The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Emil Molt: I have the honor of welcoming you this evening and thanking you for the large attendance, which shows us that our invitation has fallen on fertile ground. The “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has seen fit to invite a number of prominent figures here this evening to put all the questions that the individual members of the audience have on their minds - questions that have arisen, for example, from the lectures - so that these questions can be clarified by Dr. Steiner himself. We believe that the lectures that have been held here in Stuttgart for four to six weeks are not only given to bring something interesting to the listeners, but above all to allow something to mature in the listeners that can be turned into action. We also believe that in order to bring such a movement into being, it is not enough to have only a few people as the driving force; rather, we need collaborators from all walks of life.

Now I ask you to take the floor, and I ask Dr. Steiner to answer any questions that arise.

Dr. Schmucker: I would like to make it clear from the start that I am asking purely as a private person. The resolution that has been formulated from the various lectures calls upon the government to appoint Dr. Steiner to implement the threefold social order that he has been advocating as quickly as possible. Now I must honestly confess that I have not yet had enough time to delve into his book and follow all the lectures. So I apologize if my question reveals that I don't know whether Dr. Steiner has perhaps already commented on the matter that is close to my heart. My question is this: Let us assume that one day the government takes the position that we want to work together with Dr. Steiner. Let us assume that Dr. Steiner comes to some ministry, for example the Ministry of Labor. He is seated in a room that is full of government papers and commentaries. He finds all the codes of law that deal with the solution of the social question, for example the Workers' Protection Act, the Law on Employee Insurance and so on, but above all the many laws that were brought to light by the new government after the great upheaval, and which all point in the same direction, namely, to satisfy as much as possible the social aspirations of the workers and employees. How does Dr. Steiner envision this work – the transition from the current mode of governance to the future one? What should happen to the current popular representations, to the provincial assemblies, to the National Assembly?

Rudolf Steiner: You have approached the question from a certain perspective, from the government perspective. Therefore, I can only answer it from this perspective. And the answer is that, of course, at the first act of government, one would have to foresee a great deal that could happen as a result of this first act of government.

As a first act of government, I would have something to think about – isn't that right, we are of course talking quite openly here – which of course has little to do with the question of what I would do if, for my sake, I were placed in the Ministry of Labor, found law books and the like in there and now had to continue working there. I would just like to formally state in advance that I had absolutely nothing to do with the wording of the resolution you are talking about. I would not be able to accept this interpretation of the resolution, but only be able to characterize my position on this question.

For example, I would first have to state that I do not belong in a labor ministry at all, that I have nothing to do there, for the simple reason that there can be no labor ministry within the unified state community in the near future. That is why I recently said in a lecture that the first act of government should be to take the initiative on various matters, in order to create a basis for further action.

First of all, it must be understood that a present-day government is, to a certain extent, the continuation of what has emerged as a government from previous conditions. However, only part of this government lies in the straightforward continuation of previous conditions, namely that which would include the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior - for Internal Security - and the Ministry of Hygiene. These things would lie in the continuation of what has arisen from previous government maxims. In all other respects, such a government would have to take the initiative to become a liquidation ministry, that is, a ministry that takes the initiative to the right and to the left in order to create the conditions for a free spiritual life that would be based on its own administration and constitution and would have to organize itself once the transition from the present to the following conditions has been overcome. This administration would also have a corresponding representation, which of course could not be shaped like today's popular representations, but would have to grow out of the special conditions of intellectual life. This would have to be formed purely out of the self-administration of intellectual life; in this context, the system of education and culture is particularly important. On the one hand, it would have to be handed over to the self-administration of intellectual life.

On the other hand, a liquidation ministry would have to hand over to the autonomous economic life everything that is, for example, traffic and trade; the Ministry of Labor would also have to find its administration in organizations that would develop out of economic life. These would, of course, be very radical things, but from this point of view they can only be radical things. Only then would a basis be created for any kind of treatment of specific questions.

What I have dealt with now does not change anything with regard to what has been built from below. It only indicates the path by which something new can be created out of what already exists. Only when those organizations have been created out of economic life that would continue what is in the codes of law you mentioned, only then could [further] be tackled. That would only be a step that could come later. I am not thinking of a program, but of a sequence of steps, all of which are real actions, real processes. All I say in my books and lectures are not indications of how to do it, but how to create the conditions for people to enter into the possible interrelationships in order to do the things. Economic laws can only grow out of economic life itself, and only if all those corporations are expressed in their impulses in economic life that can contribute something to the shaping of this economic life from the individual concrete circumstances of economic life.

So, on the part of the government, I would consider that as the first step: to understand that it must be a liquidation government.

I am happy to go into further specific issues that arise from this.

Dr. Schmucker: Suppose you were to get some kind of self-government to regulate economic life. Could the works councils, which are now to be introduced for individual companies under the Reich bill, serve as a means of achieving this self-administration if – which is at least the intention – the works councils were expanded upwards, for example by combining the Württemberg works councils into a state workers' council or state works council and, at the highest level, into a Reich works council or Reich economic council? The bill uses the term “works council” for a representation that would become a pure workers' representation in which employers would not be included. Just as the works council works together with the employer, so too could employers and employees sit together at the higher state level, and then not only employees but also employers would be represented in a Reich Economic Council, so that here too there would be equal representation. Could Dr. Steiner see the possibility that such an organization would fulfill some of the wishes of economic life and that these economic self-governing corporations would be assigned all further tasks that Dr. Steiner believes should be performed by economic corporations as self-governing corporations?

Rudolf Steiner: I would ask you not to take the few introductory sentences I am about to say as abstractions, but as a summary of experiences. These can only be summarized in just such sentences.

The way in which the structure of economic life has developed means that this economic life suffers from the fact that harmonization of interests is not possible within the existing structure. I will only hint at some of it. For example, under the development of our economic life, the worker is not interested in production - I am ignoring the really foolish interest, for example, in profit sharing, which I consider impractical. The worker is interested in economic life, as things stand today, only as a consumer, while the capitalist, in turn, is basically only interested in economic life as a producer, and again only as a producer from the point of view of profit - that is his point of view, economically speaking, it cannot be otherwise. So today we have no way of organizing a real harmonization of consumer and producer interests; it is not part of our economic structure.

What we must achieve is that we actually make those people who are involved in shaping the economic structure equally interested in consumption and production, so that no one who intervenes in a formative way – not only through judgment but also through action – has a one-sided interest in production or consumption, but rather that through the organization itself there is an equal interest in both. This can only be achieved if we are able to gradually let people form small corporations out of economic life itself, and out of all forms of economic life, which then naturally continue to grow. They must be corporations because trust must be established. This is only possible if larger corporations are gradually built up uniformly from smaller ones, that is, only if we have personalities with their judgments and also with their influence based on the economic foundation, who work in all areas of social life through their aptitude for managing economic life as such. If we want to socialize, we cannot socialize economic life through institutions, but only by being able to interest people in the institutions in the way described and by having them participate in them continuously.

Therefore, I consider it most necessary today that we do not create laws by which works councils are established, but that we have the possibility to create works councils from all forms of economic life – so that they are initially there – and to let a works council emerge from these works councils, which only has a true meaning when it forms the mediation between the individual branches of production. A works council that only exists for individual branches is of little significance. It is only when the activities of the works councils unfold primarily between the branches of production that are in interaction that they have a meaning.

I therefore said: the individual works council actually only has a purpose in the company if it has an informational significance. What must be done with this idea of works councils in economic life can actually only be done by the works councils as a whole, because it can only result in a blessing for the individual companies in the future if the works councils emerge from the structure of the whole economic life. So I think that the real focus is on the works council as a whole, in other words, on what is negotiated between the works councils of the individual factories, and not on what happens only in the individual factories.

But then I can only expect this institution to be a blessing if these works councils – which, of course, have to be set up on the basis of existing conditions, which must not arise from blue-sky hopes but from what exists today – if they are elected, for example, from all those who are somehow involved in the company. I do not want to speak of “employers” and “employees”, but of people from the circle of all those who are really involved in the business, either intellectually or physically. So all those who participate in the business would form the basis for such councils to develop out of themselves. If the matter were approached from this economic angle, the reasonable employers to date would naturally be included in their capacity as spiritual leaders, and we would have a works council that would at least not initially have elected representatives from all [areas] – that would only be the case after some time – but which could represent the interests of the most diverse people involved in economic life. However, I could only imagine that such a workers' council would nevertheless focus its main attention on the conditions of production, so I actually cannot imagine that a mere workers' council would be anything meaningful. I can only imagine that in addition to the workers' council – not overlooking the objection that one might say: Where will work still be done if all this is to be done in practice? I can only imagine that the workers' councils will be supplemented by transport councils and economic councils, because the workers' council will primarily deal with production, but the economic council with consumption in the broadest sense. For example, consumption would also have to include everything that we consume from abroad, everything that is imported; everything that is imported would be subject to the economic council. I am not saying that everything is exemplary today, but these are the three most important [types of] workers' councils that must be established first: the workers' council, the transport council, and the economic council. To do this, only one wing of the government would have to take the initiative, but it would have no laws to create, but would only have to see to it that these workers' councils are set up. These councils would then have to begin to create their own constitution, that is, to create what flows from independent economic life, what they have experienced in it. The constitution of the three councils would arise entirely from the circumstances themselves. This is what I would consider the first step: the creation of workers' councils out of the circumstances. Only then would these have to give themselves their constitution. That, in practice, is what I would call breaking up the economy in a given area. As long as there is the idea that laws concerning workers' councils are issued by a central government, I consider that to be something that has nothing to do with what should happen. Taking the first step first – that is what the time demands of us.

Dr. Schmucker: In my opinion, this work, which the participants themselves should carry out in order to form and manage organizations, requires a highly developed workforce. However, the experiences we have had with the workforce during the war and with the labor force in recent months make me hesitant to assume that the majority of the workforce – or at least the vast majority – is up to this great task. When you have experiences like the ones we have had recently, where the workers of a company come and demand under threat of violence: You have made so much profit now. You may be doing badly now, but the state will take a large part of what you have earned if you do not share it. We are now demanding cost-of-living allowances! This whole process is well known to everyone, this continued increase in wages, food prices and so on, one thing becoming more expensive as a result of another. These experiences cast doubt on whether workers and employees are at this high level of development to fulfill the task that is required of them here.

Rudolf Steiner: If we start from the principle that we always want to do the best we can possibly imagine or that we can envision in any ideal way, then we will never carry out in practice what really needs to be done. I naturally admit that a great deal of what you have just said is absolutely right. But I would ask you to consider the following: in the last few weeks and months, I have had the opportunity to talk to a great many workers, and I have found that when you really speak to them in their language, they come up with things that really have a real basis. I have found that he then proves to be inwardly receptive and realizes that what is to be done can only be something that does not undermine economic life or cause it to die, but builds it up. It is extremely easy to make the worker understand what needs to be done if you address what he himself has experienced. And from there he will easily grasp certain interrelations in economic life. Of course, there is still a great deal that he cannot grasp, for the simple reason that the circumstances never allowed him to see into certain interrelations, into which one simply cannot see when one stands at the machine from morning till night. I already know that too.

But now, of course, there is the added factor that even our most experienced principals do not delve very deeply into the real conditions of economic life. I would like to quote Rathenau not as an economist [oriented towards the whole], but almost as a principal, because his writings actually reveal on every page that he really speaks from the standpoint of the principal, the industrial entrepreneur. Now, basically, from this point of view, there are no absolute objections to be made against these statements, because basically all the facts are correct. I would like to mention just one thing: Rathenau calculates the actual meaning of surplus value. Of course, today it is very easy to prove that the concept of surplus value as it existed some time ago is now obsolete. Rathenau also does this calculation very nicely in detail, and comes to the quite correct conclusion that basically none of the surplus value can be claimed. Because if the worker gets it, he would have to give it back, because the institutions make it necessary for it to be used as a reserve. This calculation is, of course, simply correct. The question is whether it is possible to escape the result of this calculation, whether it is economically possible to find a way to escape the result of this calculation. The point is that there is no way to escape Rathenau's calculation other than to realize what I have given as an answer in my book: that the moment any given sum of means of production is completed, it can no longer be sold, that is, it no longer has any purchase value. Then the whole calculation collapses, because the Rathenau calculation is only possible if the means of production can be sold again at any time for a very specific value. So the right prerequisite is missing for the actual conclusion, for which the principal is not yet available today. They would first have to understand that we will get nowhere because we are at an impasse if we do not make major changes. And it would be immediately apparent if we were to find common ground, but on ground where the only interest is in continuing economic life and not in serving the interests of the individual; we would see that the principals know something, but that they have one-sided knowledge that can be supplemented by the others.

I believe I can say, with reference to everything that an individual can produce intellectually in the way of beautiful ideals: “One is a human being, two are people, more than two are beasts.” As soon as we come to the kind of thinking that is supposed to be realized in the social order, the opposite principle applies: “One alone is nothing, several are a little something, and many are those who can then do it.” Because when twelve people from the most diverse party-political directions sit together with the goodwill to summarize their individual experiences as partial experiences, we not only have a sum of twelve different opinions, but by these opinions really taking action, a potentiation of these twelve impulses arises. Thus a quite tremendous sum of economic experience is formed simply by our socializing human opinion in this way. That is the important thing. Well, I must say, I believe that what you say is right, so long as you are dealing with a class of workers who demand simply from their standpoint as consumers. Because the fact that they have demands will of course not lead to anything that can lead to any kind of socialization. This is the only way to dismantle the economy. We must not imagine that we will achieve ideal conditions the day after tomorrow, but a condition that is possible to live in if we do things this way. At this point in particular, we should think: What is possible to live in? – and not: Are people smart enough? Let us take people as they are and do the best we can with them, and not speculate about whether people are highly developed, because ultimately something must always happen. We simply cannot do nothing; something must happen from some quarter. I do not see why, if we take people out of economic life, they should be less highly developed than, for example, the government people and the members of the former German Reichstag in all the years in which what happened then had terrible effects. There, too, only what was possible happened. The point is that we do what is possible with the majority of people who are there. I do not imagine that an ideal state could be created, but an organism that is possible to live in.

Dr. Riebensam: I would like to address the question of the works councils. What still gives us the opportunity to talk to the workers? The situation is now escalating to the point where we need to find a lightning rod. I want to get to the practical point and ask: Why do you want to put a car on the road without a steering wheel? In my opinion, such a machine is our workforce. I have spoken to many of them about this and expressed my view that I consider it impossible to come to any kind of cooperation with a large workforce in this way. For the moment a committee of workers makes itself the representative of a certain opinion, every member of the committee will be stoned by the workers. You assume goodwill on the part of the workers. I have tried everything, and not without success at first, because I have the trust of the workers, ever since I have been able to speak to them and they have been able to hear me. But the people who do not come are in the majority. I can perhaps talk to two thousand, the others do not have the good will. From experience, I know that the great multitude is capable of confusing those who are initially convinced. The wisest of the workers' committees, with whom I have spoken privately and who expressed positive views, are now back to the point where I ask myself: has all the work I have done for six months been in vain? I have made certain proposals to the government with the intention that they be implemented in such a way as to satisfy the workers. If these proposals are issued as decrees by the government, all this work will be in vain. But I think it is useless to establish works councils without any tax; the craziest things happen then. Since you yourself say that we have to start at some point, we would have to start in such a way that it could be implemented.

Rudolf Steiner: All that you have said actually amounts to the fact that it is basically not possible at present for the management of the companies to cope with the workforce. This has of course not come about without preconditions, it has of course only gradually become so. I believe that you misjudge the situation if you rely too much on the goodwill of the workforce. Because the workers will demand goodwill from you, for the reason that they have learned through agitation - to a certain extent justifiably - that nothing will come of it. The workers will say: We can have this goodwill, but the entrepreneur will not have it. This mistrust is already too great today. Therefore, there is no other way than to gain as much trust as possible. The moment someone is found who really knows something about social objectives that the workers can understand, and not just based on good will but on insight, even for two thousand workers – or for eight thousand, for that matter – the situation changes. Of course, if you talk to two thousand workers, they in turn may be confused by the other side, but the situation will still turn out like this: If you really talk to the workers about what they understand, you are not just talking to two thousand people who are confused by the people they last talked to, but these will in turn have an effect on the others.

But if we ask ourselves whether this path has even been taken yet, we have to say that basically it has not been taken at all. And everything is done to make this path unattractive over and over again. Naturally, when the worker sees that works councils are decreed from above by law, this is a complete denial of trust. So let something come from the central authorities today in a truly audible way, something that makes sense, so that the worker can see that it makes sense. But nothing like that is happening. And that is why the movement for the threefold social order actually exists, because something is to be created that really constitutes a conceivable goal. You will not reach the worker by just talking about concrete institutions, because he has been pushed out into a mere consumer position. This is not explained to the worker by anyone. Everything that is being done is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Let the institutions arise on their own initiative today. If this works council is really to be constituted, just let it come, perhaps only in the form of proposals - after all, many proposals can be put forward here -; not just one single type of bill. That is, of course, the best way to have the entire working class against the works councils. Today there is no way to make any headway in this way. Today we can only succeed if we want something other than to use force against force, namely to confront personalities with personalities, to gain personal trust. That is what the worker can do. The one who understands how to talk to the worker in his language in such a way that the worker realizes that nothing will come of it if he only ever pushes up the wage scale, and he also sees that there is a will to finally move in this [new] direction, then he will go along with it and work as well. He will not work with you if you just make legislative proposals, but he wants to see that the personalities in the government actually have the will to move in a certain direction.

This is what the current government is also being criticized for; people have the idea that they want to do something, but what is happening is all moving along the same tracks as before. There is nothing new in it anywhere. On the other hand, when people are involved, it is not a matter of somehow setting a car in motion and not giving it a steering wheel. It really must have a steering wheel if it is to be able to move. We cannot help but say: either we try to move forward and go as far as we can, or we are heading for chaos. There is no other way to do it.

Dr. Riebensam: I agree with all that. I go along with the idea that the worker should be shown this goal to begin with, but not be led down the same old paths. I think it's possible that today you will see that the workers in a factory are throwing a great deal together. But perhaps it would be possible to find a way for the workers to play a fruitful role. We are willing to take the workers into account, but they must also take our point of view into consideration if they do not want all faith in a possibility of understanding to disappear. Somehow we have to find a way. [But it's not that easy.] When the workers come to set up works councils and we tell them we want to sit down together and do the right thing, then that is basically an abstract template; they don't meet our advice at all. I was at a workers' meeting the other day when the workers demanded too much. They said that we should not approach the matter with narrow-minded thinking; it would no longer be useful to make any arrangements; they wanted to decide everything themselves in the future. This realization must be the basis for my future actions. However, I could imagine a works council that meets every eight days and with which I discuss everything before tensions arise. But we should also tell the workers: we cannot simply create a works council on our own.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in these matters it is important to take systematic experiences, not unsystematic ones. We have had a whole series of workers' meetings, almost every day, because we had no other option. One thing emerged again and again in these workers' meetings. It was very noticeable that, as an extreme, the workers themselves said: Yes, if we are alone, how are we supposed to cope in the future? Of course we need those who can lead; we need the spiritual worker. This matter does not arise from dictating, but only from really working with people. That is why I considered the fact (Molt will be able to confirm this) that from the very beginning, when he came with other friends to put this matter into effect, I told him: the first requirement is that honest trust be acquired, but not in the usual way of: I am the principal and you are the worker, but rather from person to person, so that the worker is really initiated step by step into the management of the whole business and also gets an idea of when the business ceases to be economically viable. That is something that is indispensable, and I openly ask the question: where has it happened? Where is it being done? — Nowadays, a lot of things are done in government by individual commissions getting together and thinking about the best way of doing this or that. In this case, forgive the harsh word, the horse is being put before the cart. It is impossible to make progress with that. Today it is necessary to create a living link between those who work with their hands and those who can understand it. It is much more necessary than holding ministerial meetings for individual men to go among the people and talk from person to person. That is the ground on which one must begin first. One must not be put out if success does not come at the first attempt; it is bound to come by the fourth or fifth time. So, wouldn't it be true that if only some kind of beginning had been made in what is actually practical today, one would be able to see [that something is emerging]; but there is no beginning, people are opposed to it.

