From the side of the state and from that of economic life. And man consciously or unconsciously storms against the oppression. In this onslaught lies the real cause of the social demands of our present time. Everything else that lives in these demands is a wave driven to the surface that conceals what is at work in the subsoil of human nature.

[ 9 ] The onslaught against the oppression of the state expresses itself in the striving for true democracy; the onslaught against the oppression of economic life in the other striving, for the social organization of economic life.

[ 10 ] For what has become the modern state in the last three to four centuries, humanity demands democracy. If this democracy is to become a true fact, then it must be based on those forces of human nature that can truly live out their lives democratically. If states are to become democracies, then they must be institutions in which people can bring to bear what regulates the relationship of every adult human being who has come of age to every other human being. And every adult who has come of age must have an equal share in this regulation. Administration and representation of the people must be held in such a way that they reflect what arises from the consciousness of a person simply because he is a mentally healthy, mature person.

[ 11 ] Can such a representation of the people and such an administration also regulate the spiritual life, which must bring about the full development of individual human dispositions, if this development is not to be stunted and prevented to the detriment of social life? This development is based on the fact that it is cultivated on a ground where action is only taken as it arises from the impulses of spiritual life itself. A specific disposition is only really recognized and properly cultivated by a specifically developed disposition. And it is only correctly directed onto the path into life if the person giving the instruction acts on the basis of the experiences that experience gives him from the circle of life into which he is supposed to point. For the proper cultivation of a socially healthy community life, personalities are necessary who know the individual branches of life through the experience they have gained in them, and who develop within themselves the sense to bring their experience to revelation within the spiritual life. Think of the most socially significant branch of spiritual life: the school at every level. Can the development of the individual human powers and their preparation for life in a particular field not only be carried out successfully by a personality who has individual experience in this field? And can anything socially salutary ever come about if the position of such a personality in its place is determined by something other than the manifestation of its individual abilities? What is lived out in democracy can only relate to that which every responsible person has in common with every responsible person. There is no possibility of finding a regulation of what lies entirely within the sphere of the individual human being through that which can be lived out in democracy. If democracy is to be carried out honestly and truly, everything that belongs to this circle must be excluded from its soil. On democratic soil and within the administrative institutions that can grow out of this soil, no impulse can arise that can give direction to a human activity that should flow freely from the individual talent of man. Democracy must declare itself incapable of such an impulse if it wants to be true democracy. If a true democracy is to be formed out of the existing state, then everything must be taken out of it and handed over to its full self-government over which only the individual development of the particular person can develop the right impulses, and which cannot be regulated by that which lives in every person simply because he has become a responsible human being.

[ 12 ] The social relationships about which every person who has come of age is capable of judgment are the legal relationships from person to person. These are at the same time those living conditions which can only retain their social character by the fact that they arise in democratic institutions as an overall will from the real interaction of the same individual human wills. In everything that is to develop on the basis of individual human abilities, an overall will cannot be expressed in the institutions; rather, these institutions must be those in which the individual wills can fully express themselves. The individual human being must, so to speak, be able to behave like a natural basis. One cannot cultivate an area of land on the basis of needs which are conceived apart from the individual parts of this land; one must learn from the nature of the individual parts what they can produce in particular. Thus, in the spiritual field, individual initiative based on individual abilities must be able to have a social effect; it must not be determined by the content of an overall will. This general will must have an antisocial effect, for it deprives the community of the fruits of individual human abilities.<

[ 13 ] There is no other way to bring the fruits of these individual capacities to fruition than their self-government. Within this self-government alone can there be a state of affairs by which an overall will does not arise which suppresses the fruitfulness of individual human beings for social life, but by which individual human achievements are incorporated into life as a whole for its benefit.

[ 14 ] Within such a self-government, the points of view will emerge from the spiritual life through which the right people can be brought to the right places and through which directly living trust can take the place of law and regulation. The people involved in the education of the people will not be shown any educational goals by such laws and regulations; instead they will become observers of life and seek to glean from it what they have to educate. There will be a tendency to include in the spiritual organization people who have years of experience in some branch of economic or legal life. In this organization they will find the people with whom, in living contact, they will be able to transform their practical experience into something educationally fruitful. On the other hand, people in spiritual administration will feel the impulse to temporarily step out of this administration into practical life in order to utilize what they have achieved in a real way.

