The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

The true nature of the social question, understood from the necessities of life of contemporary humanity on the basis of spiritual scientific research

[ 1 ] What is included in the term “social question” today is something that has been occupying thinking humanity intensively for decades, because this social question today is not only urgent for the development of humanity, but has become burning. In particular, however, it can be said that the terrible catastrophe of war that has befallen humanity in recent years has also cast its dark shadow on what is called the social question and the related human movement of the immediate present.

[ 2 ] Since I must place the social puzzle within the entire historical movement of modern times, I will have to talk about various things related to the cause and course of the terrible catastrophe of war in the next few lectures. In these introductory remarks, I would just like to point out how, even at the outset of the war, the social question was evident in the emotions of fear that were clearly perceptible in those who stood at the starting point of this war. Certainly, much would have been different in 1914 if those who had to make important decisions here and there had not been under the fear: What will happen if the social movement becomes more and more influential? Much of what has developed in this so-called war has developed under fear on the one hand and under complete misunderstanding of the social question on the part of some leading personalities on the other. Some things would have turned out differently if this fear and misunderstanding had not existed. And again, in the course of the war, we see how personalities active within the social movement are giving rise to hopes in themselves and others that the possibility might arise of achieving this or that reconciliation of the disharmonies that have entered human life in such a terrible way. And now that these tragic events have entered a kind of crisis, we see how, especially in the defeated countries, the result is a pressing need to take a stand on social issues, to intervene in what is entering contemporary history as social demands.

[ 3 ] From all this alone, anyone who thinks about the present day, anyone who has even the slightest inclination to familiarize themselves with the habits of contemporary life, could see how something is emerging in the social question right now that all members of human society will have to deal with for a long, very long time. And precisely at this moment, when, as I said, life in the defeated countries simply demands attempts to solve the social question, something like tragedy now hangs over a large part of civilized humanity.

[ 4 ] If one surveys the intellectual achievements, literature, and everything similar that has emerged over many decades in the debates, discussions, and efforts relating to the social question, it is an immeasurable amount of human work and human thought. But never before have social problems been faced so vividly as today. Today, life itself reveals what is emerging as a social demand. It seems that despite all the efforts, the most intense thinking, and the best intentions that have prevailed in recent decades, the abilities that have developed have been thoroughly insufficient to cope with the social question as it is presented in its true form to the human soul by life today. This hangs like something tremendously tragic over the aspirations of contemporary humanity. Something for which we have been preparing for so long is affecting precisely those whom we would like to believe would be decisive, and who appear to be completely unprepared.

[ 5 ] Anyone who has not dealt with the social question from the point of view of theoretical science, from mere concepts, or from one-sided party views in recent decades, has been able to find that the most powerful contradictions of life have always come to light in this very area. And perhaps the following is one of the most remarkable contradictions that have come to light in the field of social life. Much has been discussed, and much has been written by people who were involved in the modern social movement through their own lives. Everywhere, especially when one was perhaps in the midst of the discussion, in the midst of the desires of the modern working class itself, everywhere one had the feeling: Yes, many things are being said, many questions are being discussed, many forces of life are being discussed. Attempts are being made to give direction to this or that impulse. But in what one might call social will, there is something quite different from what is being expressed. Hardly any other phenomenon in life gave one such a clear feeling that the more or less subconscious, the unspoken, plays a greater role than what has been translated into seemingly clear concepts and sober discussions. This is the point where one can find the reason not to despair in one's attempts to approach social puzzles from a particular point of view.

[ 6 ] Here in Zurich, and in other cities in Switzerland, I have often had the opportunity to speak about questions of spiritual science. From the standpoint of this spiritual scientific research, I have also sought to approach social enigmas for decades. Listening to some people today who consider themselves practitioners, one could certainly despair of being able to achieve anything fruitful for the relevant questions from the standpoint of mere spiritual research. But it is precisely the contradictions I have pointed out in the efforts within social life that dispel this despair. For one sees how important figures within the social movement smile when the talk turns to wanting to contribute something to the solution of the social question through this or that spiritual endeavor; they dismiss it as ideology, as a gray theory. They believe that nothing can be contributed to the burning social issues of the present from thought, from mere intellectual life. But if one looks more closely, it becomes apparent that the real nerve, the real driving force of the modern, specifically proletarian movement, lies not in what today's proletarians talk about, but precisely in thought.