Emil Molt: A start has been made. May I point out to those gentlemen who are interested that we have been introducing this kind of works council for weeks. Even though I am well aware that the matter is still in its infancy, it has been shown that we have already gained the trust while we are negotiating here on how to gain that trust. This is essential because we set out to make fewer cigarettes and more people. We have used the factory to make people. Making cigarettes is only a means to an end. We set out to really get in touch with people and to do this during working hours. You just have to take that time. It's about realizing things from the bottom up. If things are like this elsewhere now - a lot has been missed in the last six to eight weeks. If we had started earlier, a lot could have been avoided.

The situation now is as follows: the people who are in the factory not only want to work, they also want to know. We must be clear about this: the more we give in to this urge and are not afraid to steer this power current into the right channels, the more this power can be utilized again. Therefore, we should not be afraid to tell every factory owner to lay out his business like an open book, because that is where trust begins to be put into practice. As long as we only talk about what we should do, we will not win the trust of the people. We must provide insight and show them: Today we have nothing more to hide. In the past, the factory owner had more to hide. Now the worker can see at most that nothing is being earned. Only if he comes to it himself will he believe it – he will not believe it from the factory owner. When people demand higher wages, they are driven only by a desire for knowledge; they want to gain insight. But if you yourself are the helmsman and provide insight into the production process, you will see that people will concern themselves with issues other than wages. I would ask you to bear in mind that we [from Waldorf-Astoria] are not speaking as theorists; we have experience, we have proof of this. Even if not all our ideals have been realized so far, we are on the way to doing so. And the difficulties that other companies are now facing – we will never have them.

Yesterday I spoke to a large workforce from another company. I saw the enthusiasm with which people received my report as soon as things were viewed from a comprehensive point of view. I heard from my workforce today that the news of this meeting is spreading like wildfire among the workforce. People see for themselves that if it were like this everywhere, the conditions would be quite different. For days we have had continuous visits from the workers' committees of all the major plants, and they say: Yes, if only we had that! There is a great failure on the part of the bourgeoisie; if you really talk to our colleagues, you will encounter blinkers and narrow-mindedness everywhere.

Dr. Schmucker: I had imagined the government's bill to be dreadful, but not so dreadful; it is a real monstrosity. If you study the matter, you can see that the law-makers in Berlin do not know the situation; they do not even know what it is about. Now they want to abolish the employee and worker committees and set up works councils of 40 to 80 people who are incapable of working.

Mr. Geyer: There is no one present who is not touched by Dr. Steiner's proposals. But I must openly admit that I deal with the question every day of why we always face new problems when I think we have overcome them. We are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. People are becoming more and more concerned with the spiritual side of the social structure than has been the case so far, when the interest of the individual in general was only directed towards an economic revolution. But I must say that this spiritual revolution, in my opinion, is not moving in the right direction. The worker and many employees are by no means aware of what is at stake today. Their consumer interests keep them so firmly in their grip that they do not allow other people who do not work with their hands to be considered alongside them. It is true when Dr. Steiner says that social policy cannot be driven from above. But we must come to a point where the human being enters into a closer relationship with other human beings. Unfortunately, however, we are already so one-sided in the culture and in the state organism and in the world organism that a return to the original culture, to the original state, is necessary – not in the spiritual sense, but in relation to the relationship between human beings. There is no longer any control that stands above the human being. All people should enter into relationship with each other, forming small circles, a kind of crystal, which combine to form larger units. This forming of crystals should then continue until we have reached the summit, where the liquidation of the state organism has come to its end. I believe that this is how Dr. Steiner imagines the process of developing threefolding until it is complete. But a considerable time will pass before that [and a problem will arise]: councils will be formed, but these councils will change very often, just as people now often change their jobs, so that chaos will ensue. There will not only be friction between the small organizations, but also collisions within the liquidation ministry. This can lead to the whole tower, which is to be built from below, collapsing. I believe that our general education of the people as a prerequisite [for this reform work] does not yet make it possible to hope for the development of genuine trust between people. I believe that a general education of the people should start first, although I readily admit that this general education of the people will also face obstacles from above and below. The one who is supposed to be educated, the worker, regards not only the employer as an enemy, but everyone who is intellectually superior, because he fears that he will have to persuade him to do something that is contrary to his interests. This is an experience that is made many times. I do not believe that even if Molt has had good experiences with the works councils in his company, it will always remain so. Man is man, and since I have known man in his ten-thousand-year development, I must say: Man is not a mere earthly creature, but a being that once reaches the point of culture where one can truly say that now man is culturally so educated that his earthly existence will be a happy one. To bring this about, however, a person would have to come along who has superhuman spiritual powers to capture the souls of people.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say that all of this could actually be used to present a view of the value of the human being. But for those who are thinking practically about what can be done in these chaotic times, it is not at all a matter of whether a person is sufficiently culturally educated or can be educated, but only of making what can be made out of people. And above all, when we speak of the social organism, we should abandon the notion from the outset that we want to somehow establish happiness in the social organism or bring happiness to people through social institutions. The aim of social transformation is therefore not to create happy people, but to get to know the living conditions of the social organism, that is, to create a viable social organism. The fact that we cannot make progress with popular education as it is today has led to the demand for total emancipation from the other limbs for popular education, for the impulses of the threefold order.

Now, if you really want to know people, you cannot speak of tens or thousands of years, but of what is really manageable. If you consider the development of public education in the last few centuries – three to four centuries is all you need to take if you want to get to the bottom of today's problems – you can see that the ever-increasing nationalization of the entire education system has led to the public ignorance that we have today. We have gradually created an education in our leading circles that leads to nothing but false concepts. Consider that the leading circles have driven the worker into mere economic life. Because what you throw at him in the way of popular education, he does not understand. I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School and I know what the worker can understand and what is done incorrectly. I know that he can only understand something that is not taken from bourgeois education, but from the general human existence. You said that the worker regards everyone as an enemy who is spiritually superior. Of course, he regards everyone as an enemy who merely represents a spiritual life that is conditioned by the social structure of a small number of castes and classes. He senses this very well in his instinct. As soon as he is confronted with the spiritual life that is drawn from the whole human being, there is no question of him being an enemy of the spiritually superior; there can be no question of that; on the contrary, he realizes very well that this is his best friend. We must find a way to achieve a truly social education for the people through the emancipation of spiritual life. We must not be afraid of a certain radicalism. We must have an inkling of how concepts, ideas, the whole essence of what our education is today has rubbed off on people, to put it trivially. There has been much discussion about the grammar school system. What is this grammar school system? We have established it by staging a kind of paradox. The spiritual life is, after all, a whole. The Greeks absorbed the spiritual life from everything, because it was the spiritual life that adapted to the circumstances. We do not teach anything in school that is in the world, but rather what was in the world for the Greeks, that is imagined by our culture. From this paradox we now demand: We want to offer people enlightenment. We can only offer it to them if we go back to ourselves in this area, if we approach man as a human being. There should be no return to a speculative original state; only what the times demand can be considered. Today it is necessary that we really learn from such things. When I taught my students - and I can say that there were a great many of them - what I could not get from any branch of grammar school knowledge or education, but what had to be built up from scratch, they learned eagerly. Of course, because they also absorb the judgment of the educated, which [actually comes from high school knowledge], so they knew exactly that this is a cultural lie; of course they don't want to learn anything about that.

We will never have the opportunity to actually move forward if we are unable to make the radical initial decision to implement this threefold order, that is, to really wrest spiritual life and economic life from state life. I am convinced that today a great many people say that they do not understand this threefold order. They say this because it is too radical for them, because they have no courage to really study the matter in detail and carry it out. That is not the case, it is really a matter of the fact that we are not dealing with supermen, but with human beings as they really are, and doing what can be done with them. Then you can do a great deal if you do not want to start from this or that prejudice. You really ought to put the education system on its own basis and let those who are in it manage it. But people can hardly imagine what that is, while it is actually a thing that, if you want to imagine it, already exists.

So, the school system must first be thought of as completely separate from the state system. It is out of the question for us to make any progress if we do not embrace this radical thinking of bringing the school, indeed the whole education system, out of the state.

Dr. Riebensam: I want to get back to the real issue, to what we are trying to achieve. I would like to speak very personally and reply to Mr. Molt that I consider his view – although he experienced it in his factory – to be somewhat unrealistic. It is based on experiences in a small circle. Twenty years ago, I implemented principles in a small factory that no one else was thinking of at the time. I openly showed what I did in the factory. We had the Taylor system, which seems good. I then tried the same in a much larger factory – the people went with me. I then tried the same here – there was a lack of trust. Because of these circumstances, I have expressed my concerns, and I must stick to them. Let us return to what we want. The question was asked: How should we begin? I will assume that we call together the workers with the aim of founding works councils. How do we do that? It is possible that you, Dr. Steiner, will tell me that we could even give the workers self-management. I am not yet convinced that this is possible. I would like to see a concrete example of a works council being formed in a large factory.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say in advance that everything that can be done in detail within a company today can really only be a preparation for what the works council means. I would just like to say, because Dr. Riebensam started from this point, that experiences such as those in the small group described by Mr. Molt should not be celebrated too soon as a victory. But let us not be deceived: what these experiences can prove in the first instance is that trust can be established within a certain group. And that is what Mr. Molt primarily meant. It cannot be a victory because, when a systematic socialization is considered, a victory cannot be achieved in a single company. The victory of a single company, even if it were to increase the standard of living of its workforce, could only be achieved at the expense of the general public if a single company were to achieve it unilaterally.

Dr. Riebensam: I did not want to speak in detail about the Taylor system.

Rudolf Steiner: I only meant that this Taylor system could lead to something positive under certain circumstances, if it were applied under different conditions; but under our present system it would only increase all the system's damage.

Regarding the specific question of how we deal with works councils, let us not forget that we only want to make demands. We must observe the demands and distinguish the essential from the inessential. The system of councils is actually a given reality today, that is, perhaps it only exists in embryo, but anyone who properly observes the social forces at work in our social organism will understand this. So it is with the idea of councils in this particular case: works councils, transport councils and economic councils will assert themselves of their own accord. Now, to begin with, we only have a presentiment of the working class. The real issue is that the social constitution of the works council is to emerge, that general principles cannot be established for it. In fact, the issue is that we finally get used to making initiatives possible, and such initiatives will arise the moment they are unleashed. They need do nothing at all except popularize the idea of works councils – and that is very important today. Then the question will surely have to be answered in the most diverse concrete enterprises in the most diverse ways: How do we do it? – It can be done in one enterprise in one way and in another way, depending on the goals and people. We must come to the possibility that a workers' council is constituted from within the enterprises, that a workers' council separates itself from the enterprises and acts between the enterprises. That is where the work of the council actually begins. The question of how to do it would have to be resolved by you in each individual case. We just have to understand the idea in general and implement it in each individual case.

The general tenor that we have heard here today, our experience, we are not gaining any trust -: I believe that if one were to examine each individual case, one would come to see that the matter would have to be approached differently after all. First of all, we would have to really embrace the full necessity of putting economic life on its own feet. Just think, if you do that, then it is only goods and the production of goods; you no longer have anything to do with wages. Of course, this cannot be done overnight. But the worker understands that when you tell him: you cannot abolish the wage system overnight. But if the tendency exists to abolish the wage system, to transfer the worker's labor power to the constitutional state, so that it is decided there - because it does not belong in economic life - then there is only a contract between management and workers regarding distribution. That is a concrete thing, that must first of all become real, it must be carried into every single company; then one can make progress with the people. Unfortunately, however, there is no will to do this. For example, there is no understanding [among employers] that the wage system can be replaced. This is regarded as a conditio sine qua non of economic life.

Dr. Riebensam: I say that the workers do have works councils in mind, but they do not take them into account in their [fundamental] goal. [This would have to be shown to them]. You do this here by giving lectures.

Rudolf Steiner: Not with the leaders [of the workers], who think in the old ways, who think in bourgeois terms.

Dr. Riebensam: Of course we have to tell the workers all these things, but first I have to be clear about them myself, I have to think about these thoughts. Then I can also try to talk to the workers and influence them. But I would like to ask you if you also know the works councils in the other factories?

Rudolf Steiner: I only know the Molt system, which was introduced on the basis of this idea [about the works council].

Emil Molt: One fine day, we saw that there was a need, we convened the people, discussed the aim and purpose and then said: the most capable can join the works council, but they must know that they still have to learn. Those who come in must learn from day one, but under supervision. They must learn what is necessary to run a business. Confidence comes, people then see that it is not as easy to run a business as people now realize that it is not so easy to govern. People then understand that the director is the first works councilor in his business because he is the only one who knows the business from the bottom up. Then you work through fundamental questions with the people so that they feel the imponderables.

Dr. Riebensam: How many people do you have in your company?

Emil Molt: Seven hundred.

Dr. Riebensam: Who should I sit down with?

Emil Molt: They will come to me.

Dr. Carl Unger: I could contribute some experiences, even if they are only specific ones, because my company has metalworkers who have a slightly different mentality than the other workers. My experiences go in the direction that we have set up a program that is not a program in and of itself, but it is only about working out the basic features for a works council before the government comes, because otherwise nothing will come of it. You said that you consider it essential for the works council to seek contact with the outside world and to get in touch with other works councils. The prerequisite was the call that appeared at the time and was circulated in our company. In all the possible questions that have now been discussed here, the point of view of threefolding was always sought. [In our company, however, we were forced] to do it the old way — but that doesn't really belong here. The whole matter of the workers' councils must be approached from the legal point of view. It is actually a good thing when people ask about the threefold order, because in this way they are instructed and pass on their knowledge in their circle, because the threefold order idea is something that must work from man to man.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: Dr. Schmucker first asked Dr. Steiner what he would do if he were now appointed to the government in accordance with the workers' resolution. I would like to speak purely personally, not politically, because from a political point of view, I do not consider this demand to be a good one, and that is because it would mean nothing less than asking the government to dismiss itself. Because such a government will not, without disavowing itself, appoint the representative of modern ideas without resigning. Since that would be irresponsible and since such a significant movement should not arise with something that has no chance of success, I have never hidden these concerns and regret that such a resolution was passed at all. However, that should not prevent us from extracting what is useful from this unreasonable demand. As far as I know, Dr. Schmucker is in the Ministry of Labor. We have had ministers during the war and afterwards who were not there before; these are signs that the old state of civil servants, the old state of lackeys, has not mastered this tremendous economy that has been emerging for 60 years and which must seek other forms, whether we like it or not, because these forms have now actually suffered a fiasco. The states themselves have shown that it is impossible for them to build themselves up into economic states in this way. That is the meaning of this catastrophe.

Now all the gentlemen, especially Dr. Riebensam, have rightly assumed that we are in an extremely difficult situation in which the whole building can collapse. We are in a transitional stage and must first remain in the area that is of current interest and that must be tackled immediately. These are not spiritual questions, but economic ones. Mr. Molt has earned the trust of his workers; but they are not from the metalworkers' structure. They have in fact, as we hear, already arrived at the point of nihilism, which will bring about the sharpest dangers for Württemberg. One of these dangers, Dr. Riebensam, lies in the fact that you view the matter too sharply from a purely industrial point of view, because you forget that the state of Württemberg does not only have 8,000 [Daimler] and 5,000 Bosch workers, but also farmers. And if they come, we will have a civil war. What will happen then, I do not know.

The question arises: if the workers demand the impossible without reason, not only the workers but also the bureaucracy, if they take the mere consumer point of view, [what happens then]? We would have to try and say to the workers in the sense of threefolding: You metalworkers – and that means all companies – get together, form a production cooperative – this is something completely new – you bring all the assets of your company, your labor, and a new organization will be created. I do not want to say that this is necessary, but I can imagine that the worker can be persuaded to advocate the abolition of wages as the equivalent of labor without having to make a final decision, because a single state can hardly abolish wages. If these enterprises, which are important in Württemberg, were to set up such a production cooperative and thereby reassure the workers, we would have gained time for the implementation of Dr. Steiner's ideas. This merger would be an organized merger that manifests itself in some legal form. This could be organized differently for you, Dr. Riebensam, than for small businesses.

And now the other question: Can a small or medium-sized state like Württemberg, which belongs to a closed economic area [with its own money], even form such a structure for itself? Will foreign countries supply raw materials to such cooperatives? The danger is that foreign countries, which are much larger and stronger “capital countries” than Germany at the moment, will decide not to enter into economic relations with such a structure. But we cannot feed ourselves. So the question must be considered: where do we start with these organizations?

Rudolf Steiner: It would perhaps be going too far if I were to go into the details of the previous summaries; I would rather go into the questions.

It would not yet be possible to regard it as a particular realization of what is meant by threefolding if, for my sake, all metalworkers in Württemberg were treated in the way you have described, although it could be formally implemented. But when I speak of the threefold social order, I must expressly emphasize that I regard a one-sided separation of economic life from state life, with the spiritual life remaining with the state life, as the opposite of what is sought, because I consider a two-way division to be just as harmful as a three-way division is necessary. If a single branch of the economy were to be separated out in this way, I would not regard it as being in line with the threefold order. However, it could formally take place in a social organism that is working towards threefold order. Well, it would also be a fundamental test of the principle if such things were to be considered.

As a detail, I would just like to note that the abolition of wages, consistently thought through, does not at all lead to the view that a single state cannot abolish wages because the relationship of the economy in such a state, which abolishes wages, to the entire economic outside world, does not need to change at all. Whether the worker receives his income internally in the sense of economic liberalism or whether he receives it in some other form, for example from the proceeds of what he produces, for which he is already a partner with the manager, does not change the other economic relations with the outside world. It is therefore not true that a single state cannot abolish wages. But it is equally untenable to claim that a small or large state cannot implement this on its own. On the contrary, in a small or large state you certainly cannot socialize in the sense that the old socialists had in mind. I believe, in fact, that socialization in the sense of the old socialists can lead to nothing more than the absolute strangulation and constriction of a single economic area. If you draw the ultimate consequences from the old socialization, then basically a single economic area is nothing more than what is dominated by a single ledger. You can never come to a positive trade balance with that, but only to a gradual, complete devaluation of the money. Then you can abolish the money. Then the possibility of an external connection ceases altogether.

So all these things have been the basis for thinking of this threefold order, because it is the only way that each individual area, the economic, the legal and the spiritual, can carry it out. The external relationships will not change in any other way than that it will no longer be possible, for example, for political measures to disrupt the economy. The economic sphere will have an external impact, and it will no longer be possible for things to happen, as in the case of the Baghdad Railway problem, where all three interests became entangled, with the result that the Baghdad Railway problem became one of the most important causes of the war. There you see these three things tied together.

I would like to point out once again that the tripartite division is intended for foreign policy, that is, it has been conceived to offer the possibility of conducting economic life according to purely economic aspects, beyond political boundaries, so that political life can never interfere with it. This means that in the areas where the threefold order is not implemented, the damage would be there, but there would be no real reason for the [separate] economic life not to get involved abroad if the economic situation is profitable for the foreign country. It will depend on this alone, even if an economic area is not independent, if it is entirely impulsed by the political; for all these things that affect other countries are not affected by the threefold social order.