[ 15 ] A subdivision of the social organism in such a way that a self-governing spiritual life unfolds within it will not destroy the living unity of this organism, but, on the contrary, establish it all the more. Only the administration will be subdivided; in the life of man the unity will be able to develop. Man will no longer need to close himself off from life and encapsulate himself in a frozen state. It will be possible to pass back and forth from the spiritual to the other members of the social organism. For there will be something far more fruitful in the life that has developed as tradition and public opinion in the spiritual organism than in the rigid system that develops when people separate themselves as a class. In the future, the organization of the social organism should lie in the objective; and this objective should, through its self-government, develop the power that is effective even when it does not tyrannically ensnare people in its nets.

[ 16 ] It should not be doubted that a social economic and legal life can only arise if people can think and feel socially. An unbiased experience of present conditions should show that the spiritual life that has hitherto merged with the constitutional state cannot do this. Those who at present judge from the fullness of life find it difficult to understand, for they come up against the state of mind of people in whom there are no strings that are taut from life experience in the way of thinking and feeling, but rather those to whom state education has given an abstract, lifeless nature. Those people who consider themselves the most practical are the least practical. They have acquired a certain routine in the narrow sphere of life into which they have spun themselves. They call this their practical sense and, from this state of mind, look with pride on everyone as an impractical person who has not crammed himself into this routine. In all the rest of their thinking, feeling and willing, however, a being alien to life and borne by abstract forces of direction prevails. Such a being is brought up by the education anchored in the state, into which life experience cannot flow, but only abstract thinking and feeling, which, without special experience in any field, can be inherent in every person who has come of age through human nature, if they have a ground on which only they are effective. This fact is the reason why the social demands of the present are met with so little understanding from many sides. The very starting-points of social sentiment are not equal to the demands of the social organism. One thinks: many people demand a social reorganization of life. They are being met, some think, and laws and regulations are being created. But social reorganization cannot take place in this way. The social demands of the present are those that cannot find their fulfillment in a temporary upheaval of force. The "social question" has come to the surface of the historical development of mankind, and it will always be there from now on. And it will demand a direction of thought and feeling which will require the full adaptation of the spiritual being to social life as a whole and the continual fertilization of this spiritual being from the impulses of life as a whole. One will not be able to socialize in order to be socialized, one will always have to socialize anew; or also: one will have to maintain social life in a state of socialization.

[ 17 ] The anti-social, indeed often anti-social sentiment of those who currently pose as socialist thinkers has arisen from the tendencies founded in the previous intellectual system, especially in the educational and school system. Spiritual life, which is alien to life itself, has given rise to an inverted view of spiritual life itself. Broad circles today think that the true impulses of human life lie in the economic forms; that spiritual life, too, is merely a kind of "superstructure" resulting from economic life, an ideology that arises from the way of doing business. Almost the entire proletariat, which bears the present-day demands, more or less unconsciously or consciously professes such a view. This proletariat has developed it in an age in which the spiritual being has renounced giving itself direction and goal out of itself, in which the external, social organization of this spiritual being has become a result of state and economic life. This intellectual life has brought itself into a state from which it can only emerge through its self-administration. The proletariat, which has been completely absorbed into economic life through technology and the capital system, now believes that a mere reorganization of economic life will also produce the necessary new legal and spiritual forms "by itself". This proletariat has had to learn that modern intellectual life has become an appendage of state and economic life, and has formed the opinion: Every intellectual life is such an appendage. If it were to see this view realized in a social organism, it would have to realize to its bitterest disappointment that a spiritual life which has emerged from a social organization resting only on an economic basis would have led to even more deplorable conditions than those we have at present. The proletariat will have to come to the realization that the present situation cannot be improved by the mere reorganization of economic life, but by the detachment of the spiritual and legal systems from economic life in the tripartite healthy social organism. Only then will the proletarian movement stand on the right ground, when it will no longer say: The newer economic life has produced a spiritual and legal life that has an anti-social effect; we must bring about a different economic life, which will then also produce a different spiritual and legal system; but when it will say: The newer cultural life has led to an economic system that can only be transformed if the new one detaches the legal and intellectual life from itself and hands it over to its own administration, in order to achieve its own self-administration in this way. For this newer cultural life has led to the dependence of everything non-economic on the economic: recovery lies in the abolition of this dependence, not in an even greater dependence. The inclusion of the modern proletariat in mere economic life has led to the belief that recovery lies solely in a transformation of economic life. The day that will free the proletariat from this superstition, that will make its instincts realize that the spiritual and legal life must not be an ideology born of economics, but that the disastrous thing about the modern age lies precisely in the fact that such an ideology has been born: that day will bring the dawn for which so many people are waiting.