[ 7 ] The modern proletarian movement is, perhaps more than any other similar movement in the world—if you look at it more closely, this becomes apparent in the most eminent sense—a movement that arose from ideas. I am not saying this merely as an aperçu. If I may be permitted to insert a personal remark, it would be this: for many years I taught proletarian workers in a wide variety of fields at a workers' educational school. I have come to know what lives and strives in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. From there, I have come to know what lives in the unions of various professions and occupational groups. So what I want to say is not merely expressed from the point of view of theoretical considerations, as in an aperçu, but as the result of real life experience.

[ 8 ] Anyone who has gotten to know the modern labor movement where it is supported by workers—which is unfortunately so rarely the case among leading intellectuals—knows what a wonderful phenomenon this is, how a certain way of thinking, a certain current of thought, has captured the souls of these people in the most intense way. That is what makes it so difficult today to take a position on social issues, that there is so little opportunity for understanding, for mutual understanding between the classes. The bourgeois classes today find it so difficult to empathize with the soul of the proletarian, to understand how such a system—whatever one may think of its content—a system that sets the highest standards for human thought, such as the system of thought of Karl Marx, could take root in the, I would say, still undeveloped intelligence, in the elementary intelligence.

[ 9 ] Certainly, Karl Marx's system of thought can be accepted by one person and refuted by another, perhaps with equally good reasons. It could be revised by those who continue to observe social life after the deaths of Marx and his friend Engels. I do not want to talk about the content of this system, the content of this system of thought. That seems to me to be the least significant thing. What seems most significant to me is the fact that within the working class itself, within the proletarian world, a system of thought acts as the most powerful impulse. One can put it this way: never before has a practical movement, a pure movement of life with the most everyday human demands, stood so almost entirely on a purely scientific, intellectual foundation as this modern proletarian movement. In a sense, it is even the first such movement in the world that has placed itself purely on a scientific basis. Nevertheless, if one takes into account everything that the modern proletarian has to say about his own thoughts, desires, and feelings—as I have already indicated—then, upon closer observation of life, this does not seem to be the most important thing.

[ 10 ] Many have now shown in a very astute way how this modern proletarian social movement has emerged from the development of humanity over the last few centuries. It has been astutely demonstrated how, in particular through the development of modern technology and modern machinery, the proletariat in the modern sense was actually created, and how the tremendous economic upheaval of recent times gave rise to the modern social question. I do not wish to repeat here what others have said so astutely about the emergence of the social question. But it seems necessary to me to point out precisely what characterizes the existing contradictions of life in this modern proletarian movement. It is certainly true that without the tremendous upheaval, without the technical revolution of recent times, the modern social movement could not have taken the form in which it has now emerged. However intensely it is asserted that what is evident in social life today has arisen solely from economic impulses, economic forces, class antagonisms, and class struggles, the assertion that only economic antagonisms and economic forces are at play does not stand up to a penetrating observation of the soul of the modern proletarian. It is precisely those who, trained in the humanities, are accustomed to looking at the subtleties and intimacies of spiritual life in all human affairs, which are often unconscious even to the bearers of this spiritual life, who realize that it is not what has developed technically and economically that is essential in shaping today's social question, but that what is significant is the fact that, out of completely different life contexts, certain people have been placed in the operation of the machine in the manner of large-scale capitalist enterprise, and that this placement has awakened something in these people that is not directly related to what is economically around them and in which they are economically entangled. What has been awakened is much more closely related to the deepest habits of modern humanity.

[ 11 ] Those who view history only in the way that modern socialist science now wants to do again, always saying that what follows arises from what precedes it, that effect always leads back to a cause, do not take into account that forces of change, forces of transformation, exist in living reality, which revolutionize the mere connection between cause and effect, I would say: the sober, dry connection between cause and effect, at certain points in this development.