Today there is great concern: let us take a specific case. Let us assume that Bavaria would now carry out its socialization, then with such a bureaucratically and centrally conceived socialization, a whole range of free connections between domestic companies and foreign industry would be made impossible and undermined. On the other hand, through the threefold social order, the labor force is removed from the economic sphere, which thus gives the worker the opportunity to face the work manager as a free partner. But this is how the worker comes to be able to really have the share that arises within the economic sphere when everything is no longer mixed up. Today, we no longer have objective prices, but rather the wage relationship in economic life. If you take this out, you have, on the one hand, eliminated the disquiet caused by the workers. And if you now take out the capital relationship, you have, on the other hand, the intellectual organism that always has to take care of the abilities of those who are supposed to be there to run the businesses. So you have removed the two main stumbling blocks from the economic body, and yet you have not touched on something that takes place in economic relations with foreign countries. Therefore, there is no reason for foreign countries to be hostile, because they lose nothing and can conduct economic life exactly as before.

This reorganization [through the works council] is intended precisely with economic life in mind. If we think of Germany, a whole host of fine threads that exist with foreign countries will organize themselves in one fell swoop, from all companies. There is really nothing else to be done but to reorganize social life in such a way that in the future, goods will actually regulate themselves through goods, so that there will be a precise index around which goods group in terms of their value. This will create the possibility that what the individual produces has the value that all products must have in order to meet his needs. In our organism, which is based on the division of labor, all socialization must ultimately result in what the individual person produces in the course of a year equaling what he needs to sustain his life. If we throw out the wage and capital relationship, then we get the pure commodity relationship. However, this is something that one must decide to think through completely. At that moment, one will find that it is quite easy.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: I am not opposed to the spiritual organism administering itself; I am just saying that it will take longer and is not urgent.

Rudolf Steiner: It is urgent because we have the necessity to create a basis for the education of spiritual workers, which we do not produce with our current state spiritual life. That is the terrible thing today, that our state-stamped spiritual life is very far removed from real practical life. Even at the universities, people are trained in such a way – they are not trained practically, but only theoretically – that they are not rooted in life. Isn't it true that I imagine, for example, this school system in the future in such a way that the practitioner, who works in the factory, will be particularly suited as a teacher, and possibly, I think, these [teachers] will continually change [between school and factory]?

Dr. Stadler: I came here today by chance, and I would like to take the liberty of expressing my opinion as a guest. What you are doing here is currently being done in a similar way in many parts of Germany. What I am currently experiencing in Berlin is an unprecedented intellectual struggle of the German people with the problems of the revolution. In Berlin, there are masses of circles, organizations, associations, loose groups, all of which meet in a similar way to you this evening and discuss these matters. For we are not only experiencing the political and economic collapse in Germany, but also the intellectual disintegration of the entire old system. And in this collapse, the German people are once again so far along that they are trying to go their own way. The practitioners are causing difficulties for the theorists and thwarting their goals with their practical questions. They are also right, because they live in practice. The difficulty lies in the fact that in the whole of Germany long-term goals are being set that would take one or two generations to achieve, while we are in the midst of an actual collapse. If, in contrast to Rudolf Steiner and others, I state that Dr. Steiner has actually thought up an idea that a large proportion of those present can emotionally agree with, but that pure practitioners cannot be satisfied with - I say practitioners because one of them is a government councilor [Dr. Schmucker] and the other a top entrepreneur [Dr. Riebensam] —, because they have to ask themselves: What is the way forward tomorrow, because we are not getting anywhere with this? The solution will not be found [so easily]; it is so extraordinarily complicated that with a system of thought one remains in the unreal and it is no longer suitable for solving real questions. All these action programs repeatedly encounter resistance from industrialists, politicians and lawyers. In Germany, we are fortunate that thought and research are being done at all, unlike in Russia, where there has been no real thought during the entire revolutionary period. Thus, Russia is indeed doomed - both as a state and economically. I suspect that the same thing will happen to us in Germany, despite all our intellectual efforts, because the way things are going it is impossible for us to arrive at a political synthesis in time. There are theorists who cling to some system or other, while there are practical people who put the brakes on; so it can only happen by force, because between the two extremes German politics is now only drifting and letting everything happen. Our party politicians have no idea about the spiritual. I have the honor of knowing leading statesmen personally. I leave with the sad belief that they have nothing of the spirit of the times in them, that they have no faith in the future and only think about how to hold on to the rudder from today to tomorrow.

But you should consider whether there are possibilities for quickly linking what you are trying to achieve here with similar efforts being made throughout Germany, so that you do not feel isolated. It would be right for you to be aware that Germany is not the small circle that is currently gathered here. If you do not succeed in forming a phalanx, this attempt is doomed to failure because it can only be a local one. You cannot shape something in Württemberg, carry out the threefold order, when the whole of Germany is going to the devil. You cannot introduce works councils if the entire political system does not go along with it. Either you join together in a spiritual renewal movement and refrain from engaging in the realpolitik of the day – in which case you have to accept ruin and chaos – or you not only want to strive for renewal, but also to work practically and realpolitically for today and tomorrow, then you have to form a phalanx with all the similarly minded forces of the German people and make concessions to the realities of life. That means, for example, you must begin to work out a very concrete system of workers' councils and make specific foreign policy proposals. Please excuse me for criticizing as an outsider, but I mean well by you and the German people, whose preservation is important to me.

Mr. Jaeger: I would like to be brief. I have gained the impression in the discussion that the question tends to be asked quite generally: How do we initially tread the path that leads to the goal that Dr. Steiner presents to us? This question concerns us all. If the creation of the works councils, as Dr. Steiner demands, is proving so difficult, we must not forget that this is only a very small beginning. To shape economic life, we need not only works councils for the factories, but a whole system of councils in general. But when we talk about it today, we must be clear about the fact that no council system exists at all yet, because what has been practiced by the councils in our country so far is not yet a system at all; it is a lack of system. We would first have to discuss individual questions and make an effort to get started and begin with these councils.

And now a specific question: the representative of Daimler-Werke spoke at length about the works council there and about the relationship with the workers. Dr. Riebensam asked how he should proceed in order to properly get in touch with the workers at Daimler and gain the trust of the workforce. I believe that if you want to achieve a big goal, you first have to look at the small things by taking a practical step like Mr. Molt. [So I would like to ask]: Is it not possible for Dr. Steiner, together with the gentlemen who want this suggestion, to work with the workers at the Daimler factory themselves, in order to inspire others by achieving this goal? We need not only the trust of the workers, but also the cooperation of the industrialists, the factory managers, who are opposed to [such things at first.

Rudolf Steiner: This question can only be answered if this practical experiment could actually be carried out – it could certainly be carried out – but I would like to think that one would first have to be inside the Daimler works.

A speaker: Once you are inside, the problem is a lack of trust. Leading personalities find it difficult to gain trust. Those who are elected by the workers are opposed when they come to an understanding with the management. The point is to explain to the workers: Through this threefold structure we can achieve practical goals; we only want to be the link to bring you together and show you the way.

Rudolf Steiner: The only way to do this is to win over the workers, for example, to an understanding of a common goal that can be achieved outside the walls of the company concerned. If one wanted to go further — and that is what would give it a purpose in the first place; it would have to be possible to lead the workers to this goal — one would have to try to achieve something oneself, somehow. That would only lead to the management of the Daimler-Werke throwing me out. I was told that it was highly peculiar that I had gained the trust of the workers, and that I would actually do things quite differently from the way they were usually done. This different way of doing things is based on the fact that I basically do not promise the workers anything, but only explain the processes to them and such like. That is the big difference: in fact, I don't promise anything – I can really do the same with the workers at the Daimler factory as I am doing now – I can't promise anything because I know for sure that if I make promises to the management I will be thrown out. We must not forget that today it is not about some nebulous abstractions such as “all of Germany” or “what is collapsing,” but rather that it is about actually bringing understanding to the individual point and working from that individual point. If a true understanding of the demands inherent in the really real conditions and their satisfaction were to be awakened in a single point, then the prejudice would not always arise again: This is some kind of general idealism that has nothing to do with practice. If people would take the trouble to study the actually practical impetus of this not thought- but life-principle, then we would make progress. What harms us today is that this so-called system, which is not a system at all, but really something else that is rooted in real life, is taken everywhere merely as a system of thoughts. I can only do what is based on real circumstances. But the right impetus to win over the entire workforce of the Daimler factory would be based on that today. The next step, however, would have to be to come to an agreement with the management. But that would get them fired. And that makes it impossible for someone on the outside to implement anything. It is important that we work on bringing these things to real understanding. Then it will move forward. But I don't think we will make progress with mere abstractions. It is also an abstraction to say that a practical attempt should be made when there is no basis for it.

Mr. Jaeger: I must insist that once the workers' understanding is won, the management would not throw the personality out, but once the personality has gained the trust, then these proposals would be taken up by both sides. It is not a matter of promises here, but only of the works council first reaching an agreement among the management and an understanding between the management and the workers.

Rudolf Steiner: The whole matter is hopeless if there is no understanding of the real threefold social order. This understanding is generally found today among the working class, because these people do not cling to anything that comes from old conditions, but own nothing but themselves and their labor. This understanding is still lacking, however, among the other [people] today; perhaps only when they come to grief will they be forced to let go of what consists only in clinging to the old conditions. Today, they actually find widespread support for the threefold order among the working class, even though the leaders of the working class are not at all able to think in terms of progressive thinking, but basically think much more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.

When people say that these things cannot be understood because they are too outlandish, it is because they have forgotten how to understand things based on life. When it comes to things that arise in life, people must respond with experiences of life. Today, they only respond with what they have based on party judgments and concepts. But if someone has nothing of that, but only what comes from the whole breadth of life, then one says: that is impractical, that does not answer individual questions, one would have liked to have answered individual concrete questions. My “key points” were not written to steer [the social question] into the theoretical or philosophical, but to start somewhere. When you start, you will see that it continues.

Dr. Riebensam: I do not think that Dr. Steiner would be thrown out by me – I am the one who decides, but the commercial management also has something to say – but the current workers' committee would probably throw Dr. Steiner out. It appears as if I wanted to thwart Dr. Steiner's ideas with my real concerns. That was not the aim or the intention of my explanation. I just wanted to discuss the whole matter here. My view is that today we need some way to avoid a struggle with the workers if possible. Now it is a fact that Dr. Steiner has won the trust of a large number of workers today. And that should be enough in Stuttgart to take further steps. This could also pave the way for a way forward that might not require a fight for a while. The workforce is willing to go along with this, even with the plant managers. It would be a great mistake not to pursue such a path. That is my personal opinion.

Mr. Reitz: How can this be done?

Emil Molt: To answer that, we have come together. After Dr. Riebensam has said an important word, after the way is clearly laid out, how two classes come together to form one human race, after these clear ways are laid out here, it is now up to each individual to actually follow the way. The death in all these things is always that there is much more talk than action. Dr. Stadler is right when he says that if we only come together and talk without taking action, then time will rush by so quickly that events will sweep over us. We all agree that the great collapse will come in three to four weeks, when we must be ready to take action to realize the New. For this we need every single person, so that thoughts can be put into action hourly and every minute in daily life. Therefore, in the interest of the people, of humanity, we ask you not only to ask, what does Dr. Steiner think about it, but that each individual is very clear about the fact that the path lies within himself and he must tread it. The old Germany perished because of this non-treading and the present Germany will perish. I believe that when we go home today, we should do so with the firm resolution to move from mere deliberation to action, even if it cannot be perfect – imperfect action is still better than clever thinking, with which we only remain on the surface again and do not reshape things in reality, because reshaping things is what it is all about today.

Perhaps there is still a need to comment on the cultural side of the problems. We would like to create an opportunity for this soon; perhaps individual areas could be worked on separately or together. I would like to hear your opinion on this so that we can go home with a result.

Dr. Weiss: I am very much in favor of continuing the discussion along these lines. However, I think it would be better not to work on the individual areas separately; it is important for us, who are neither entrepreneurs nor tradesmen, to look at all the issues. The opportunity should be created to work on all the issues together, even at the risk of thinning out the ranks. We should not only speak, but also try to work through the press. We should have a very loosely organized press committee that comments in the various party organs, not to fuel polemics. There should also be a special organ of the federation for threefolding to check the manuscripts before sending them to the relevant editorial office, so that the subsequent procedure is not complicated. The Federation for Threefolding should not, of course, restrict freedom of expression, but we must organize ourselves in such a way that everyone uses their contacts with the press to comment on the issues in question, but the articles should be sent in beforehand so that we can proceed in a concentrated manner.

Emil Molt: That is precisely what we are aiming for; we should actually be commenting every day.

A speaker: We came here today for a discussion. It would be desirable if a number of industrialists, as representatives of the owners, and plant managers, and employees, as representatives of the employee committees, came together to talk.

Emil Molt: In my opinion, this should really be attempted; it would be the first step in preparing a functioning works council.

Dr. Riebensam: I think the approach should be somewhat different; your works councils should invite our workers' committees.

Emil Molt: You can do both; the workers would have to see that the initiative comes from the factory owners.

Dr. Riebensam: It should come from the workers' committees, not from the factory owners.

Emil Molt: But otherwise the factory owners would not come; but it would be best to discuss this afterwards.

A speaker: Couldn't we, so to speak, issue certain guidelines to give the factory owners something to work on? That way, the management of the large companies could process the matter and discuss it with the workers' committees. Perhaps this would be a way to shorten the whole thing.

In response to the question of whether they would like to meet again next Thursday, it was decided to meet again at 7 p.m. that day.

Wilhelm von Blume: Dear attendees, on behalf of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, I would like to welcome you again today. We have planned an evening on which questions are to be answered that have been or may be asked from the floor, and I would first like to ask Dr. Steiner to make a few introductory remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, this evening is primarily intended to answer questions that have arisen from the esteemed audience in connection with the impulse given by the idea of social threefolding. Tomorrow I will deal with one of the main objections in a lecture to be held here, the objection that the impulse of the threefold social organism is only some kind of sophisticated idea, some kind of ideology or utopia, and tomorrow I will try to prove that it is really the most practical matter in our present time. Today, allow me just to say a few words to introduce the answering of questions that makes up the content of today's agenda.

It has, in fact, been little noticed, my dear attendees, that the impulse for the threefold social organism is intended to point out the most significant task that has been set for humanity in modern times as a result of developmental conditions. It is truly not out of exaggerated pessimism when one expresses the view today that all too little – truly all too little – of the great seriousness of the time, of the great seriousness of the demands of the time, is recognized in the broadest circles. We are indeed faced with a task that is almost gigantic. For the whole development of modern humanity has come to a head in such a way that this task has arisen at last, and it has arisen out of the momentous events of this world war catastrophe. But the extraordinary significance of this task is by no means understood in the broadest circles today, and one would like to believe that it is itself a task to make the people of the present age fully aware of the seriousness of this task. The task first emerges in the phenomena, in the facts of the time. People from the most diverse classes, from the most diverse social circles and also from the most diverse parties take their stand on these phenomena, on these facts of the time. From all that has emerged from such statements to date, two things stand out. I would like to characterize these two things in these few introductory words; I will go into more detail tomorrow. I would like to characterize this in the introduction because, however desirable it may be to discuss more individual, concrete, practical questions in today's question, But today it is necessary for people to look again and again at the big, comprehensive picture of the task, if only to awaken in people their sense of responsibility towards the great issues of the times.

There are two things that can be observed when considering the opinions of the most diverse circles on this great task today. One can say: One group of people is primarily interested in restoring in some way, in some form - in a form that is acceptable - what has been destroyed by the significant world war catastrophe. And the other type of person, coming from a completely different background, is primarily interested in doing everything differently than it was before the world war catastrophe - partly with the aim of ensuring that such terrible things never happen to humanity again, partly also out of the feeling and conviction that we cannot move forward on the basis of the old economic, state and spiritual order, that a new construction must be tackled very seriously. If we want to call one type of people – in the face of the completely new demands – more the conservative people, then our gaze is directed to all those circles that more or less belong to the old social worldviews, which are somehow intertwined with what the old worldviews have brought to humanity, especially in terms of economic orders. On the other hand, we see the forward-rushing parties, which are made up mainly of the proletariat, and there we see that which takes a completely different approach to the great task and which takes such a different approach that one type of people no longer understands the other. If we look for the reasons for this lack of understanding – I will only sketch them out today – if we look for the reasons for this lack of understanding, we will find that on the one hand the representatives of the old, who in some way want to continue to be associated with this old, have lost an actual cultural goal in the course of recent history and have retained an old cultural practice in which they have continued to work. These people, dear assembled presenters, have a practice, but this practice is no longer imbued with purposeful impulses. This practice always expresses itself in such a way that when you ask these people: How do you actually want to move forward now that the big tasks are coming? they somehow answer with what only means a continuation of the old; but they do not answer with any great goal either; basically, they only answer with what has emerged from the routine of their previous practice. They have a practice without a goal. On the other side stands the proletariat. It has a goal, a goal that can be expressed in the most diverse ways, but it is a goal. But this proletariat has no practice; this proletariat lacks any practical possibility of realizing what it somehow defines as its goals. So on the one hand there is traditional practice without a goal, on the other hand there is a new goal without practice. The proletariat has been kept away from practice, only summoned to the machine, only harnessed to the factory and to capitalism. From this, its goal has emerged, in that it, I would like to say, is rushing against what it has experienced, but it is never connected with the management, with the leadership of the economic forms themselves. Today it demands new forms of life; but it knows nothing of practice. Where does this gap come from?

This gap arises from the fact that we are faced with the greatest problem of modern times, and this greatest problem of modern times has arisen precisely in the age that has brought industrialism to its highest flowering. This problem is hidden at first in the economic sphere, but it extends its various branches to the other forms of life. This problem is so momentous that even a keen mind such as Walter Rathenau's has at most touched on it, but has not come to any clear understanding of this far-reaching problem of the present, this problem from which we all suffer, this problem that imperiously demands its solution. At least the impulse for the threefolding of the social organism would like to consider this problem without prejudice and full of life. And if I am to hint at it in a few words, so to speak as an introduction to tomorrow's lecture, which is to deal with it in its specific forms, then I must say: this problem, it had to slowly arise in humanity, had to, so to speak, rise to its highest development in the time of ever-expanding industrialism and modern technology, and now stands before us, questioning and threatening. It consists in the fact that all industrialism works with a deficit in the national economy – that is the case, there is no other way. The national economy must be attuned to this, knowing that all industrialism, insofar as it develops further and further through its means of production, works with a deficit in relation to what the national economy is for humanity. Insofar as industrialism works with a deficit, what is missing in the human national economy must be replaced from another source. That is the great problem of the present time, that all industrialism works with a deficit and that the question cannot be asked by me or others as to whether this deficit will be covered, but life is constantly being asked to cover the deficit of industrialism. Where does it come from? It is covered only by the soil, my dear audience, only by what the soil produces. In the modern economy, we are constantly involved in this exchange process [between industry and land production], which is covered up by secondary processes – in that the deficit of industry has to be covered by the surplus of land production in the broadest sense. Everything that is involved in the question of wages, the question of capital, and the question of prices in modern life is due solely to the fact that the surplus in the production of land must migrate into the deficit in industry.