[ 18 ] An economic life in which the state does not participate will be able to emerge from the uninfluenced economic experiences on the one hand and from the particular economic foundations on which the economic life of individuals and groups of individuals rests. Economic experience cannot live itself out on the ground on which is to be revealed what lies in every person who has come of age, but only on the ground of the economic body which forms itself out of itself. And the validity which a man has by virtue of his being in a particular branch of economic life cannot express itself in the structure of state life, in which is to be realized what is equally valid for all men, but only in the effect which emanates from this man on other branches of economic life. The people who belong to one branch of the economy will have to unite within themselves; they will have to form associations with people from other branches of the economy. Consumption and production interests will be able to organize themselves in the lively traffic of such associations and cooperatives. Only economic impulses will be able to find their realization in the economic cycle.

[ 19 ] The manual laborer will stand opposite the intellectual laborer in such a way that only economic questions will come into consideration between them, because the legal relationship will find its regulation on the separate legal ground. The manual laborer will be able to be a free partner to the intellectual manager of his enterprise, because only the division of the jointly produced goods resulting from the economic basis can be considered and not an economic compulsion caused by the economically better position of the labor manager. The associative organization of the economic body will bring the manual worker into contexts of life which will bring quite different aspects into his contractual relationship with the intellectual work leader than his present position, which makes him not a participant in the results of production but a fighter against the interests of his employer. The manual laborer will gain the same interest, not the opposite, in his branch of production as his spiritual leader from the knowledge he gains from his economic situation as a consumer. This cannot arise in an economic life whose impulse is the profitability of capital ownership, but only in one that can regulate the values of the products from the balancing relations of consumption and production of the social community as a whole. Such a social community is only possible, however, if the special professional, consumer and production interests find their expression in associations which emerge from the individual branches of economic life itself and which communicate with each other in the overall organization of the economic body. The individual associations will arise from the special interests of the individual branches of the economy; the social impulses of the formation of the value of goods will be able to lie in the union of these associations and in the central administrative body, which will be formed out of the economic interests. One cannot socialize an individual enterprise, for socialization can only lie in the fact that the formation of the value of goods with which an individual enterprise stands within the overall economic life does not have an anti-social effect. True socialization in this direction completely deprives the capital system of that basis which makes it harmful as private property. (I have described the special structure of the capital system in the healthy tripartite organism in my book The Key Points of the Social Question). It should be clear that capital cannot be "abolished" insofar as it consists in nothing other than the means of production working for the social community. It is not capital that is harmful, but its management out of private property relations, if these private property relations can make the social structure of the economic body dependent on themselves. If this structure emerges from the economic association system in the manner described, then capital is deprived of any possibility of having an anti-social effect. Such a social structure will always prevent the ownership of capital from detaching itself from the management of the means of production and from becoming the impulse of aspiration of those who do not want to shape their lives by participating in the economic process, but without participating in it. It may be objected, however, that nothing would come of it for those who participate in the economic process if the acquisitions of those who do not work were "divided up". This is captivating because it is correct, and yet it conceals the truth, because its correctness has no significance for the organization of the social organism. For the harmfulness of the non-working rent-holders is not due to the fact that they deprive the working people of a relatively small amount, but to the fact that, through the possibility of earning an unemployed income, they give the whole economic body a character which has an anti-social effect. That whole economic body is something different in which unemployed income is impossible than the other in which such an income can be produced, just as a human organism is something different in which an ulcer cannot form at any point than one in which the unhealthy discharges itself in an ulcer formation at one point.