[ 12 ] Let us look at individual human development. We can, if I may say so, follow it successively, for my part from birth to about the age of seven, when the teeth change. There is a powerful revolution in the development of the human organism. We must turn our attention to what happens during this period of life. There is not just a straightforward connection between cause and effect. Then, from the age of seven to around the age of fourteen or fifteen, we can again observe a straightforward development of cause and effect. But then another revolutionary change takes place in the human organism at the onset of sexual maturity. Such transformations are less noticeable later on, but they are still there. How such things play out in individual human lives, which repeatedly disprove the convenient but completely incorrect saying that nature does not make leaps, how such leaps are present in the individual organism, and also in the historical development of humanity. Simply put, within the period that can be roughly limited from the middle of the 14th and 15th centuries to the present day, which will continue, powerful processes of transformation have taken place in human consciousness itself.

[ 13 ] Just as the individual human organism is different when it reaches sexual maturity than it was before in a certain sense, so the human social organism has become something else after the elementary, fundamental impulses, which cannot be found merely within the straight line of cause and effect, have asserted themselves. Anyone who is able to observe historical life more closely knows that before this period, much of what is now entering full consciousness, much of what must be absorbed by full consciousness, took place instinctively in humanity. Therefore, the social movement in this period, for which it is particularly characteristic, takes on the form that is revealed in the often-used word, which is not characterized intensively enough: proletarian class consciousness. With this term “proletarian class consciousness,” one should pay much less attention to the fact that it refers to the necessary struggle in which the proletarian believes himself to be embroiled against the other classes. but rather that something has entered the soul of the proletarian in an age in which social instincts that previously prevailed are being transformed into social consciousness. Class instincts used to exist. Now class consciousness underlies social movement.

[ 14 ] This class consciousness, I would say, is only superficial if one takes the wording seriously: proletarian class consciousness. What is hidden in the term “proletarian class consciousness” is something quite different. And if one wants to briefly characterize an important fact, this fact can perhaps be characterized as follows: Within old occupational contexts, as expressed, for example, in the old crafts or in other professions, there were certain social instincts that shone into the human soul, that powered the human soul. These instincts were able to take effect, forming a certain personal bond between what people think, feel, and want, what they consider to be their honor, their joy, and their aesthetic needs. Work itself gave people something for all these things.

[ 15 ] When man was placed at the machine, when he was placed in the thoroughly impersonal machinery of modern capitalism, where remuneration for human labor is no longer clearly transparent, but where the accumulation of capital by capital is the essential thing, that is, when man was placed on the one hand in the machinery and on the other hand in modern capitalism and its economic order, he was torn out of the world and life contexts that gave him something for his personal life, for his personal joy, for his personal honor, for his personal impulses of will. They were, in a sense, placed at the tip of their personality next to the machine, within the purely objective, impersonal circulation of goods and capital, which basically had nothing to do with them as human beings. But the human soul always wants to function fully in a certain way, always wants to unfold its full scope. And so the worker, who was torn from the other contexts of life described above and placed in a context that is detached from full humanity, was prompted to reflect on his human dignity, to empathize with his human dignity.

[ 16 ] And so, behind what is called proletarian class consciousness in modern historical development, there is in truth a dawning, a shining forth of a full human consciousness drawn from human nature, from the human soul itself. Directing consciousness to the question: What am I as a human being? — to the question: What do I mean as a human being in the world? — those who were placed as proletarians alongside the machine that denied human beings, alongside the capital that denied human beings, had the opportunity to feel this.

[ 17 ] I believe that the whole consideration of the social question is placed on a different footing when one considers that while other people have been driven more or less out of life contexts that did not bring about such radical revolution, out of old instincts and into modern consciousness, the modern proletarian has been radically driven into a conscious conception of himself out of the formerly merely instinctive conception of human dignity and the social position of the individual human being in human society.