But this, dear ladies and gentlemen, is linked to something else. It is linked to the fact that, on the one hand, everything in man that is connected with the soil tends towards a certain conservatism. This can be strictly proven, but today I will only hint at it in my introduction. If only the land and its products were available, we would have to remain more or less in a primitive state in terms of culture. The progress of humanity stems from the fact that industry, with its extensive division of labor, favors this progress. But at the same time, industry becomes the basis for progress in the most diverse fields, first of liberalism, then of socialism. Thus, what is expressed in the significant, I would even say bookish, contrast between land and industrial means of production is transferred to human sentiment. And as human sentiments clash with one another in life, this conflict is intimately connected with what underlies it: the opposing economic interests of land and industrial means of production. But in modern times this whole problem has intensified in yet another way. Not only that in parliaments liberal and socialist sit opposite the conservative, stemming simply from the assets and liabilities of the entire world economy; not only that in modern times the conservative and progressive element has crept into the people's assemblies of humanity , but economic interests have also crept in, with everything connected with the land, on the one hand, working for what remains stationary, and everything connected with industry, on the other hand, working for what is progressing. And so it has come about that, on the one hand, man's spiritual progress and, on the other, man's economic interests have been chaotically thrown together in our modern unitary state system.

This is the great problem that confronts people today, I would even say it is a gigantic one. People on the left and the right are fiddling around with this problem. Because it is so huge, that is why it is so difficult to reach an understanding. People on the one hand only want to consider the most immediate issues and only call that practical, while the times demand that we find some solution to the great accounting disparity between the land products and industrial products, from which humanity feeds, clothes and satisfies other needs, in the more recent development of humanity. I would say that everything that has occurred can ultimately be traced back, almost in terms of numbers, to the accounting result mentioned. But it takes real goodwill to engage with the fundamental forces of real practical life, even if you just want to see the task. We are at the point today where we have to see this task, that what is chaotically mixed up must be properly separated again. The impulse for a threefold social organism wants to face up to this task, which wants to place a healthy social organism on its healthy three legs in the right way: on the spiritual, the legal and the economic. This problem has arisen simply from what is inherent in this development of modern times. And even if, for my sake, people still find the next results, to which the impulse for the threefold social organism has come, disputable, one comes, without asking about these three areas of life in such a way that for their proper organization in the future, one does not come any closer to the greatest problem that has been set for us; one does not come any closer to what alone can lead out of the threatening chaos and confusion.

I wished to say this by way of introduction for the simple reason that, on the one hand, it should be seen how the impulse for the threefold social organism is really connected with the highest that is set before humanity as a great historical and because, on the other hand, the answer to the question will show how much can already be said today, based on a real observation of life, about what can arise in detail from the questions posed today.

I will now begin by answering the questions that have been put to me.

Wilhelm von Blume: So we will now begin to answer the questions that have been put to us in writing.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I will try to answer the questions that were handed to me in writing in a not too long form, for the simple reason that I believe that perhaps afterwards numerous questions from the esteemed audience may still be asked orally or in writing.

The first bundle of questions that I have before me is headed “On Threefolding”. The first question:

In what way are individuals, associations and enterprises placed under the three different organizations? Individual borderline cases are, for example, the newspaper publisher, public health institutions, theaters and cinema enterprises.

Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to focus on the newspaper industry in particular from this first question. Because it is precisely something like the newspaper industry that will make it possible to see how, on the one hand, the threefold social organism can actually lead to a complete transformation of the current situation, but in an organic way, and how, on the other hand, it can result in the unity of life not being disturbed at all. Basically, it will also be possible to show that what people say about the incomprehensibility of the three-part social organism is actually based on the fact that, out of old habits of thinking, they do not want to engage in the present with what is necessary. But they will have to decide to come to terms with this necessity.

As you can see, dear attendees, in the newspaper business, all three aspects of human life basically come together. In the newspaper business, on the one hand, we have the publisher, the person who has to ensure that the newspaper is printed, that it is distributed in the appropriate manner, and so on – this is a purely economic task. On the other hand, we have those who write the newspaper. I believe that today, many people are already comfortable enough in our strange circumstances to come to the conclusion that newspapers should be written differently than they are often written. You see, something beneficial for humanity can only come out of writing a newspaper if what is written arises solely from the interests and needs of the spiritual life of humanity and from the needs that arise from the fact that the spiritual life also looks at the various other branches of life. The newspaper writer and everything that belongs to the editorial staff belongs to the spiritual life. And since we are dealing on both sides, both in the economic part of the newspaper business and in the spiritual part of the newspaper business, with people who, in turn, as human beings, are in relationships not only with their subscribers, but also with the whole of the general public, we are dealing with relationships that take place from person to person, that is, with legal relationships. The issue at hand, esteemed attendees, is that in the future, especially in a business such as the newspaper industry, the economic, the legal and the intellectual, cultural aspects will not mesh for the detriment of humanity, otherwise, in the culmination of the disaster, we will end up with things as we are experiencing them in the present, for example. Recently, a strange advertisement appeared in the so-called press. It called for the world of big industry and the world of capitalists in particular to join forces to create a new newspaper. So it is advertising for a new newspaper, especially among capitalists and big industry. The purpose of this newspaper is to fight with all spiritual means against the socialization of the means of production. So, dear attendees, the interest of capitalists and big industrialists is supposed to enslave everything that should actually educate humanity from the judgment that comes from impulses of the spiritual world. Those who have some experience in life will know how, especially in the newspaper industry, these things have increasingly merged in recent times and have developed in a particularly grotesque way under the present circumstances.

In the future, the aim must be for the newspaper publisher and printer to be a mere economist, subordinate to the administration of the economic part of the social organism. He will be part of the economic organism with all the interests he can develop within his newspaper business. The editorial staff will not be part of the economic organism, but will be entirely subject to the self-administration of intellectual life, along with the other branches of intellectual life. The editorial staff will form a unit with all that is teaching, art or the like, which are other branches of intellectual life. How a particular newspaper publisher can come to be a particular editor depends on the contract that can be concluded between the newspaper publisher and the editor, whereby the editor, because he belongs to the self-government of the spiritual organism, is independent of the newspaper publisher with regard to his entire material life. The editor will merely have an interest in being able to pursue his profession at all. If he did not pursue this interest in practicing his profession, he would be without a livelihood. But the moment he succeeds in concluding a contract with some administration, he will not receive compensation for this profession from the interests of that administration, but from the interests of the self-governing intellectual life. If any matters arise through which one or other part of the newspaper violates the law, this violation of rights will be subject to the laws of the constitutional state. In the future, therefore, it will be desirable for such a branch of production to be influenced by the three great administrative branches of intellectual, legal and economic life. In the most diverse branches of production, those interests that are administered from the most diverse directions will converge. And it will come about in the cooperation of people that these interests - which otherwise, when they are confounded, when they are mixed together into a tangle, only interfere with each other - that these interests will precisely moralize, ethicalize, and support each other. The one who really has a practical mind will say to himself: There is no doubt that such a division of a single trade can really be carried out in practice. And by this structuring of the entire social organism, which reaches into the individual circumstances, we then have the recovery of the whole of social life. It is just that people today are not accustomed to thinking about what leads to such a recovery. They are also unaccustomed to it because they have to let go of many things that they consider almost indispensable from certain old ways of life. Today it is considered essential that the person who takes the economic risk for a newspaper also makes the person employed by the newspaper on the editorial staff his writer. He will not be able to do that in the future. From this will arise a great independence of the writer from the economic interests of the newspaper publisher in the newspaper industry, and precisely in this branch will come a recovery that we truly need and must admit that we need if we want to address the living conditions of a healthy social organism.

The second question put to me is:

Will the municipal administration, with its enterprises that break through the tripartite division, be maintained in the areas of the three organizations – for example, schools, gasworks, and jurisdiction?

Now, dear attendees, it is not the intention, in this transitional period – in which we are not even in it yet, but are only striving for it – to talk about the size of the individual spiritual, legal and economic areas, which I talked about in the last lecture here. In regard to the external structure of social life, not much needs to change at all if there is to be a genuine socialization of all human life. But what I have just explained for a single trade can just as easily be carried out by any state, an empire or a single local authority. Schools, gasworks, courts of law, they will have their various aspects, partly on the legal side, partly on the economic side – and in the case of schools, also on the spiritual side – and what emanates from the three organizations and their administrations will play a role in the individual enterprise, be it spiritual or more or less merely material, economic. The third question:

Who decides on the respective affiliation to one of the three organisms?

This question, dear attendees, actually arises – forgive the harsh word – from a certain prejudice that everything must come from an authority. In what is striven for as a healthy social organism for the future, the affiliation arises from the matter itself. We have just seen in our discussion of the newspaper industry how this affiliation arises from the matter at hand. From this affiliation, a much more comprehensive answer will be given than is currently thought. And a question like this one - it will be recognized as one that actually flows from the present-day mood of obedience to authority, and not from a truly factual basis. The fourth question:

Is there, in addition to or above the special representatives of the three members, any thought of a parliament consisting of their top leadership or an elected parliament (for the individual states? for the empire?)?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it must first be stated that, of course, as I have explained in my book on the social question, the question of what is the administration or representation in the individual of the three parts of the social organism is that it must belong to the others in some way and that a mutual exchange must take place through people. But in this respect, too, people often think far too stereotypically. For example, it is stated — and this is not in this question — in a long document that was sent to me a few days ago that threefolding actually makes three different parliaments necessary: a cultural parliament, a state parliament and an economic parliament. Now, I am of the opinion that if three parliaments with three ministries were to sit side by side in such a stereotyped way, then the only consequence that could arise would be that all three would sabotage each other. And this is precisely what follows from a true understanding of the actual situation: that parliamentarism – and only a democratic parliamentarism is a true parliamentarism – can only be based on that which can be established between human beings by virtue of the fact that the human being is simply an adult, a mature human being. Everyone must be able to participate in democratic parliamentary life who is an adult, a mature human being. For everything that comes to a head in the legal sphere can be based on what a normal, healthy, adult, mature human being is, on what he can know, think, feel and want. But economic life has become mixed up with this legal life, which is therefore not only based on the feelings and thoughts of the adult, mature person, but which is based, firstly, on economic experience, which one can only acquire in a specific area can only be acquired in a specific, concrete area, secondly on the actual foundations, I would like to say on credit in the broadest sense. I do not mean monetary credit, but credit in the broadest sense, which is generated in a group of people by the fact that this group of people is involved in a particular branch of production. Because everything in economic life must develop from actual experience and the actual administrative basis of the specific individual branch, the organizational structure that exists in economic life can only arise on such a basis. That is to say, only an appropriate administration can develop in economic life from economic experience and economic facts. There will be no parliamentary representation at the top, but rather a structure of associations, coalitions, cooperatives from the professional classes, from the grouping of production and consumption and so on, which organize themselves and can manage themselves. And this structure will also develop a certain leadership, I would say a central council. But this cannot be the same structure that is expressed in what must be independently separated as the legal basis. On the contrary, it is precisely that which is to have an effect on economic life as law that will have the right effect as law, because it can now arise purely, without being contaminated by economic interests, on the legal basis of the community of all people who have come of age. And just as little as economic life can be administered in a stereotyped, parliamentary way, just as little can spiritual life be administered in this way. Spiritual life, in turn, must develop an organization based on its own laws, which will be quite different from that of economic life, because of its special circumstances. That which arises at the very apex of intellectual life, together with all that which stands in the middle, on the legal ground, what is administered by parliament and by ministers, and with that which arises as a kind of central council in economic life, will be able to order the common affairs. I know that there are many people who cannot imagine such a thing; but in practice it will be simpler, above all more fruitful, than all that stands in its place today.

The second set of questions is entitled “On Economic Life”. First:

What will happen to the existing property of the wealthy, in particular agricultural and urban property?

The question is clearly explained in my book on the Social Question. That which has led us into the individual crises of economic life and now into the great crisis - for such is the present world catastrophe - is that form of modern economic life which I have tried to highlight in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. In this book, the question is answered as to how, in the future, on the one hand, the means of production, which consists of land, and, on the other hand, the industrial means of production, must be viewed differently. The industrial means of production may only suck capital out of the economic body until they are finished; when they are finished, their sucking of capital out of the economic body is also finished. In other words, industrial means of production can only cost something while they are being worked on until they are completed; then they have to be transferred to the circulation process for means of production; then they have to be what is generally owned. But the land, which is not manufactured but is already there, can never cost anything.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, if you think in a healthy way, it already arises in a certain way today, but only in the individual cases where you think economically in a healthy way. We have built a structure in Dornach as a School of Spiritual Science that is not yet finished, which has been affected in its completion by the catastrophe of the world wars. We have, of course, built it out of the present economic conditions, but the question can be raised about this building: when we are all dead, when we are no longer there when the building is finished, who will own this building, who will be able to sell it to someone else? This question answers itself for our building. It will not belong to anyone; it naturally belongs to the general public. For it is built on the sound foundation that it will one day [in the future] be able to pass as the common property of all humanity to whoever can manage it in turn. One only has to have come up with such a thing in practice. In the present economic system, one can only come close to this, but one will see that what is written in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” about the fact that every purchase relationship ceases with a means of production when it is completed, and that this means of production, which can no longer be bought in other forms, then passes into the administration of society. And one will see that there is something eminently practical in this.

The second question:

How should small-scale crafts and trades be organized?

It is to be organized in no different way than large-scale industry and trade, for the simple reason that it will follow from the laws of economic life itself - from the laws that I explained in the lecture the other day - that a trade or business that is too large harms and starves those who are outside of it, and that a trade or business that is too small harms those who are within it. Size will be determined by the future economic situation.

The third question:

Should trade, in particular wholesale trade in import and export, be stopped?

That would, of course, be completely absurd if it were to stop. Anyone who really thinks through with a practical mind what is explained in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” will see that the actual conditions at the boundaries of the economic, legal and intellectual spheres will by no means change. Not even the initiative of the individual will change as a result, which is of course necessary, especially in the external world. What is changed are only the social conditions within. In fact, only things that have nothing to do with what is happening on the borders will be changed, except that on these borders, what has previously had such a disturbing effect and has come to a head in the terrible explosions of war, will harmonize with each other. The fact that economic conditions at the borders have a harmonizing effect on international legal and spiritual conditions – for example, also at language borders – is precisely why the threefold social organism in its international relationship, as I explained in my book, will have its greatest significance. It will no longer be possible for what develops on the one hand from the economic and on the other from the legal or from the spiritual, to which the national also belongs, to mix in a colorful way with imports and exports. The absurdity of a “national economy” will, however, come to an end, for the simple reason that only economic conditions will be decisive for export and import across borders and because there will no longer be the possibility of such world conflicts being caused by the intertwining of economic and political interests. A great deal of what led to the present world war catastrophe lies in such a tangle of political, cultural and economic issues, as has emerged, for example, in the Sandschak question or the Dardanelles question in the southeast of the European continent or in the Baghdad railway problem.

The fourth question:

Will the economy of exchange by 'wages' be replaced by a natural economy?

In my book and in many lectures I have explained that the concept of wages will no longer have any real meaning in the future, because a kind of socialization will occur between manual laborers and intellectual workers. So there can be no question of a return to a purely natural economy. But money will — even if the leading commercial state of England adheres to the gold standard — at least initially in domestic trade — take on a different significance. What adheres to money today — that it is a commodity — will fall away. What will be present in the monetary system will be only a kind of changing accounting of the exchange of goods between the people belonging to the economic area. A kind of written credit will be kept in what is used as a monetary record. And a deduction of these credits will take place when one acquires anything one needs. A kind of bookkeeping, walking bookkeeping, will be the monetary system. Money, which is a commodity today and its equivalent, gold, which is only a sham commodity, will no longer be a commodity in the future.

The fifth question:

Is compulsory labor envisaged?

Now, dear readers, anyone who delves into the spirit of my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” will see that what must seem to every humanely thinking person - I say quite bluntly here - must appear as the most abominable, a bureaucratically ordered compulsion to work, that in the future [in a threefold social organism] can be eliminated. Of course, everyone is forced to work by their social circumstances, and one has only the choice of either starving or working. There cannot be any compulsion to work other than that which arises from the circumstances in this way [in a social order] in which the freedom of the human being is a basic condition.

The sixth question:

Is the abolition of inheritance law planned?

Inheritance law, to the extent that parts of it remain, will at most be based on the fact that in a transitional period some kind of reckoning must be made with feelings of piety and the like. But inheritance law [in the sense of the previous inheritance law] will no longer be talked about in the future for the simple reason that, on the one hand, it can no longer be the case that something that cannot actually be sold, that is not for sale, still has value for someone. On the other hand, inheritance will no longer be needed, because under the institutions of a healthy social organism, people will be able to provide for the future of those who belong to them in a completely different way than is the case today under the purely materialistic law of inheritance. I have stated this in my book.

The third set of questions is headed: “On practical feasibility”. The first question:

Does not the accidental nature of personal talent (often not factual content, but individual ability such as skill, oratory and the like) create an upper class with the danger of abuse of the power entrusted to it, as well as corruption, and towards which envy and resentment of the lower class persists?

Now, dear attendees, anyone who does not want this formation will never be able to contribute anything to any fruitful shaping of the social organism if it does not correspond to the absolutely ideal state. The greatest enemy of all social impulses is when, through these social impulses, one wants to establish, so to speak, the happiness of humanity. I would like to use a comparison here. You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, let us take the human organism, let us assume that it is a so-called healthy organism. You don't feel it at all, and precisely because you don't feel anything in your organism, it is a healthy organism. Joy, harmony, and inner soul culture must first arise on the basis of such a healthy organism. You cannot expect the doctor to give you soul joy or inner soul culture in addition to health, but you can only expect him to make your organism healthy. It is only on the basis of a healthy organism that inner soul culture can arise. But if the organism is sick, then the soul shares in the sickness, then its inner life is dependent on this sickness. It is the same in the social organism. The sick social organism makes people unhappy; but the healthy social organism cannot yet make people happy, but only creates the conditions for human happiness, which can arise when the social organism is healthy. Therefore, the impulse for the tripartite social organism is to seek the living conditions of a healthy social organism. Of course, corruption or the like can also arise there – that cannot be denied – but such corruptions can be improved by countermeasures, and the greatest prospect of improving them when they occur lies precisely in the health of the social organism itself. I am firmly convinced that if the social organism is healthy, then the professional windbags with their gift of the gab will simply drive people away; they will not have much support. At present, due to our social circumstances, this is not yet the case. Particularly in those spheres where intellectual life is supposed to flourish, it sometimes happens that the audience of some professional babbler in a professorial chair takes to its heels, but they have to pay their college fees and may also take their exams. And professional babbling with its corruption has no particular effect on real life, on the living conditions of the social organism. Such things will naturally fall away in the future when man is instructed in the spiritual life to rely on the fact that he must gain the trust of his fellow human beings and that, for example, only on this trust of his fellow human beings can his achievements be based.

The second question, and this is the last question that has been put to me in this bundle of questions:

What evidence is there that communism, which does not strive for the equality of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie but for the rule of the proletariat, and which believes that the bourgeoisie will not voluntarily renounce its present position, will renounce its program of power in favor of threefolding and see an accommodation on the part of the propertied classes not only as an advance payment?

This question cannot be answered simply on the basis of the structure of the threefold organism. Rather, it must be said that the gulf that has arisen between the proletariat, on the one hand, and the non-proletariat, on the other, is essentially the fault of the leading circles , that is, the non-proletariat, and that the next task of these leading circles would be to really understand the demands of the proletariat and to be able to respond to them; for the proletariat will need, above all, the strength of intellectual workers. It is not in some impossible demands from one side or the other that one should see a danger, but only in the lack of goodwill to build any kind of bridge across the abyss.

There are now a few other written questions, for example the question:

In the three-part social organism, human labor will lose the character of a commodity. There will no longer be a wage in the traditional sense. The workers of a company will receive a contractually agreed portion of the total revenue of the company in question, while another portion will belong to the employees and the manager. How will it be ensured that the worker is guaranteed a kind of subsistence minimum, for example if a single company has a low earning capacity?