[ 20 ] A healthy social organism, however, necessitates institutions from which the present economic prejudices still shy away, due to the social association formations characterized. In a healthy social organism, a sum of means of production will have exhausted what it is allowed to cost when it is ready for operation. It will then be able to be managed by the producer only as long as he can be there with his individual abilities. Then it will have to be transferred to someone else, not by purchase or inheritance, but by transfer without purchase to the person who again has the individual skills to manage it. It will have no purchase value, and consequently no value in the hands of a non-working heir. Capital with independent economic power will work in the production of the means of production; it will dissolve the moment the production of the means of production is completed. The present capital, however, consists essentially precisely in "produced means of production".

[ 21 ] The socially correct value of a good (a commodity) can only arise in comparison with other goods. It must be equal to the value of all other goods which the producer needs to satisfy his wants up to the time when he has produced an equal good again, taking into account those wants which must be satisfied by him in other people. (The latter needs include, for example, those of his children, the part he has to play in maintaining people who are unable to work, etc.) The fact that such a value of goods comes about must be mediated by the institutions of a healthy economic life. These institutions can only be created by a network of corporations which regulate production on the basis of the experience of consumption. There can, of course, be no question of judging the justification of needs, but only of a mediation between consumption and production supported by economic experience and real economic conditions. Emerging needs that cannot be borne by the whole of an economic circle will not be able to find an equivalent value in the goods produced by those who have the needs.

[ 22 ] Only such an economic cycle will be able to find its regulation in this way, which arises from the mutually supporting measures of the individual economic corporations based on factual knowledge and factual documents. Any interference by a democracy would have to have a suppressive effect on the realization of factual knowledge. In the same way, however, the interests of the economy must have a destructive effect on everything that is to emerge from the influence of democracy.

[ 23 ] In the threefold division of the social organism into an independent spiritual element, an equally independent legal element and an economic element lies the health of this organism. The division will not be such that it separates people into three estates, but such that a person with his total human interests participates in all three members. The separation will only be such that, for example, in the legal organism or in the spiritual organism nothing will be decided that arises from the interests of the economic circle. In the unified state, in which the three members of life flow into one another, an economic group will be able to make its interests into law, into public law. In the tripartite organism, this will not be possible because economic interests can only express themselves in the economic cycle and there is no possibility of allowing them to flow over into the law.

[ 24 ] The amalgamation of the three members in a single body, consisting of the delegates of the three central administrations and central representations, will offer the greatest conceivable guarantee that one area will not be violated by the other. For these central administrations and central representations will have to reckon with what arises in their areas as a result of factual measures. They will not be in a position, for example, to allow legal or intellectual life to be unjustifiably influenced by economic life, for they would thereby put themselves in conflict with what takes place appropriately in each individual area independently of the other. If it is necessary for one area to influence the other, the factual basis for this cannot lie in the interests of one group, but only in those of the whole area.

[ 25 ] No one should believe that any social institution can bring about what he may imagine to be an "ideal state". What can be achieved is the viable healthy social organism. What goes beyond that must be found by people through something other than social organization. The task of this organization cannot be to establish "happiness", but to find the living conditions of a healthy social organism. In such an organism, however, people must be able to seek what they find necessary for a humane existence. Even the natural healthy organism does not of itself create what the soul needs to develop in terms of inner culture; a sick natural organism prevents it from doing so. And a healthy social organism can only create the conditions for what people want to develop in it through their individual abilities and needs.

[ 26 ] Whoever heretizes as utopia or ideology what emerges as a guideline for social organization, and wants to leave everything to development, which by itself brings about what can be, is like a person who becomes unwell because he is sitting in a room with dull air, and who does not want to open a window, but waits until the dull air "develops by itself" into a fresh one.

[ 27 ] Those who really want democracy cannot think of its true justification other than by assigning to self-government what this justification makes impossible by merging it with the rule of law: intellectual life and the economic cycle.