[ 18 ] Now, this entry of human consciousness into the soul of the proletarian coincided with all sorts of other things that were happening in human development. It coincided with a certain stage of human thought, with a certain stage of human development. Today, we basically know very little about the historical development of humanity. For this historical development of humanity is always presented in a biased manner, either from one side or the other. Anyone who takes an unbiased look at the development of humanity will often find something quite different from what is commonly said about this development. One could also say that anyone who looks today at what currently enjoys the most authority, namely science, knows that even what is today regarded as absolutely objective has developed, has emerged from something, and clearly bears the hallmarks of the fact that it will in turn take on other forms. If we look at this science with its brilliant methods, its infinitely conscientious research methods, this science that is particularly suited to penetrating nature and its phenomena, one notices that the most striking thing it has to say is that it is, in fact, quite unsuited to grasp the deepest, most intimate human feelings and sensations, that it has very little to say about what human beings actually want to know when they turn their gaze to self-knowledge and self-understanding. Science, too, has in a sense detached itself from human beings. It no longer has a personal character, nor does it speak of what is spiritual, supernatural, and eternal in human beings. When it does speak of these things, it clearly shows that, in the form in which it is fashionable today, it does not have the appropriate methods or the appropriate means of research.

[ 19 ] From this form of science, one can look back to those times when, within human development, life still showed a complete connection between religious understanding of the world, religious feeling, and scientific observation. The two diverged. What had been unified split apart at about the same time that the objective revolution arose, which finds its expression in the machine age and modern capitalism. It was also at that time that this economic upheaval took place, and it was also at that time that religious development, so to speak, wanted to stand still and did not want to participate in what scientific development was bringing about. At that time, when Galileo and Giordano Bruno were condemned, the innermost human feelings and emotions lagged behind, in a certain sense, behind what human beings want to say about nature and the world in general. Human beings lost their belief that they could permeate their knowledge with religious fervor, with religious warmth. Today, people are proud that they can keep science free from everything that they want to attribute only to religion. It was during this period, when science wanted to become more and more free of religion and spirit, that the development of proletarian consciousness took place, that the proletariat seized human consciousness.

[ 20 ] This proletariat pushed toward modern thinking, toward modern intelligence, toward grasping what can be grasped with the powers of the human mind. But it found a science that no longer had the impetus to grasp and fulfill the whole human being. And that gave the soul of the modern proletarian its special form. The spiritual consciousness of humanity, the spiritual consciousness of the leading classes of earlier times, had lost its impetus and had provided humanity with a science that was more or less abstract in relation to human affairs. Thus, the souls of the proletariat of the modern era found themselves confronted with a science that did not inspire confidence that it could provide anything that lived as the truest inner spiritual reality in external sensory and economic activity. Such a science was before the proletarian; such a science he found himself confronted with. He lived himself into it. And so something arose in his soul from purely spiritual grounds of development, which today is taken for granted, as an absolute truth, but which can only be recognized in its true essence if one has an eye for what is going on in the souls of human beings. What touches the deeper observer most is the way in which the modern proletarian talks about the actual spiritual matters, about customs, morality, art, religion, even about science within human development, that he encompasses all these things with the term ideology. That touches one most deeply. It is particularly moving to hear that these modern proletarians believe they can be certain that everything that human beings think, everything they create artistically, everything they feel religiously, is actually only an illusion formed from the human soul, an ideology. But the true reality is economic struggles, economic processes; they represent reality. What they cast into the human soul like a reflection is the spiritual development of humanity, that is ideology. At most, this in turn throws some impulses back into the purely material reality of economic events. But even when it has a reciprocal effect on economic events, it originally grew out of these economic events.