This question is dealt with in my book, and I will only note here that the question in the most eminent sense, when the three members of the healthy social organism really exist, is an economic question, and that the socialization of economic life will give rise to a major practical question for those administrations that will be active within the economic body. In essence, I would say that this question boils down to the following: what is today called the minimum subsistence level is still conceived in terms of the wage relationship. This kind of thinking will not be able to take place in the same way in the case of independent economic activity. There, the question will have to be posed purely and simply from the point of view of economic life. This question will then arise in such a way that a person, by performing some kind of service, by producing something, will receive in exchange as many other human services as he needs to satisfy his needs and those of those who belong to him, until he has produced a new, similar product. In doing so, only what the person has to do for his family in terms of work and the like must be taken into account. Then one will find a certain, I would say original cell of economic life. And that which will make this original cell of economic life what will make people satisfy their needs until they produce a similar new product, that applies to all branches of spiritual and material life. It will have to be organized in such a way that the associations, the coalitions, the cooperatives of the kind I have described earlier will have to ensure that this primal cell of economic life can exist. That is to say, that each product, in comparison with other products, has a value equal to the other products needed to satisfy needs until a new, similar product is produced. The fact that this original cell of economic life does not yet exist today is precisely because labor, goods and rights converge in the supply and demand of today's market and that these three areas must be separated in the future in the tripartite, healthy social organism.

Then the following question was asked:

How does Dr. Steiner envision an improved future for the status of private teachers and teachers of similar professions whose necessary income depends on the number of hours they personally work? How will it be possible in the future to strip their labor of its character as a commodity?

Well, that takes care of itself, because anyone who works as a teacher in the spiritual life will, when they are no longer tied into the state machine, actually be more or less free, but then in a healthy way, like any spiritual cultural activity in the threefold organism. That is about all that can be said on the matter. Simply, such persons as are meant here will be equated with those who today have monopolies, in that they are, in the field of the spiritual, combined in their position with purely state affairs.

I think I will now take a break in answering the questions submitted in writing so that any questions that may arise from the honored audience are not affected. The questions that I answered first have been on my mind for quite some time, and I wanted to answer them first today because I believe that they could be really significant for a larger circle. If we are unable to answer all the questions today, we can do so at a later date. I think it would be a good idea to let the questions that may arise from the audience approach us now.

Wilhelm von Blume: So I ask the esteemed attendees, if you have any questions on your mind, to speak up now and submit them in writing as far as possible. But you are also welcome to ask questions orally. We would just ask you to come here and ask the question from here so that we can hear you all.

Perhaps I may in the meantime answer the one question that was raised earlier with a word that I would like to add to what Dr. Steiner said, because this question has occasionally arisen for me myself and I therefore well understood that it was asked. It is the question of the position of the municipalities in the future threefold social organism. Perhaps the questioner would like to know more about what the situation of the municipalities will actually be in the future threefold social organism. The question has been asked: What will happen to the municipal schools, what will happen to the gasworks and so on? Behind this is the question: what will become of the community in the future, if, as there is no doubt, the gasworks, as an event in economic life, must be integrated into the overall organization of economic life, and can no longer be considered a special municipal institution? The questioner did not mention anything else, but the question of housing is at least as important. Who will be responsible for the construction of housing in the future? The construction of housing is, to put it bluntly, an economic process, since it involves 'production'. And there can be no doubt that the allocation of housing for use can also be regarded as an economic process. In the future, this matter will have to be dealt with by the special economic organization. One might think that the community will lose all or at least almost all of the tasks it has had until today – so what will actually become of the community? And yet: the community remains, and the community will continue to play an extremely important role in the future, just as the state remains and will continue to have tasks to perform in the future. I think everyone will immediately feel that the transfer of the gasworks from pure municipal administration to a special economic administration also has its very, very good sides, when they consider that the price of gas, which is charged by the community today, is not set with the aim of enabling as many people as possible to have this gas at a price that reflects the cost of production, but rather because the gasworks is a municipal institution that generates income and [through the surplus] municipal finances are maintained. The same applies to the power stations, the trams and so on. This means that these institutions, which are actually supposed to pursue very specific economic purposes, must also serve the financial purposes of the community, and often enough in such a way that the actual purpose of providing the community's residents with these extremely important goods is severely compromised. So it is certainly an advantage if, in the future, the community can no longer use such institutions for its financial purposes, but if they are only used for purely economic purposes. But the community remains the organization subordinate to the state in all matters of law and administration, that is, in particular, the police and the so-called welfare work - the welfare work insofar as it relates to the maintenance of the strength of the individual. That will be the task of the community, and that is where it has its most important task, as it does today. The community has only taken on economic activity because no one else has properly addressed this task, and it is fortunate, I believe, for a proper community life if in the future the purely economic is no longer the concern of the community. It is fortunate that in the future the municipal administration will no longer be organized in such a way that selfish interests prevail, but will be organized in such a way that every individual can effectively come to his or her rights.

As for spiritual life, what applies in general to the separation of this spiritual life from the influence of the state must also apply to the community. It is clear that today the communities have achieved a great deal of good in this area, but the disadvantages of economic interests interfering in cultural matters, which keep cropping up, can be felt clearly enough in the area of community life. But nevertheless, the community still has the very large area that it had before it took over such community institutions. So the fear that the community would become completely superfluous is just as unjustified as the other fear that the state would actually be finished off by this threefold order. It is not.

No further questions have been asked from the audience so far. Dr. Steiner will now answer the questions submitted in writing.

Rudolf Steiner: There is still the question:

The Steinerian economic order will have to submit to a certain government policy in broad outline, such as the nationality principle, the militaristic or pacifistic world order. Will the burden on the economy (apart from the current war debts and war reparations) be any different according to these guiding principles? Will not, for example, a nationalist policy, conceived in the old way, again burden the economy above all else and undermine the general welfare?

Now, dear attendees, the question arises from a not yet complete penetration of what the essence of the threefold social organism actually is. You see, the damage caused by the unitary state arises from the fact that, let us say, in the legal sphere, and thus to the greatest extent in politics, economic interests interfere, for example, when farmers form an alliance and assert themselves in the state parliament as the “Alliance of Farmers” and there, based on their interests, influence the legal system. On the other hand, harm can come about when a corporation that pursues purely spiritual interests – let us say, for example, the Catholic-organized “center” – in turn sits in the state parliament and there makes the legal interests, I would say, into reshaped spiritual interests. Now you will say: Well, in the future the three elements will exist separately: the spiritual organism, which is completely self-governing from the spiritual principles; the legal organism, which will form the continuation of the present state organism, but which will not have the spiritual and economic life within itself, but only the legal and political life; the economic organism, the cycle of economic life. But, you will say, the three areas do have certain things, certain interests in common, and they are connected through the individual himself; the individual is involved in some kind of business in which the three independent administrative areas play a role. You will ask: Yes, could not some club or the like assert itself in the future for the parliament of the legal ground, which carries the economic interests into the legal ground and asserts its interests in the state parliament , as for example, in the unified state, the farmers' union wants to make rights out of economic interests, or as the center wants to make rights out of religious, confessional interests, that is, out of spiritual life, through coalitions with other parties?

Now, dear attendees, the essence of the threefold social organism, which is still so little understood today, is that in the realm of the economic plane, only economic measures can be taken, not legal measures and not measures that have anything to do with the development of human abilities, which are to be administered in the realm of spiritual life; in the realm of the legal life, only legal issues will have to be developed at all. Let us assume, then, that a club with economic interests were to be found in the parliament of the legal sphere, in the state parliament. It would never be able to take measures that somehow influence economic life, since only legal issues relating to the equality of all people are ever discussed in this parliament. They cannot be conceived in terms of economic life. Economic life is out of the question in the Parliament of Right. It is impossible for anyone, no matter how much economic interest he may have, to assert his economic interests in the Parliament of Right, because nothing of an economic character can take place on the basis of the life of right; that can only take place on the basis of economic life. The point is that it is not a question of dividing men into classes, but of dividing the social organism itself. Thus the present unified state breaks down into three areas, and the interests of each area cannot be asserted in any way in the other two, because such assertion would have no effect in these areas. It is precisely this consistency that will bring about the future healing of the social organism; it is also the reason why this tripartite social organism is a social necessity.

I believe that most of those who have already familiarized themselves with the impulse of the tripartite organism consider what is meant by it to be much too sophisticated, something beyond practical application, something that someone has thought about and come up with: The unified organism did not work out well, so let's make three of them. That is not the point. What is important is the recognition of real life and real necessities, which lead to the tripartite social organism as a consequence. Today, we often hear people say: “We don't understand what is actually wanted.” They don't understand what is actually being sought. Today, so many people say to such an impulse: “We don't understand that.” Why is that? You see, that comes from something that is supposed to be different and better through the threefold social organism. Today, when people are called upon to judge something, what is missing above all is the connection with life. When someone speaks today from a theory, from something that can be explained with a few general principles, which are ultimately comprehensible to every normal person when they come of age, then people understand it. But when we speak today of something that cannot be grasped in this way, but for which a true connection with life is necessary, where one must appeal to life experience, then people come and say they do not understand it. Where does this come from? It comes from the unitary state that we have had for four centuries; through this unitary state, people have been thrown into a life in which they are involved in a particular area of life and have acquired a certain routine in it. They call this routine their practice. They know what they have through this routine. Otherwise, they are educated by the state from the lowest school level. What will play a role in the future is not part of their education, real life is not part of their education, but decrees, laws and so on are part of their education. The abstract nature of the decree and the law flows into human thinking [from the lowest school level], so that today people only have the routine of some individual branch, which they handle quite mechanically. Anyone who disagrees with them on this point, based on a broader experience of life, is called a fool or an impractical person. And on top of that, they have a head full of abstractions because they have only been educated from decrees, laws, teaching objectives and so on, which are not taken from life, but merely from some abstract way of thinking, which has sole authority on the legal ground, but on no other ground of life. In the legal sphere, it has legitimacy because, in the legal sphere, anything that any normal person of legal age can spin out of themselves simply by being of age can be claimed as a human right over against all other people. But what cannot be spun out of the ground is what must flow into the administration of economic life and into the development of intellectual life. Therefore, because we have lacked the freedom of intellectual life, the self-reliance of intellectual life, we have today this strange phenomenon that people can only grasp what they have been thinking for a long time.

Recently, I spoke in a neighboring town about the same issues that I am talking about here now. Afterwards, someone came forward to join the discussion who put forward something from which one could see that he had only taken up and even heard from my remarks what he had been used to for decades, even down to the sentence structure. But what had not been in his brain box for decades, that man did not even hear, it passed him by so strangely that he did not even hear it, that he denied it altogether in the discussion. This is because something like the impulse for a tripartite social organism must appeal not to what we have been educated to through abstract decrees, laws, teaching objectives, courses and so on, but must appeal to what people understand from life itself. That is why such a gulf has opened up today, when one speaks not out of utopian and ideological thinking, but precisely out of life. The more practical one's words are today, the more impractical people call one, because people do not have a real life practice, but only life routine and abstractions in their heads. That is also what leads to the fear that in the future, in the tripartite social organism, there could somehow be a tyranny from one side or the other. This cannot happen because, as I have explained, such a tyranny cannot even assert itself. No matter how many laws are passed in the right-wing parliament, they would not affect economic life, because even what would be dangerous for the interests of economic life could not affect economic life, since it is independently administered.

Another question:

On the other hand, how are the requirements of social policy, for example support for war invalids, orphans, the weak, and so on, regulated? In particular, on what scale? How are the results of the economy used? Couldn't a suitable government configuration render Dr. Steiner's social policy illusory? Even if the main excesses of capitalism, the rent economy, were eliminated, can't the distribution of the burdens still be one-sided?

The last part of the question has already been answered with what I have just said. But the fact that a truly self-reliant economic life can take even better care of widows and orphans, etc., is explained in more detail in my book “The Crux of the Social Question”. I have already indicated that the economic unit must take into account what each person has to contribute as a quota to what widows and orphans, and other people who are unable to work, receive, as explained in my book, and also for children for whom I claim the right to educate. The standard for this will be derived simply from the living expenses of the other persons. Since the economic unit provides a standard for the living expenses of a person according to the existing overall economic prosperity, this also makes it possible to create a standard for the living expenses of those who really cannot work.

The next question:

Could the dangers of the so-called bourgeois government not continue to exist? Are these not further strengthened by the fact that, depending on the composition of the leading political direction, the distribution of offices can take place in such a way that, despite all the good words, the leadership and the occupation of the factories, cooperatives and so on happens through cronyism? In a backward ruling society, that is, in parliament, who guarantees the removal of the incompetent and the lazy from a leading or independent position? Can't a clique economy quickly destroy the advantages of Steiner's system?

Basically, the answer to this question also follows from what I have already said. Because, dear attendees, it is really not a matter of devising some ideal state in which it can no longer happen that one or the other eats up something, but rather it is a matter of finding the best possible state adapted to some specific human society. What is here called the “cousin's” way and the like, that would, if you only really think about things - but think about them practically, according to reality - become quite impossible. For just consider that in this threefold social organism the circulation of the means of production takes place on the widest possible scale, and that, furthermore, the cooperation of the manual workers with the intellectual workers is based on a completely free contract regarding their respective services. So there are much greater safeguards than anywhere else. If you consider, for example, what can arise from corruption and informers in a large economic cooperative that has become a tyrannical state, then I would like to know how that compares with what can arise in the threefold social organism due to a flaw in human nature in the individual, certainly here and there, but which will of course soon be corrected. The greatest safeguard against the spread of damage that is inherent in human nature is offered by the very liveliness that takes place in the threefold social organism, because the three limbs of the social organism themselves control each other. A unified organism, especially one that is built on the purely material economic life, carries within itself the dangers that are characterized by this question. And because these dangers can be foreseen, the question has arisen – again out of a practical necessity – how to remove the possibility of these damages arising from a unified economic body. By taking out the legal life, thus creating a correction for what can arise as injustice. How do you remove the damage to the spiritual realm caused by the economic system of production? By the spiritual realm governing itself; it must be based on trust in one's fellow human beings, and the unfit must withdraw from the spiritual life and become manual laborers or the like. All this arises directly from the threefold social organism, because this threefold structure also provides the possibility of correction for damage that occurs in one or the other area.

Another question is asked here:

How do you envision the self-administration of the spiritual realm and which organizations will support it?

Now, dear attendees, to characterize this complicated self-administration of the spiritual realm in detail would take a long, long time. I can only hint that it will be a matter of only those people being involved in the self-administration of the spiritual realm who are also active in this spiritual realm themselves. Thus, for example, in the field of education, nothing but that which the pedagogue, as pedagogue, must properly exert as influence, will enter into the self-administration. The selection of personalities for certain posts will not be based on examinations, decrees and the like, but on the actual pedagogical knowledge of abilities and so on, so that the question of where I stand in the spiritual organism will depend, let us say in the specific field of schooling, on pedagogical considerations alone, that is, on inner considerations. Never will any other body, the economic or state body, be able to organize the schools according to its own needs. The schools will be organized solely on the basis of human needs up to the age of fifteen, and from the age of fifteen on, according to the needs of the social organism, according to the needs of the life of this social organism. But this means that what is administration depends precisely on the same points of view as teaching itself in educational institutions. In the future, the human being must not be placed in one place by a state and then also have to follow the state's decrees; rather, everything that is active in the spiritual life is placed only in an administration that has arisen from the point of view of this spiritual life itself.

The question then arises:

Has the Federation for Threefolding already considered the establishment of a cultural council for the spiritual realm? If not, then the assembly should take the initiative to do so.

Now, esteemed attendees, it is of no use today if we do not speak openly and honestly about the great tasks that present us with the present, Economic life has taken on forms that have led the proletariat to vigorously defend its economic interests. It is well known, through a wide variety of circumstances, that today the proletariat suffers greatly from the fact that it has more or less a theoretical goal but no practice. Nevertheless, what lives in the proletariat is a definite will, which is also the result of a very definite political education that has gone through decades. From this will, something like a works council or a council of intellectual and physical workers can be formed today. This will not be easy, especially since if it does not happen quickly, it could be too late.

But, I would like to say, today it is a struggle with obstacles that are less and less formidable than those of the creation of a cultural council, because the most diverse [obstacles] confront one. For example, there are party leaders today who believe they think socialist, completely socialist, no longer in the sense of the old intellectual culture of the privileged classes, and yet they have adopted nothing but that intellectual culture. Nothing but the ultimate consequence of this intellectual culture lives in their heads. This intellectual culture of the leading and ruling circles can be characterized by the fact that, over the past four centuries, it has increasingly merged with economic life to such an extent that intellectual life is now actually only a consequence of economic life, a kind of superstructure over economic life. From this experience of the last three to four centuries, the proletariat, or rather proletarian theory, has now formed the view that intellectual life may only be something that arises from economic life. The moment you put this into practice, the moment you say that intellectual life may only arise from economic life, you lay the foundation for the complete destruction of intellectual life, for the complete destruction of culture. The bourgeoisie cannot now demand that the proletariat should take a different view and expect everything from economic life, because the bourgeoisie itself has brought everything to the point where ultimately everything of a spiritual nature is somehow dependent on economic life.

The course of development was such that, in the beginning, historical development overcame those damages that arose for man within human society from the aristocratic order. From this aristocratic order, legal damages arose; the bourgeoisie fought for rights against what used to be the aristocratic order. Then, in the course of historical development, the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that is, between the propertied and the propertyless, emerged as a further consequence. The great struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is aimed at no longer allowing labor power to be a commodity. As things stand today, the proletariat is vigorously demanding – and this is not only a proletarian demand, but an historical one – that in the future physical labor should no longer be a commodity. The bourgeoisie demanded liberalism because it no longer wanted the old aristocratic privileges, because it no longer wanted to make the law a thing to be conquered and bought. The proletariat demands the emancipation of labor from the character of a commodity. If we do not want to leave something behind that would plunge all of Central and Eastern Europe into a state of barbarism, we must recognize something else today. If the proletariat were not to demand cooperation with intellectual labor in a spirit of understanding, the proletariat would succeed in divesting physical labor of its commercial character. However, the consequence of this would be that in the future a state would arise in which all intellectual human labor would become a commodity. This state must not be allowed to come about, must not be brought about. The seriousness of the task must be grasped in such a way that at the same time as physical labor, spiritual, truly spiritual labor, also comes into its own. The old aristocracy brought about the lack of rights of the people, the old bourgeoisie brought about the lack of property of the proletariat. If the purely materialistic-economic view of the proletarian question remained, the dehumanization of intellectual life would remain. We are facing this danger if those who have a heart and mind for cultural life do not take the initiative to liberate this intellectual life themselves. And this intellectual life can only be liberated if we break away from the dependence of intellectual life, which I have characterized in so many different ways, and really bring about a reorganization of intellectual life through a serious cultural council. But today we must speak honestly and openly: interest in this area is unfortunately still far too low. The most pressing task at hand is to recognize that this is an urgent issue. A cultural council must be formed.

The attempts we have made, including a meeting yesterday, have not been very promising, because people do not yet realize what is at stake today if we do not manage to put intellectual work on its own feet and not let it be a slave of economic or state life. It is therefore an urgent necessity that in the very near future hearts and minds be stirred precisely for a cultural council. The apolitical nature of our Central European people, which has unfortunately manifested itself in such a dreadful way in the last four to five years, is what should lead to self-knowledge precisely in the spiritual realm. This is what should open people's spiritual eyes and hearts to the fact that our spiritual life has so far been the spiritual life of a small clique, calculated on the basis that it would develop on the soil of broad masses of people who could not participate in this spiritual life, and that today we must create a spiritual life in which every human being can find a dignified existence not only physically but also spiritually and soulfully. Dearly beloved, if one looked into the damage to this spiritual life, especially in the years that have proven to be the decades of preparation for the current world catastrophe, one could truly be seized by cultural concerns.

Then the question was:

What is the best way to educate our children?

In the time when people were so proud of the fact that they did not want to pay homage to any authority, children were still being educated in such a way that the blindest belief in the authority of the established was the most authoritative of all, and the connection between this established order and life could no longer be judged at all. They had neither the heart nor the mind to appreciate that, for example, the habits of thought that a person absorbs in the last years of youth permeate his entire being and constitute his entire being. Do we, as members of the intellectual elite, really absorb anything vital for the present day?

Interjection: Very true!

Oh, this spiritual life needs a thorough transformation, and it is very difficult to find an open ear among people in this field today. But until this open ear is found, there will be no salvation. There is no one-sided solution to the social question, only a three-pronged one. It is essential to stand on the ground of a spiritual life that really arises out of life. This requires goodwill, not the unconscious evil will of the pigtails. Therefore, it is urgently necessary that precisely in this area, something arises that can be called a cultural council. I can only say that a cultural council seems to me to be an absolutely essential requirement, because it must develop an activity that saves us from the commercialization of intellectual work in the external life.

This question seems to be related to the other question that was asked:

If we can expect the transformation of economic life in the sense of the separation from the unitary state through the organization of the works council to take place quickly, how then can intellectual life quickly be made independent and its reconstruction tackled?

Precisely by forming a cultural council and exploring the requirements within this cultural council that are necessary for the rebuilding of our intellectual life. That is what I have to say in response to these questions.

Lively applause and hand clapping.

Dr. Carl Unger: Dear attendees, a whole series of further questions have been received, which we will probably – and I hope you will agree – postpone answering until a later evening.

However, it is extremely important to us to really take to heart the last words of the esteemed speaker. Right now, a challenge is circulating among us that truly bears the mummification of the bankrupt intellectual life: the question of the galvanization and preservation of the humanistic grammar schools in the old sense. We have heard in which direction we have to look when we look at the dire consequences of contemporary life, and we have heard where we have to attack in the intellectual life. And just in these days we have also noticed how the impulse of a new spiritual, a new artistic life has been met with the greatest philiserosicäs. Dear attendees, we must allow strong impulses to arise within us from the words we have just heard, which work to release forces and strong, even revolutionary willpower for the spiritual life in us in the direction of preparing to found or form a genuine cultural council. But this can only be founded on freedom, on the own initiative of individual personalities who, from whatever situation in the spiritual life, are willing and able to contribute to a real new development of spiritual life. The purpose of my present words is to trigger this initiative and to work towards promoting this idea and the threefold social order among those present. We are prepared, first of all, to accept addresses – and indeed as early as this evening – from personalities who are willing to take on the heavy task that our esteemed speaker has set us. I ask to be allowed to approach you with this request, and I would like to ask you in particular to let the impulses for the rebuilding of intellectual life take effect in you in the strongest possible way and also to bring them to bear in other personalities.

With that, allow me to close today's meeting.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! This evening I will not be anticipating what is actually supposed to be taking place here as study evenings based on the book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. Instead, I will try to give you a kind of introduction to these evenings. I would like to evoke in you through this introduction a sense of the perspective from which this book was written. Above all, it was written from the immediate present, from the conviction that the social question has also taken on a new form through the events of the present and that it is necessary to talk about the social question today in a completely different way than it was talked about from any side before the world war catastrophe. With this book, it has been attempted, so to speak, at this point in human development, in which the social question is becoming particularly urgent and in which actually every person who consciously lives today, who does not sleepily and sleepily live the life of humanity, should know something about what has to happen in the sense of what is usually called the social question. It may be helpful to look back a little today. I may mention things that are partly known to you.

You probably know that the issues raised today on the social question have been raised for a relatively long time. And today, the names Proudhon, Fourier, and Louis Blanc are mentioned as the first to have addressed the social question in the mid-19th century. You are also aware that the way in which the social question was treated until the middle of the 19th century is referred to by today's representatives, at least by many of today's representatives of the social question, as “the age of social utopias”. It is good to be clear about what is actually meant when one says: in its first stage, the social question arose in an “age of utopias”. But one cannot talk about this matter in the absolute sense, but one can actually only talk about the feelings of the representatives of the social question in the present. They feel the way I am about to describe it. They feel that all social questions that arose in the age of which I want to speak first were in the stage of utopia. And what do people understand by saying that the social question was then in the stage of utopia? They understand by this – and this was already noticed at the time; Saint-Simon and Fourier noticed it well – that there are, even after the French Revolution, people of a certain social minority who are in possession of the means of production and also of other human goods, and that there are a large number of other people – in fact, the majority – who are not in possession of such things. These people can only work on the means of production by entering the service of those who own the means of production and also the land. They have basically nothing but themselves and their labor. It has been observed that the life of this large mass of humanity is one of hardship, and that it lives largely in poverty in contrast to those who are in the minority; and attention has been drawn to the situation of the minority and the situation of the majority.

Those who have written about the social situation of humanity, such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, as well as Proudhon, have started from a certain premise. They have started from the premise that it is necessary to point out to people: Look, the great mass lives in misery, in bondage, in economic dependence; this is not a humane existence for the great mass. That must be changed. And then all kinds of means were devised by which this inequality among people could be changed. But there was always a certain prerequisite, and that prerequisite was that one said to oneself: If one knows the reasons for this inequality and if one has enough words of warning, if one has enough moral awareness to point out that the great majority of people live in economic and legal dependence and are poor, then this speech will touch the hearts and souls of the minority, the wealthy, the more favored minority. And if this minority realizes that things cannot remain as they are, that changes must be made, that a different social order must come, then a different social order will be brought about. So the prerequisite was that people would deign to do something to liberate the great mass of humanity out of their innermost soul urge. And then they suggested what should be done. And it was believed that if the minority, if the people who are the guiding, leading people, realize that what is wanted to be done is good, then a general improvement in the situation of humanity will occur.

A great deal of extraordinarily clever things have been said from this side, but all that has been undertaken in this direction is felt today by most representatives of the social question to be utopian. That is, one no longer counts on the fact that one only needs to say: This is how the world should be organized, then the economic and political and legal inequality of people would end. Today, it is of no use appealing to the understanding and insight of those who are favored, who have the privilege, who are in possession of the means of production and the like. If I am to express what was lost in the course of the second half of the 19th century, I have to say that faith in the insight and goodwill of people was lost. Therefore, the representatives of the social question, whom I now mean, say to themselves: it is all very well to think up beautiful plans for how to set up the human world, but nothing comes of it; because no matter how beautiful the plans are preached, no matter how touching the words of appeal to the hearts and souls of the ruling minorities, nothing will happen. All these are worthless ideas, and worthless ideas, which paint the future, are in reality, to put it popularly, utopias. It is therefore useless, so they say, to imagine anything that should happen in the future, because there will be no one who lets go of his interests, who can be moved in terms of his conscience, in terms of his moral insight, and so on. Faith in conscience and moral insight has been lost in the broadest circles, especially among the representatives of the social question. People say to themselves, people do not act according to their insight when they make social arrangements or when they lead their social lives, they act according to their interest. And the haves naturally have an interest in keeping their possessions. The socially privileged have an interest in maintaining social privileges. Therefore, it is an illusion to count on the fact that one only needs to say that people should do this or that. They just don't do it because they don't act out of their insight, but out of their interest.

In the broadest sense, it can be said that Karl Marx gradually – but really only gradually – came to accept this view. One can describe a whole series of epochs in the life of Karl Marx. In his youth, Marx was also an idealistic thinker and still thought in terms of the realizability of utopias, in the sense that I have just characterized it. But it was precisely he, and after him his friend Engels, who in the most radical way possible abandoned this calculation of people's insight. And when I characterize in general what is actually a great story, I can say the following: Karl Marx ultimately came to the conviction that the world could not get better in any other way than by calling on those people who do not have an interest in their goods and privileges being preserved. As for those who have an interest in keeping their goods, these cannot be looked at at all, they must be left out of the reckoning altogether, because they would never deign to enter into it, no matter how beautifully it is preached. On the other hand, there is the great mass of proletarian laborers, [who have no goods to lose]. Karl Marx himself became convinced of this during the period when what is today called the proletariat was basically only emerging in Central Europe; he saw the proletariat emerging in Central Europe out of different economic conditions. When he later lived in England, it was somewhat different. But at the time when Karl Marx was developing from an idealist into an economic materialist, it was still the case that the modern proletariat was only emerging in Central Europe. And now he said to himself: this modern proletariat has completely different interests than the leading minority, because it consists of people who possess nothing but their labor, of people who cannot live in any other way than by placing their labor in the service of the propertied, namely in the service of those who own the means of production. If these workers leave their jobs, then they are thrown out on the street – this was particularly true in the most radical way for the time. They have no other prospect before them than the possibility of serfdom for those who own the means of production. These people have a completely different interest from the propertied classes. They have an interest in the entire previous social order being abolished, in this social order being transformed. They do not need to be preached to in such a way that their understanding is seized, but only in such a way that their selfishness, their interest, is seized. You can rely on that. To preach to those whose understanding one should count on, nothing comes of it, because people do not act out of understanding, they only act according to interests. So, one cannot appeal to those who should be appealed to for understanding, but one must appeal to the interests of those who cannot but advocate for the newer times out of inner compulsion. That is the egotism to which Karl Marx has developed. Therefore, he no longer believed that the progress of humanity to newer social conditions could come from any other human work than from the work of the proletariat itself. The proletariat could only, according to Karl Marx, strive for a renewal of human social conditions from its interests, from its own selfish interests. And in so doing, the proletariat will also liberate all of the rest of humanity, not out of philanthropy but out of selfish interest, because there can be nothing left but what people can achieve, people who are not attached to old goods and have nothing to lose from old goods in a transformation.

So one says to oneself: On the one hand, there are the leading, guiding circles, they have certain rights that were granted to them in earlier times or that were enforced by them in earlier times, that have been inherited in their families, they hold on to them. These leading, guiding circles are in possession of this or that, which they in turn pass on within their circles, their family and so on. These circles always have something to lose in a transformation, because of course, if they lost nothing, no transformation would happen. The point is that those who have nothing should get something, so those who have something can only lose. So one could only appeal to reason if this reason would give the propertied, leading class the impulse to want to lose something. They will not go for that. That was Karl Marx's view. So you have to appeal to those who have nothing to lose. That is why the “Communist Manifesto” ends with the words: “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, but they have everything to gain. Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

Now you see, since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, this has become a conviction, so to speak. And today, when certain sentiments, which are already influenced by this view, are alive precisely in the majority of the proletariat, today one can no longer properly imagine what a tremendous turnaround in socialist thought took place around the mid-19th century. But it would be good if you would take something like The Gospel of a Poor Sinner by Weitling, a journeyman tailor who wrote it not so long before the Communist Manifesto, and compare it with all the things written after the Communist Manifesto appeared. In this “gospel of a poor sinner” that is truly inspired by genuine proletarian sentiment, there is a language that is, one might say, in a certain sense even poetic, glowing language, but it is definitely a language that seeks to appeal to people's good will, to their insight. That is Weitling's conviction, that you can do something with people's good will. And this conviction only disappeared around the middle of the 19th century. And the event that caused it to disappear is precisely the publication of the Communist Manifesto. And since that time, since 1848, we can actually follow what we call the social question today. Because if we wanted to talk today like Saint-Simon, like Fourier, like Weitling – yes, we would really be preaching to the deaf today. For to a certain extent it is absolutely true that one cannot achieve anything in the social question by appealing to the insight of the leading and guiding circles, who have something. That is quite right. The leading and guiding circles have never admitted this, and they are hardly likely to admit it today either – they don't even know if they do, because unconscious forces in the human soul play an extraordinarily important role there.

You see, in the course of the 19th century, our intellectual culture has almost entirely become a cliché. And the fact that we live with clichés when it comes to intellectual culture is a much more important social fact than is usually thought. And so, of course, the members of the leading and ruling circles also talk about all kinds of nice things when it comes to the social question, and they themselves are often convinced that they already have the good will. But in reality they only believe that; it is only their illusion. The moment something real is tackled in this regard, it immediately becomes clear that it is an illusion. We will talk about this later. But as I said, today we can no longer talk as we did in the age of utopias. The real achievement that came through Karl Marx is that he showed how humanity today is so enmeshed in illusionism that it is nonsense to count on anything but egoism. It must be reckoned with one day; therefore, nothing can be achieved if one wants to somehow count on selflessness, on goodwill, on people's moral principles - I always say “in relation to the social question”. And this change, which has led to the fact that today we have to speak quite differently than it was possible to speak in the first half of the 19th century with regard to the social question, this change has come with the Communist Manifesto. But it did not all come at once. Even after the Communist Manifesto, it was still possible, as you all know – some younger socialists have already forgotten the time – that this very different kind of social thinking, the kind of Ferdinand Lassalle, took hold of hearts and souls well into the 1860s. And even after the death of Lassalle, which occurred in 1864, what was Lassallean socialism continued. Lassalle is one of those people who, despite the fact that the other way of thinking had already emerged, still counted on the power of ideas. Lassalle still wanted to reach people as such in their insight, in their social will above all. But this Lassallean tendency gradually diminished, and the other tendency, the Marxist tendency, which only wanted to take into account the interests of that part of the human population that only had itself and its labor power, gained the upper hand. But it did not happen so quickly. Such a way of thinking only developed gradually in humanity.

In the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, it was quite common for people who belonged to the proletariat or who were politically or socially dependent – even if they were not exactly proletarians – to judge their dependency morally, so to speak, and to morally condemn the non-dependent circles of the human population. In their minds, it was the maliciousness of the leading and guiding circles of the human population that they kept the great mass of the proletariat in dependency, that they paid them poorly and so on. If I may put it trivially, I can say that in the 1960s, 1970s, and well into the 1980s, a lot of social indignation was manufactured and, from the point of view of social indignation, spoken. Then, in the mid-1980s, the strange turnaround actually only really occurred. The more leading personalities of the social movement then stopped talking about the social question out of moral indignation altogether in the 1980s. That was the time when those social leaders who were younger and more or less still glowing with youthful zeal, whom you, who are younger, only saw dying: Adler, Pernerstorfer, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Auer, Bebel, Singer and so on. It was precisely during that period in the 1880s that these older leaders increasingly stopped preaching this indignation socialism. I would put it this way: these leaders of socialism expressed their innermost conviction when they transferred the old indignation socialism into their newer socialist worldview. You will find what I am telling you now is not in any book about the history of socialism. But anyone who lived through those times knows that when people were left to their own devices, this is how they spoke.

Let us assume that in the 1980s, leading representatives of socialism met for a discussion with those who were bourgeois in their attitudes, and let us assume that there was a third group present: bourgeois who were idealists and wished all people well, who would have agreed to make all people happy. Then it could have happened that the bourgeois declared that there must always be people who are poor and those who are rich, and so on, because only that could maintain human society. Then perhaps the voice of one of those who were idealists would have been raised, who were indignant that so many people had to live in poverty and dependence. Such a person might then have said: Yes, it must be achieved that it is made clear to these wealthy people, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, that they must let go of their possessions, that they must make arrangements through which the great masses come into a different situation, and the like. Very nice speeches could be made on the basis of these words. But then someone would have raised his voice who was just finding his way into socialism at the time and said: What are you talking about, you are a child; that is all childishness, all nonsense! The people who are capitalists, who are entrepreneurs, they are all poor wretches who know nothing but what they have been taught by generations. If they also hear that they should do it differently, they couldn't even do it, because it wouldn't occur to them how they should do it. It doesn't even occur to them that something can be done differently. You must not accuse people, you must not morally condemn people, they cannot be morally condemned; those guys have grown into this, these poor souls, into this whole milieu, and that inspires them with the ideas they have. To morally accuse them means to understand nothing of the laws of human development, means to indulge in illusions. These people could never want the world to take on a different form. To speak of them with indignation is pure childishness. All this has become necessary, and again, it can only become necessary through necessity. You see, you can't do anything with such childish fellows who believe that they can preach to the propertied, to the capitalists, that a new world order should be established; you can't establish a new world order with them; they only indulge in the belief that you can accuse these poor capitalists of wanting to make a different world. I have to make the matter clear, so some things are said in sharp contours, but in such a way that you could hear the speeches I am talking about absolutely everywhere. When they were written, they were retouched a bit, written a bit differently, but that was the basis. Then they continued: With these guys - they are idealists, they imagine the world in terms of an ideology - there is no starting point. We have to rely on those who have nothing, who therefore want something different out of their interests than those who are connected to capitalist interests. And they will not strive for a change of their circumstances for some moral principle, but only out of greed, to have more than they have had so far, to have an independent existence.

In the 1980s, this way of thinking increasingly came to be seen as the development of humanity, no longer in the sense that the individual is particularly responsible for what he does, but that he does what he has to do out of his economic situation. The capitalist, the entrepreneur, exploits the others in the highest innocence. The proletarian, on the other hand, will not revolutionize out of a moral principle, but in all innocence out of human necessity, and will take the means of production, the capital, out of the hands of those who have it. This must happen as an historical necessity.

Well, you see, it was actually only in 1891 at the Erfurt Party Congress that all Lassallianism, which was still based on the insight that people could be educated, was abandoned in favor of belief in the so-called “Erfurt Program”, which was intended to make Marxism the official view of the proletariat. Read the programs of the Gotha and Eisenach party conferences, and you will find two demands that are genuinely proletarian demands of the time, still connected with Lassallianism. The first demand was: the abolition of the wage relationship; the second demand was: the political equality of all people, the abolition of all political privileges. All proletarian demands up to the 1890s, up to the Erfurt Party Congress, which brought about the great turnaround, were based on these two demands. Take a close look at these two demands and compare them with the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress. What, then, are the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress? They are: the transfer of private ownership of the means of production into common ownership; the administration of all production, of all manufacture, by a kind of large cooperative, into which the existing state must transform itself. Compare the former program, which was the proletarian program of the 1880s, with what emerged from the Erfurt Party Program and has existed since the 1890s. You will see that in the old Gotha and Eisenach programs, the demands of socialism are still purely human demands: political equality for all people, the abolition of the degrading wage relationship. At the beginning of the 1990s, what I have characterized to you as the attitude that emerged during the 1980s was already taking effect. What was still more of a human demand has been transformed into a purely economic demand. You no longer read about the ideal of abolishing the wage relationship, you only read about economic demands.

Now, you see, these things are connected with the gradual development of the idea that one had about the external creation of a better social condition for humanity. It has also often been said by such people, who still had ideals: Oh, what harm can it do to smash everything, a different order must be brought about; so, a revolution must come, everything must be smashed, the great Kladderadatsch must come, because only from that can a better social order arise. - That was still said by many people in the 1880s who were good, idealistic socialists. To which the others replied, who were in touch with the times, who had become the leaders, those who, as I said, are now buried – they said: There is no sense in any of this, such sudden revolutions are senseless. The only thing that makes sense is that we leave capitalism to its own devices. We see that in the beginning there were only small capitalists, then there were big ones; they joined forces with others and became capitalist groups. Capital has become more and more concentrated. We are in the process of capital becoming more and more concentrated. Then the time will come when there will actually only be a few large capitalist trusts and consortia. Then it will only be necessary for the proletariat, as the non-possessing class, to peacefully transfer the capitalist property, the means of production, into community property one fine day, through parliamentary channels. This can be done quite well, but we must wait and see. Until then, things have to develop. Capitalism, which is actually an innocent child, can't help it that it is exploitative – that is brought about by historical necessity. But it also prepares the way, because it concentrates capital; it is then nicely together, then it just needs to be taken over by the community. Nothing of rapid revolution, but slow development.