[ 21 ] This attitude toward spiritual life lives on in the modern proletarian question as something much more essential than one might think. And why, why have art, customs, morality, religion, and other aspects of spiritual life become ideology for the modern proletarian? Because they have received from those who were formerly the leading circles a science that no longer wants to maintain a living connection with the real spiritual world, a science that no longer shows any impulse that leads to real spirituality. Such a science can at best lead to abstract concepts as laws of nature. It can also lead to nothing else but a view of the spiritual as ideology. It produces methods that are only suitable, on the one hand, for purely objective, non-human nature, and within human life only for economic events. When the modern proletarian had to adopt this scientific direction, his gaze was directed, as if by a powerful suggestive force, to that which such science can only direct one to, namely economic life. And he began to believe that this economic life was the only reality, whereas the truth is that what the bourgeois classes have handed down to him as science can be directed solely and exclusively toward economic life.

[ 22 ] But this was an enormously decisive factor, for it gave the modern proletarian movement its actual characteristic impulse. One can see how much of the old instinctive thinking was still present in this proletarian movement, even into the last decades of the 19th century. In individual proletarian programs, one still finds points where there is talk of an awareness of human dignity, of the assertion of rights that lead to such true human dignity. Since the 1890s, however, under the influence of the impulses I have just mentioned, we see how the gaze of the proletarian and his learned advocate has been directed, as if by a powerful suggestive force, solely toward economic life. And now he no longer believes that anywhere else, in the spiritual or emotional realm, could lie the impetus for what must necessarily occur in the realm of social movement. He believes only that through the development of economic life, which is devoid of spirit and emotion, the state of affairs that he considers humane can be brought about. Thus, his gaze was directed toward transforming economic life itself in such a way that it would be stripped of all the harm caused by private enterprise, by the egoism of individual employers, and by the inability of individual employers to meet the demands of human dignity on the part of employees. And so the proletarian began to see the only salvation in the transfer of all private ownership of the means of production to communal operation or even communal ownership. This is based on what could only have resulted when one had, so to speak, diverted one's gaze from everything spiritual and intellectual, when the intellectual had become purely ideological, when one had a method and based it on a purely scientific one, which could only be directed toward the purely economic process.

[ 23 ] However, a very strange fact has come to light, which shows just how much contradiction there is in this modern proletarian movement. The modern proletarian believes that the economy, economic life itself, must develop in such a way that he ultimately gains his full human rights. He fights for these full human rights, as he sees them. But within his striving, something arises that can never arise as a consequence of economic life alone. It is a significant and compelling fact that at the very center of the various formulations of the social question, arising from the necessities of life of contemporary humanity, there is something that is believed to arise from economic life itself, but which could never have arisen from economic life alone, but rather lies in the direct line of development that leads from the old slave system through the serfdom of the feudal era to the modern working proletariat. However the circulation of goods, the circulation of money, the nature of capital, property, the nature of land, and so on may have developed, something has emerged within this modern life that is not clearly articulated, not even by the modern proletarian, but which is felt all too clearly as the real driving force behind his social aspirations. This is it: the modern capitalist economic order basically only recognizes commodities within its sphere of circulation. It recognizes the creation of value of these commodities within the economic organism. And within the capitalist organism of modern times, something has become a commodity that the proletarian today feels should not be a commodity. But since his gaze is directed solely at economic life, he can say nothing else scientifically than: it is a commodity. Namely, his own labor power.

[ 24 ] Once we realize that this is one of the fundamental impulses of the entire modern social movement, that in the instincts, in the subconscious feelings of the modern proletarian, there is a revulsion against having to sell his labor power to the employer just as one sells goods on the market, that he feels a revulsion that on the labor market, supply and demand dictate the role of his labor power, just as supply and demand dictate the role of goods on the market, when one realizes that this aversion to labor power as a commodity is the real fundamental impulse of the modern social movement, when one looks at this impartially and sees that even socialist theories do not express this forcefully and radically enough, then we will have found the starting point for what is so urgent, even burning, today with regard to the social movement.

[ 25 ] In ancient times, there were slaves. The whole human being was sold like a commodity. In serfdom, slightly less of the human being was sold, but still almost the whole human being. Capital has become the power that still claims something of the human being as a commodity, namely his labor power. Methods must be sought by which the commodity labor power can be separated from the rest of the circulation of commodities. One will only understand what lies behind this fact if one does not look suggestively at economic life, which must be understood by methods quite different from those used to understand human beings themselves, if one knows that the way in which human labor power can be removed from the character of a commodity must flow not from this economic life, but from a completely different experience in the social organism. One will have to realize—and spiritual scientific research will provide the basis for this—that the belief that one can find ways to integrate the labor power of the individual human being into the social organism by considering the mere economic system, to which the scientific method alone is applicable, is false. Only when we understand that the belief that labor belongs to the economic system is similar to the other belief that we would like to consider what goes on in the human lung and heart system, in the circulatory system, in the same way as what goes on in the nervous system of the head, will we be on the right track. The nervous and sensory systems, as they are centralized in the head, are separate, independent parts of the human organism. The pulmonary and cardiac systems, the circulatory system, are also separate, independent parts. The same is true of the metabolic system. You can read more about this in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul). It is characteristic of the human organism that its systems develop and function properly precisely because they are not centralized, but exist side by side and interact freely. If we cannot even understand the human organism in this comprehensive, penetrating way today, then we certainly cannot understand the social organism with science that has not yet been reformed, but which must be reformed in the sense of spiritual science. Today, it is believed that the human organism is something centralized, whereas it is a tripartite entity.

[ 26 ] And so the social organism is also a tripartite structure. What is today regarded, under powerful suggestion, as the only social organism, the economic system, is only one link. Another link is that from which must spring an understanding of the function of human labor in the whole structure of the social organism. The two systems must stand side by side. And the character of the commodity is only attributed to labor in false modern thinking.

[ 27 ] And this narrow-minded modern thinking has, on the other hand, reduced the third element, which must stand independently within the whole social organism, namely spiritual life, to mere ideology. The theoretical view that the spiritual is merely ideology is the least dangerous. The most important thing is that a person who holds the view that the spiritual is rooted not in a spiritual reality underlying all things, but in mere ideology, cannot possess the spiritual driving force. Such a person has no interest in assigning spiritual life its proper role in the world.

[ 28 ] If we consider what has taken place in the realm of proletarian consciousness, especially in light of the necessities of modern life, we find that it has not been possible to gain insight into the three members of the social organism. This insight has been lost. People strive for nationalization because they believe that a single social organism can take over everything.

[ 29 ] Spiritual science consciousness must open up a broader horizon than is often provided today, even in these burning times, by appointed leaders with regard to social issues. It must be pointed out that it is not only new things that are needed, but that we need to think in new ways, that we need not only a scientific view of social life, which traditional science takes over, but that we need to rebuild a science that brings new ideas, which will first be ideas of reality from the social organism, into the consciousness of humanity.

[ 30 ] This will inevitably lead to the causes of so much unhappiness in recent times being eliminated by human consciousness. Even those who act not theoretically but from life experience, as I believe I have done at this hour, are dismissed and rendered harmless today, mostly by those who consider themselves the real practitioners, saying: Oh, nothing beneficial comes into the world from such theoretical things. These “practitioners of life,” who are the true abstract thinkers, these practitioners of life, whose practice consists of nothing more than limiting their minds to the narrowest boundaries, these practitioners of life are the ones who have often brought about the misfortune and catastrophe of recent times. If they continue to operate in all political parties, the misfortune will not end, but will only expand immeasurably. The real practitioners of life must be given their rightful place in public life, those who speak of the possibilities for development that lie in the social organism, both spatially and in terms of temporal development, as, for example, in the individual human organism. These true practitioners of life, who speak from a deeper reality, are the ones who should really be counted on today. They are the ones who need not despair of their own knowledge. However, to their sorrow and regret, they see how what the practitioners of life, including the socialist practitioners of life, on the other side believe they must do, can lead nowhere else but to the overexploitation of life. Those who want to work as practitioners of life out of the spirit want to strive for viable reality out of reality.

[ 31 ] In what sense attempts at solutions can arise for the questions that I have tried to present today in a true form based on newer habits of life, how attempts at solutions can arise from this on the basis of an examination of the reality of social life and the social structure of humanity, I will take the liberty of discussing here the day after tomorrow.