You see, the secret of the view, the public secret of the view, which is based on this, was nicely explained by Engels in the 1890s. He said: What is the point of quick revolutions? What is happening slowly under the development of modern capitalism, this massing of capitals, this concentration of capitals, it all works for us. We don't even need to create a commonality, the capitalists are already doing that. We just need to transfer it into proletarian ownership. Therefore, Engels says, the roles have actually been reversed. We, who represent the proletariat, have no complaints about the development; the others have complaints. Because the guys who are in the circles of the propertied people today have to say to themselves: We accumulate capital, but we accumulate it for others. See, the guys actually have to worry about losing their capital; they get hollow cheeks, they get scrawny from these worries about what will become of it. We, as socialists, thrive in this development. We get, says Engels, bulging muscles and full cheeks and look like eternal life. – That's what Engels says in an introduction he wrote in the 1890s, characterizing what is developing, and how one need only wait for the development, which is actually taken care of by capitalism itself. This development then leads to the transfer of what capitalism has concentrated into the common ownership of those who have had nothing so far. That was actually the mood with which the 20th century was entered by the leading circles of the proletariat.

And so they thought, especially since the time when Marxism was no longer taken as it was in the 1990s, but when it was subjected to a revision, as it was said, in the time when the revisionists appeared, so those who are still alive today, but are old people, such as Bernstein. So the revisionists came. They said that the whole development could be promoted a little, because if the workers only work until the capitalists have gathered everything together, they will still suffer hardship before then, namely in old age they have nothing. Then assurances were made and so on; and above all, it was seen that what the leading classes had as institutions in political life was also appropriated. As you know, the trade union movement also emerged at that time. And within the Socialist Party, there were two strongly divergent directions: the declared trade union party and the actual, as it was then called, political party. The political party was more down-to-earth, a sudden revolution would be of no use, the development had to take place as I have just described it. Therefore, it was a matter of preparing everything for the one point in time when capitalism is sufficiently concentrated and the proletariat has a majority in parliament. Everything had to be driven forward along the path of parliamentarism, of acquiring a majority, so that at the point in time when the means of production were to be taken over into public ownership, the majority would also be there for this transfer. In particular, this group of people, who thought highly of the political party, did not think much of the trade union movement at the end of the 19th century. At that time, the trade unions were advocating the establishment of a kind of organized competition between themselves and the entrepreneurs, in order to repeatedly extract wage increases and similar things from the companies from time to time. In short, they set themselves up to imitate the system of mutual negotiations that existed among the ruling circles themselves, and to extend it to the relationship between the ruling circles and the proletariat. You know, of course, that those who were particularly criticized by the representatives of the actual political socialist system were those who became most bourgeois under the trade union movement. And at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, you could see everywhere among those who were more attuned to the political system a great contempt for those people who had become completely absorbed in trade union life, especially, for example, the printers, who in turn had developed a completely different system of trade union life to the extreme.

These were two very strictly separate directions in social life: the trade unionists and those who were more inclined towards the political party. And within the trade unions, the printers in the printers' association were almost the model boys; they were the model boys who had also earned the full recognition of bourgeois circles. And I believe that just as there was a certain fear, a certain concern about the political Socialist Party, so little by little one saw with great satisfaction that good people like the people in the printers' union came to the fore. People said of them: They are becoming bourgeois, you can always negotiate with them, it's going quite well. When they raise their wages, we raise the prices we charge. That works. And it did work for the next few years, and people didn't think any further ahead. So they were very satisfied with this exemplary development of the trade unions. Well, if I omit some of the more subtle nuances, one can say that these two directions more or less emerged until the times that were then surprised by the world war catastrophe. But unfortunately people did not learn everything from this world war catastrophe that should have been learned with regard to the social question.

Not true, as soon as you look at the situation in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, if you disregard the Anglo-American world and to some extent the Romance world, if you limit yourself to Central and Eastern Europe, you can say that nothing much has come of this history, which has always been defined as follows: the concentration of capital, and, if you have a majority in parliament, then the capital will pass into the ownership of the community, and so on. The catastrophe of the world war has ensured that this cannot be expected to happen so smoothly today. Those who expected some kind of revolution have often been portrayed as childish, but basically, what has happened in the last four to five years? Let us keep clearly and distinctly in mind what has happened. You have often heard what has happened in the last four to five years: In July 1914, the governments went a little bit “crazy” - or went crazy - and rushed the people into the world war. People believed that there was a world war, battles took place - but with the modern means of war, with the machine means, something completely different was there than in previous wars. There was no longer any possibility that someone would become a particularly famous general, because ultimately it only came down to whether one side had a greater quantity of ammunition and other means of warfare, whether one side was better at producing the mechanical means of war than the other or had discovered a gas and the like that the others did not have. First one side won, then the other side discovered something, then the first side again; the whole thing was a terribly mechanical warfare. And everything that has been said about what has happened here and there on the part of people, that was under the influence of the phrase, it was entirely a phrase. And little by little modern humanity will realize, even in Central Europe, what was put into it as a phrase when one or the other, who was actually nothing more than a somewhat twisted average soldier, was made a great commander in Central Europe. These things have only become possible under the influence of the phrase. Well, that was just the case.

But what really happened? People did not notice this because of external events. While people believed that a world war had been waged – which was actually only a mask – a revolution actually took place. In reality, a revolution happened in these four to five years. People just don't know that today, they still don't pay attention to it. The war is the outside, the mask; the truth is that the revolution has taken place. And because the revolution has taken place, the society of Central and Eastern Europe is in a completely different condition today, and one cannot start with what people had in mind for earlier situations. Today it is necessary that all the thoughts that were formed earlier be completely reorganized, that one think about things in a completely new way. And that is what has been attempted with the book “The Crux of the Social Question”: to correctly calculate the situation we have ended up in as a result of the most recent events. It is no wonder, then, that the people in the socialist parties, who cannot keep up fast enough, have shown this book a misunderstanding after misunderstanding. If people would only take the trouble to examine their own thoughts – to examine a little that which they say they want – they would see how much they live under the influence of the ideas they had until 1914. That is the old habit.

These ideas that we had until 1914 have become so engrained in our environment that they will not come out again. And what is the result? The result is that although a new approach is needed today, although the revolution has taken place in Eastern and Central Europe, although we now need to build up, not according to old ideas but according to new ones, despite all this, people are preaching the old ideas. And what are the parties today, including the socialist parties? The socialist parties are those who continue to preach this or that socialist gospel in the old way, as they preached until July 1914, because there is no difference in these party programs from the earlier ones – at most the difference that comes from outside. For those who know the issues, there is terribly little that is new, nothing at all that is new, in the individual party groups. The old shopworn ideas are still being peddled today. Well, there is a slight difference: if you have a copper kettle and tap it, it makes one sound; if you tap a wooden barrel in exactly the same way, it makes a different sound; but the tapping can be exactly the same. It depends on what you are tapping whether it sounds different. And so it is today, when people talk about their party programs. What is contained in these old party programs is actually the old party storekeeper; just because there are different social conditions now, it sounds a little different today, just as it sounds different with a copper kettle or with a wooden barrel. When the Independent Socialists or the Majority Socialists or the Communists speak, they speak the old party phrases, and it sounds different because it is not a copper kettle but a wooden barrel. In truth, many sides have learned nothing, nothing, nothing. But what matters is that one learns something, that one is told something by this terrible world war, as it is called, but which was actually a world revolution.

And here one can really say: In the broad masses, people are prepared to hear something new. But with the broad masses it is like this: they listen to what the leaders say. There is a good understanding, a good, healthy common sense in the broad, uneducated masses, and one could actually always count on understanding when one presents something truly contemporary, something that can be called contemporary in the best sense of the word. This is partly due to the fact that the masses are uneducated. But as soon as people enter into the kind of education that has been available for the past three to four centuries, this quality of being unspoiled ceases. If you look at what today's bourgeois school education is, from elementary school up to university – and it will be at its worst if the socialist unified school is founded now, because everything that has been done wrong by the bourgeois elementary school will be present to the greatest extent – you can see that what is taught in schools distorts minds and alienates them from life. We have to get out of all this stuff, we really have to stand on our own two feet in the spiritual life if we want to get out of this education. But you see, it is through this education that the great and small proletarian leaders have become so. They had to acquire this education; this education is in our schools and in popular writings, it is everywhere. And then you start to get a dried-up brain and are no longer open to facts, but to party programs and opinions that you have grafted and hammered into yourself, you stick with them. Then even the world revolution can come, you still whistle the old programs at it.

You see, this is essentially what this book, “The Key Points of the Social Question,” and the lectures in many directions have been intended to achieve. For once, the proletariat was really reckoned with in terms of what it absolutely needs today, what is necessary given the current situation. This was understood at the beginning [in the proletariat], but then it was not understood by those who are the leaders of the proletariat in the various party groupings. That is, I do not want to be too unjust, and I do not want to press the truth; I do not want to claim, for example, that these leaders do not understand this book, because I cannot assume that they have read it, that they know it. I would not be stating something that is true if I said that they cannot understand the book. But they cannot bring themselves to understand that something different should be necessary than what they have been thinking for decades. Their brains have become too dry and too rigid for that. And so they remain with what they have thought for a long time and find that what is the opposite of all utopia is a utopia. Because, you see, the book 'The Core Points' fully recognizes that today one can no longer operate in utopia in the sense of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and so on, but also that one can never again take the standpoint: development will happen by itself. For what Marx and Engels saw, what developed [in their time], from which they drew their conclusions, cannot be drawn from today, because the world war has swept that away, it is no longer there in its true form. Anyone who says the same thing today as Marx and Engels says something that Marx would never have said. He was afraid of his followers, because he said: As for me, I am not a Marxist. — And today he would say: At that time the facts were still different; at that time I drew my conclusions from facts that had not yet been modified and changed as much as the world war has changed everything since then.

But you see, those people who cannot learn from events, who today are of an attitude as the old Catholics were towards their bishops and popes, they cannot even imagine that something like Marxism must also be further developed in the sense of facts. They still see the old facts before them, and that is why people still whistle and hiss the same things that they whistled and hissed before the world war. That is how the socialists do it, but the conservatives do it too. The broadest circles do it that way. The conservatives, of course, do it very drowsily, with completely sleepy souls. The others do it in such a way that they are indeed in the thick of it and see the collapse, but they do not want to reckon with the facts that it reveals. Today, we simply have to bring something new to the people. And therefore it is necessary to understand something [like threefolding] that is not utopian but that takes the facts into account. If those on the other side call what takes the facts into account obstruction, then one could actually be quite satisfied. For if people call what they are pushing forward a straight line, then, in order to pursue something reasonable, one has to shoot into the way in order to bring the unreasonable into another, reasonable direction. But you see, those who do see the reasonable after all should delve into what is being presented here. And these evenings can be used for that.

What has been derived from the facts has long been tried to be put into practice. And so we have been meeting for weeks - I do not need to repeat all these things, you can still ask questions or discuss the pros and cons after this lecture - we have been meeting for weeks to get what we call the works council up and running. We have tried to create this council out of the facts that are currently necessary, to really create it in such a way that it comes from the mere economic life, that it does not come from political life, which cannot provide the basis for economic life. For if we look the facts in the face today, we must stand firmly on the ground of the threefold social organism. And anyone who does not want this threefold structure today is acting contrary to the historical necessity of human development. Today it must be as I have often explained: that spiritual life is taken care of, that economic life is taken care of, that legal or political life is administered democratically. And in economic life, the first step towards a truly social organization is to be taken with the works councils. But how can this be done? Only by first asking the question: Now that the impulse of the threefold social organism exists, it is new compared to all previous party mummies; is there anything else new? Today, fools claim that ideas are just buzzing through the air. If you listen to the discussions, they bring up all sorts of negative things, but they don't bring up anything that could be put alongside the threefold order of the social organism. It is all wishy-washy when people on the socialist side claim that ideas are just floating around in the air — as was said in a newly founded magazine in a review of the threefold order.

The first thing to do is to raise the question and be clear about it: is there nothing else? Then one should stick to the threefold social order until it can be refuted in an objective way, until one can objectively put something equivalent alongside it. One can no longer discuss the old party programs; the world war has discussed them; anyone who really understands knows that these old party mummies have been refuted by the world war catastrophe. But if one cannot answer this question by putting something factually equivalent alongside it, and if one wants to go further, then one can honestly say to oneself: So let us work in the sense of the threefold social order. Let us honestly say to ourselves: the old party contexts have lost their significance; we must work in the sense of the threefold social order.

When I spoke in Mannheim the day before yesterday, a gentleman came forward at the end and said: What Steiner said is nice, but it is not what we want; we do not want another new party in addition to all the old parties. The people who want something like that should join the old parties and work within them. I could only say: I have been following political life very closely for a long time, when the gentleman who spoke was far from being born. And although I have become familiar with everything that has somehow functioned as a social force through my life, I have never been able to work within any party or be part of one, and it does not occur to me, now at the end of my sixth decade of life, to somehow become a party person: I want nothing to do with any party, even one founded by myself. So I want nothing to do with a party founded by myself either; no one need fear that a new party will be founded by me. For I have learned that every party, through the necessities of nature, becomes foolish after some time, precisely because I have never got involved with any party. And I have learned to pity those who do not see this. Therefore no one need fear that a new party will be added to the old ones. That is why we have not founded a new party either, but the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has come together to represent the ideas of the threefold organism, whose non-utopian character, whose real character is seen by a number of people. But those people who understand this should also honestly and sincerely admit it.

And this must not be allowed to happen either: there is a play in which a cock crows in the morning, and every time the cock crows, the sun rises. Now, the cock cannot see the connection, so it believes that when it crows, the sun follows its call, comes because it has crowed, and that it has caused the sun to rise. If someone in a non-social life indulges in such a delusion, like this cockerel crowing on the dung heap and wanting to make the sun rise, it does not matter. But if, under certain circumstances, the idea of a truly economic works council were to flourish on the soil of the threefold organism and those people who cultivate it were to deny the origin, namely that the impulse the impulse of threefolding has brought this idea into being, and if these people believe that because one crows, the works councils will come, then that would be the same error, and a very disastrous error. But that must not happen. What is happening in this direction [of the works councils], what has been tackled here, must not be detached; it must remain in connection with the correctly understood impulse of the threefold social order. And those who want to realize the works council in the sense of this impulse can never allow themselves to be drawn into the one-sided establishment of the works council alone, with the constant crowing of “works councils, works councils”. That is not enough. It only makes sense if, at the same time, one strives for everything that is to be achieved through the impulse of the tripartite social organism. That is what matters. Because if you really want to understand what is written in the “Key Points”, then you have to take the point of view that can be learned from the facts that the last four to five years have presented. If you look at these facts, they will seem as if you had lived through centuries, and the party programs will seem as if their supporters had slept for centuries. Today, this must be clearly and unreservedly faced.

What I have told you now, I could just as easily have written as a preface to this book. But in the last few months we have seen how rigid and unfruitful the party programs currently are. It would be useful, though, if that were the preface to this book. I have told you today much of what is not in it, because you have, it seems to me, decided to meet here to study the serious social issues of the present in a proper way, building on this book. But before doing so, it must be made clear that one cannot simply carry on in the old style of party programs and party patterns, but that one must decide to take a realistic approach to the facts today and put an end to everything that does not take into account these new facts. Only in this way will you grasp in the right way what is to be achieved with this impulse of the threefold social organism. And you will grasp it in the right way if you find that every sentence in this book is capable of becoming an act, of being transformed into immediate reality. And most of those who say they do not understand it or that it is utopian and the like, they simply lack the courage to think so strongly today that their thoughts can intervene in reality. Those who always crow about “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “seizing power,” “socialism,” they usually think very little about it. Therefore, these word templates cannot be used to intervene in reality. But then they come along and say that [with the “key points”] only something utopian is being offered. A utopia only comes into being in the minds of people who understand nothing about it.

Therefore, one should make clear to these people what Goethe once said, with reference to something else, in a somewhat modified form, laughing at the physiologist Haller, who was an ossified naturalist. Haller had coined the word:

No creative spirit
penetrates into the depths of nature.
Happy he to whom she
presents only the outer shell.

Goethe objected to this and said:

“Into the depths of nature”
Oh, you philistine!
“No creative spirit can penetrate.“
...
“Happy he who sees
Only the outer shell!”
I have heard this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively.
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
All at once it is everything.
You alone are the supreme test, whether you are core or shell!

To those who speak of the threefold social organism as a utopia, one would also like to say: You alone are the supreme test, whether what is haunting your brain is utopia or reality. There you will find that all the crows mostly have utopias in them and therefore the reality in their own heads also becomes a utopia or an ideology or whatever they call it. That is why it is so difficult to get through with reality today, because people have obstructed themselves so much that they cannot access reality.

But we must realize that we have to work seriously, otherwise we will not be able to translate our will into action; and that is what it comes down to, to translate our will into action. And if we had to abandon everything because we recognize it as an error, then, in order to move from intention to action, we would have to turn to the truth, which we want to see through as truth, because nothing else can lead from intention to action but the ruthless, courageous pursuit of truth. This should actually be written as a motto, as a motto, in front of the studies of these evenings. I wanted to give you a preface to these study evenings tonight. I hope that this preface will not deter you from cultivating these studies in such a way that, before it is too late, thoughts that carry the seeds of action can be fruitfully placed in the world.

There will be an opportunity for discussion.

Rudolf Steiner: The book “The Key Points of the Social Question” is written in a special way in two directions. Firstly, it is written in such a way that it actually comes entirely from reality. This is something that some people do not consider when reading the book. I can also understand that this is not fully appreciated today. I have already spoken here in this circle – but not all those who are here today were present – about how people really think today. I referred in particular to the example of the professor of political economy, Lujo Brentano, who presented it so nicely in the previous issue of the “Gelbes Blatt”; I will briefly repeat it because I want to take something up from it. This luminary of today's economics at the university – he is, so to speak, the first – developed the concept of the entrepreneur and tried to characterize the features of the entrepreneur based on his enlightened thinking. I do not need to list the first and second features; as a third, he states that the entrepreneur is the one who puts his means of production at the service of the social order at his own risk and expense. Now he has this concept of the entrepreneur, and he applies it. He comes to the strange conclusion that the proletarian worker of today is actually also an entrepreneur, because he corresponds to this concept of the entrepreneur in terms of the first, second and third characteristics. For the worker has his own labor power as a means of production; he has control over it, and in relation to it he turns to the social process at his own risk and expense. Thus this luminary of political economy very aptly incorporates the concept of the proletarian laborer into his concept of the entrepreneur. You see, that is precisely how people think who make concepts that have no meaning at all; they have no meaning when concepts are required that are actually to be applicable to reality. But however little you may be willing to accept, it is safe to say that well over ninety percent of everything taught or printed today operates with such concepts. If you want to apply them to reality, it is just as ineffective as Lujo Brentano's concept of the entrepreneur. This is the case in science, in social science, everywhere. That is why people have forgotten how to understand anything that works with realistic concepts.

Take the basis of the threefold social order. No, you can't lay these foundations in the most diverse ways, because life needs many foundations. But one thing is clear: in more recent times, what might be called the impulse of democracy has emerged. Democracy must consist of every person who has come of age being able to determine their legal relationship in democratic parliaments – directly or indirectly with every other person who has come of age. But if we honestly and sincerely want to bring this democracy into the world, then we cannot manage spiritual matters in the sense of this democracy, because then every person who has come of age would have to decide on matters they do not understand. Spiritual matters must be regulated on the basis of an understanding of the matter at hand. This means that they must be placed in their own right and cannot be administered in a democratic parliament at all. They must have their own administration, which cannot be democratic but must be based on the matter at hand. The same applies to economic life; here, too, economic experience and the inner life of economic life must be the basis for administering the matter. Therefore, economic life on the one hand and intellectual life on the other must be excluded from the democratic parliament. From this, the threefold social organism arises.

There is a professor Heck in Tübingen, who – as I have already mentioned – has said that there is absolutely no need to admit that there is something degrading for the proletarian in the ordinary wage relationship, where one is paid for one's work, because Caruso is also in a wage relationship. The difference would be no difference in principle: Caruso sings and receives his salary, and the ordinary proletarian works and also receives his salary; and he, as a professor, also receives his salary when he lectures. The only difference between Caruso and the proletarian is that Caruso gets thirty to forty thousand marks for one evening and the proletarian a little less. But that is not a fundamental difference, only a difference in the amount of the remuneration. And so, says this witty professor, there is absolutely no reason to feel that the remuneration is degrading; he does not feel that way either. That is just by the way. But now this clever professor has also written a long article against the threefold social order. He starts from the premise that if we organize in three, we will end up with three parliaments. And now he shows that this does not work with three parliaments, because he says: in the economic parliament, the small craftsman will not understand the points of view of the big industrialist, and so on. The good professor has formed his ideas about the threefold order, and he attacks these ideas – which I find much more foolish than Professor Heck does; I would also criticize them to no end – but he has made them himself. The point is not to have three parliaments standing side by side, but to extract what does not belong in any parliament. He simply makes three parliaments and says: That's not possible. — So you live in unrealistic terms and judge the rest by them.

Now, in economics, in political economy, almost only those terms have been introduced that are unreal. But you see, I could not write a whole library now, when time is pressing, in which all economic terms are listed. Therefore, of course, a lot of terms can be found in the “key points” that need to be discussed properly. For example, I need only draw attention to the following:

It is true that in times gone by, social conditions arose basically only through conquest. Some territory was occupied by one people or race; another people burst in and conquered the area. Those races or peoples who were there earlier were pushed down to do the work. The conquering people took possession of the land, and that is how a certain relationship between conquerors and conquered arose. The conquerors had possession of the land because they were conquerors. Thus they were the economically strong, the conquered were the economically weak, and a legal relationship developed. Therefore, in almost all older epochs in historical development, legal relationships based on conquest were established, that is, privileges and disadvantageous rights. Now the times came when it was no longer possible to conquer freely. You can study the difference between free and bound conquest by looking at the early Middle Ages, for example. You can study how certain peoples, the Goths, pushed down to the south, but into fully occupied areas; there they were led to do different things in terms of the social order than the Franks, who moved to the west and did not find fully occupied areas there. This resulted in different rights of conquest. In more recent times, not only the rights that arose from conquests and were dependent on land and soil, but also the rights of those people who derived their privileges from property and who, through economic power, were now able to appropriate the means of production. Thus, in addition to what land law is in the modern sense, ownership of the means of production was added, that is, private ownership of capital. This then resulted in legal relationships arising from economic relationships. You see, these legal relationships arose entirely from the economic relationships.

Now people come and want to have concepts of economic power, of the economic significance of land, they want to have concepts of the means of production, the means of production, the capitals and so on. Yes, but they have no real deeper insight into the way things are. So they take the superficial facts and do not realize what is actually behind the land rights, behind the power relations with regard to the means of production. Of course, all these things are taken into account in my book. There is correct thinking; when speaking of rights, it is spoken from the consciousness of how the right has developed over the centuries; when speaking of capital, it is spoken from the consciousness of how capital has come into being. Care is taken to avoid using a concept that is not fully understood in terms of its origin; that is why these concepts appear differently than in the usual textbooks of today.

But something else has been taken into account as well. Take a certain fact, don't we, the fact of how Protestantism came into being. In the history books, it is often told that Tetzel went around Central Europe and that people were outraged by the sale of indulgences and the like. But that was not the only reason; that is only the superficial view. The main thing behind it was the fact that there was a banking house in Genoa that commissioned this indulgence peddler to travel around Germany – not on behalf of the Pope, but on behalf of this banking house, which had granted the Pope loans for his other needs. The whole story was a capitalist enterprise. From this example of the sale of indulgences as a capitalist enterprise, where even spiritual goods were sold, you can study – or rather, when you begin to study, you gradually come to it – that ultimately all capital power goes back to the superiority of the spiritual. Study how capital actually came to its power and you will find the superiority of the spiritual everywhere. And so it really is. The clever and resourceful have more power than those who are not clever or resourceful. And in this way, much of what is accumulated capital comes into being, justifiably or unjustifiably. This must be taken into account when considering the concept of capital. In such real studies, one comes to realize that capital is based on the development of spiritual power and that to the land rights, to the rights of the conquerors, from another side, the power of the old theocratic spirit has been added. Much of what was then transferred to modern capitalism originated from the old church. There is a secret connection between modern capitalist power and the power of the old church. And all of this has become entangled in the modern power state. Within it, you will find the remnants of the old theocracy and the old conquests. And finally, the modern conquests were added, and the most modern conquest is now supposed to be the conquest of the state by socialism. But in reality, it must not be done that way. Something new must be created that completely does away with these old concepts and impulses. Therefore, it will be important for us to also deal with the underlying concepts in our studies. Today, anyone who wants to talk about social issues must provide precise information about what is right, what is power, and what is actually a [economic] good, a good in the form of commodities and the like. It is in this area that the greatest mistakes are made. I will point out one example; if you are not aware of it, you will misunderstand much of my book.

Today, there is a widespread belief that goods are stored labor, that capital is also stored labor. You may say that it is harmless to have such concepts. It is not harmless, because such concepts poison all social thinking. Do you see how it actually is with labor – labor as the expenditure of labor power? Yes, it is a fact that there is a big difference between, for example, wearing out my physical muscle strength by doing sports and chopping wood. When I do sports, I wear out my physical muscle strength; I can get just as tired and need to replace my muscle strength as someone who chops wood. I can apply the same amount of work to sports as to chopping wood. The difference is not that the labor has to be replaced – of course it has to be replaced – but the difference is that one labor is used only for me, in the selfish sense, and the other is used in the social sense for society. It is the social function that distinguishes these things. If I say that something is stored-up labor, I do not take into account that labor actually ceases to be in something the moment work is no longer done. I cannot say that capital is stored-up labor, but rather I must say that labor is only there as long as it is being performed. But in our present social order, capital retains the power to call labor back at any time. The disastrous thing, as Marx means it, is not that capital is stored-up labor, but rather the institution that capital gives the power to repeatedly put new labor—not stored-up labor—but new labor into its service. Much depends on this, and much more will depend on it, that clear concepts grounded in reality are arrived at for these things. And it is from such concepts, which are now fully grounded in reality, that this book of mine starts. It does not use concepts that were useful for the education of the proletariat. But today, when we are supposed to build something, these concepts no longer make sense.

You see, when I say: capital is accumulated labor – that is good for the education of the proletariat; it was given the feelings it should have. It did not matter that the concept was fundamentally wrong – you can educate with fundamentally wrong concepts. But you can only build something with the right concepts. Therefore, today we need correct concepts in all areas of the economy and cannot continue to work with false concepts. I am not saying this out of frivolity, that you can also educate with false concepts, but rather out of general educational principles. You see, when you tell fairy tales to children, you do not want to build with the things that you develop there; in education, something else comes into consideration than in building in physical reality. There you have to work with real concepts. A concept such as “capital is stored labor” is not a concept. Capital is power and gives power to put newly emerging labor into its service. That is a real concept with a logical connection to the facts. In these areas, one must work with true concepts. That is what was attempted in the Kernpunkte. Therefore, I believe that much of what is not included in the definitions of the terms, in the characteristics of the terms, must be worked out. And anyone who can contribute to this work, which is needed to understand the way of thinking, the basis of this book, will make a very good contribution to these study evenings. So that is what matters, my dear attendees, that is what matters most.

Yes, it would be like writing an encyclopedia if you wanted to clarify all the terms, but what “capital” is can now be done in a single evening of study. Without having clearly understood today: what is capital? What is a commodity? What is labor? What is law? Without these concepts, one cannot make any headway. And these concepts are completely confused in the broadest circles; above all, they must be clarified. One almost despairs today when talking to people about the social order; they cannot keep up because they have not learned to master reality. This is what should be addressed in particular.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! What I have to say in these introductory words will, of course, differ somewhat from the usual format of these evenings for the simple reason that I have, so to speak, turned up out of the blue and it is therefore not possible to immediately continue where we left off last time. So perhaps today the focus will have to be on the discussion itself, in which I ask you to participate in large numbers.

When we began here in Stuttgart ten months ago to popularize the ideas underlying the threefold social order, this undertaking was conceived entirely in the context of the events of the time. We, as members of the Central European state, spiritual and economic communities, were facing all those questions that had to be raised from the point of view of how we, as people of Central Europe, who were, let us say it dryly, “the defeated” at that time, should behave. And here the view had to be taken that - in view of the terrible experiences, not so much the events of the war as the outcome of the war, which, of course in a different way, are no less terrible than the events of the war themselves - understanding would have to be awakened in a sufficiently large number of people for those ideas of a social reorganization that could have led to a reconstruction of European affairs precisely from the circle of the defeated.

When you are dealing with the propagation of some idea or other, you very often hear the word that these are far-reaching ideas. It is said that one can perhaps hope that such far-reaching ideas will be realized in the distant future – and depending on one's greater or lesser optimism, longer or shorter periods of time are then given – one can only work towards humanity approaching such ideals and so on. But at the beginning of our work, the situation did not really challenge the ideas that were moving in this direction. What was meant at that time was that the next necessity was to create understanding in as many minds as possible for the impulse of the threefold social order: for an independent spiritual life, for an independent state or legal life and for an independent economic life. It was hoped that the bitter events could have brought this understanding to people. But it has been shown that at the time when it was necessary, this understanding could not actually be brought forth in a sufficiently large number of people — for reasons that should not be touched upon further today. And today the question is rightly being raised from many sides: Can this idea of threefold order actually be cultivated in the same way as before? Have we not already progressed too far in the dismantling of our economic life?

However, anyone who understands the workings of today's economy cannot simply — I deliberately say “not simply” — answer this question in the negative. For, let us put forward the hypothesis that at the time when we began our work last April, if a sufficiently large number of people had been willing to help — and could certainly have brought about a change in circumstances — we would have actually had the necessary success: then, of course, our economic life would be on a completely different footing today. It may seem presumptuous of me to say so, but it is true. And the various articles that have appeared in our threefolding newspaper can serve as proof of what I have just said.

If we, who are working on the continuation of the threefold social order ideas in a narrower circle, nevertheless firmly believe that the work must continue, we are also thoroughly convinced on the other hand that the path that has just been taken – to convince a sufficiently large number of souls of the necessity of threefolding – that this path cannot lead quickly enough to success today. Therefore, we must think today of immediately practical undertakings, the form of which is to be presented to our immediate contemporaries in the near future. We must think of achieving our goal through certain institutions that can replace what would have been achieved through the collaboration of a sufficiently large number of convinced people. We must at least attempt to create model institutions, through economic institutions, by means of which it will be seen that our ideas can be practically realized in such economic institutions. These can then be emulated in the sense that people will believe the facts, which they previously refused to believe despite our convincing words. On the other hand, these model institutions will actually be able to have such economic consequences that some of the economic servitude that has already occurred can be redressed. Indeed, a large number of people in this Central Europe have come to the point where they do not care where their profits come from. They allow the victors to give them directives and even the material documents, if only it makes it possible for them to make corresponding profits. The way in which some people in some circles today are thinking of helping themselves economically in Central Europe is downright shameful. The idea is to create practical institutions from the threefold idea itself, which can provide the proof - even under the already quite difficult conditions - that this threefold idea is not utopian but practical.

You see, when we started our work, we were often asked: Yes, can you give us practical points of view for individual institutions? How should this or that be done? — The person who raised such a question usually completely disregarded the fact that it could not be a matter of maintaining one or the other institution, which had just proved its uselessness, by giving good advice, but that it was a matter of bringing about a complete social reconstruction through transformation on a large scale, through which the individual institutions would then have been supported. For this, it would not have taken advice on this or that, but rather a broad realization of the ideas, that is, by a sufficiently large number of people – because ultimately all institutions are made by people.

So today we are faced with a kind of change of direction that has truly not been brought about by our believing that we have been mistaken in our ideas. Ideas of this kind must always take into account the phenomena of the time. And if humanity does not respond to these phenomena, then the ideas must change, must at least take a different course. This is how we have pointed out that our not-so-old threefolding movement actually already has a story that is very much rooted in today's conditions and speaks volumes – a story that might perhaps be instructive for some people after all, if they would only pay attention to it.

I would like to illustrate what I have just said with an example: anyone who takes on the book “The Key Points of the Social Question”, as it was written a year ago, based on the economic explanations, will find certain considerations on the organization of economic life, which should acquire a certain necessary independence, which must not be dependent in the future on state institutions, state administrations, which must be thoroughly based on its own foundations, and which must be built up from its own foundations on the principle of associations. Of course, I can only give a few points of view today, but perhaps the discussion will provide more.

What then should be the actual purpose of such associations in economic life? The purpose of these associations should be that first of all, professional circles that are somehow related, that must work together objectively, and that manage their economic affairs completely freely and independently, without being subject to any state administration, should come together. And then these associations of professional circles should in turn associate with the corresponding consumers, so that what occurs as exchange between the related professional circles, but then also between the producer and consumer circles, is in turn united in associations. What arises from the free movement of economic associations should take the place of today's economic administration.

Of course, this network of economic institutions also includes everything that otherwise works in the legal and political spheres, and in the sphere of spiritual life. Spiritual life as such stands independently on its own feet, but those who are active in spiritual life must eat, drink and clothe themselves; they must therefore in turn form economic corporations of their own, which as such must be incorporated into the economic body, associating themselves in the economic body with those corporations that can serve their interests. The same must be done with the corporation of those people who are involved in state life. Thus, everything that is human in the social organism will be included in economic life, just as everything human that belongs to the social organism is included in the other two links, in state life and spiritual life. It is only that people are included in the three links of the social organism from different points of view. What matters is that the social organism is not structured according to estates, but according to points of view, and that every person is represented in every part of the social organism with their interests.

What can be achieved through such an economic life based on the principle of association? - What can be achieved is the elimination of the damage that has gradually arisen from the production methods of the last few centuries, especially the 19th century, from economic life and thus from human life in general. These damages are first experienced by man today in his own body, I would like to say. They have arisen because in the course of the more recent centuries, other conditions have arisen from the earlier conditions in relation to production in economic life.

If you look back to the period from the 17th to the 18th century, you will find that the way in which production took place is still to some extent connected with the people and their organization itself. You can see that in those days, when prices were set, they were dependent not on those factors on which they depend solely today, but, for example, on the abilities of the people, namely, for example, on the extent to which a person is able to work for so many hours a day on this or that production with a certain devotion and joy. The price was therefore determined by the extent to which the person had grown together with his production. Today, however, this is only the case in certain branches of intellectual life. If someone writes a book, you cannot dictate how many hours of the day he should work and set a wage for so many hours of the day. If, for example, an eight-hour working day were introduced for book writing, something beautiful would come of it, because it could very easily be that you should work for eight hours and get a wage for it, but that you should not get any ideas for four hours through three weekdays. Just as there is an intimate bond between human abilities, between the human spiritual organization and the products produced, so it was also the case for many more material branches - yes, the further we go back in human development, for all material branches. It is only in more recent times that the bond between the product and the producer has been broken. Looked at as a whole, it is basically utter nonsense to want to maintain this separation of the product from the producer. In individual branches of production, this can be blatantly obvious. Take, for example, the manufacture of books, considered purely economically. Books have to be written; this cannot be subjected to the laws of remuneration as represented, for example, by today's Social Democracy for the world of production. But books have to be printed, and the person who types them can indeed rely on the principles of today's social democracy, on the union principle. Because for typesetting, nothing more needs to be invented; there is no need for an intimate bond between producer and production. But if you go back to the sources, you will find everywhere that precisely the work for which you do not need such a bond would not even exist if it were not for the work on which all this external work depends. If the master builder were not there, all the wage laborers who build the houses could not work. If the book writer were not there, the typesetter could not set type for books. These are trains of thought that are not employed today, but they must be taken as a basis in the most eminent sense in economic considerations.

I could not go into detail about all the life experiences that have been incorporated into the “Key Points”, because they are, of course, intended for thinking readers. And I can assure you that it is still quite useful today to do a little thinking when reading a book and not always say: This is so difficult to understand, you have to think, it should have been written much more popularly. — But through the articles in our threefolding newspaper, which illuminate the same events from the most diverse points of view, this bond between producer and production has been loosened more and more. And only because in recent times, under the influence of the materialistic way of thinking, attention has been focused on the mode of production and not on the condition and ability of the producer, has the view even arisen among abstract, socialist agitators and thinkers that production as such is the one thing that dominates the whole of history, the whole of human life. This view arose because, in fact, through modern technology and certain other social conditions, a domination of the product over the producing people has occurred. So that one can say: While in the past, until about three centuries ago, much else was still dominant for people, in social life the economic person has since become the one who appears decisive today – the economic person and the economic process. People like Renner, for example, who even managed to become Austrian Chancellor, have indeed stated that there should be no more talk of “homo sapiens”, who haunted people's minds in the last centuries, but that n could only be talked about “homo oeconomicus” - that is the only reality. But since the 19th century, because things in reality undergo transformations according to their own laws, not even homo economicus, the economic man, the economic process, has remained decisive, but we can say: roughly from around 1810 - to set a starting point - the banker has become the dominant man. And more than one might think, in the economic life of the civilized world during the 19th century, the banker, the moneychanger, the one who actually merely administers the money, has become dominant. All the events that have occurred since that time are more or less subject to the influence of this historical change: in the economic context, the economic man and the economic process have gradually become the banker, the moneychanger, the lender above all, and the public social process has become the financial administration, the money administration.

Now, however, money has very definite characteristics. Money is a representative of various things, but money as such is the same. I can acquire a sum of money by selling a piece of music – a spiritual product. Or I can acquire a sum of money by selling boots. The sum of money can always be the same, but what I sell can be very different. As a result, money takes on a certain abstract character in relation to the real process of life. And so, under the influence of the world banking system, the obliteration of the concrete interactions in human social intercourse, the obliteration of the concrete interactions [between product and producer, and there arose] the intercourse of mere representatives, of money.

This, however, has very definite consequences. It has the consequence that the three most essential components of our economic process – land, means of production and means of consumption – which, by their very nature, are involved in the economic process in very different ways, are not only conceptually, but actually, placed under the same power and treated in the same way. For someone who is only concerned with acquiring or managing a certain amount of money may be indifferent as to whether this sum of money represents land or means of production, that is, machines or the like that serve for other productions but have been made by people, or whether it represents consumer goods, immediate articles of use. What matters is only that he receives a certain sum of money for something, or that, if he has it, it bears interest, no matter from what. The idea had to increasingly come to the fore that the interests one has in the individual products and branches of production are extinguished and replaced by the abstract interest in capital, which extinguishes all these differentiations, that is, in money capital. But that leads to very specific things.

Let's take land, for example. Land is not just something arbitrary, but is situated in a particular place and has a relationship to the people of that place, and the people of that place also have interests in this land that can be described as moral interests, as interests of a spiritual kind. For example, it may be an important point for the general interests of culture and humanity that a certain product be planted on this land. I will draw a somewhat radical picture of the circumstances. They are not so radical in ordinary life, but the essential thing can be shown with it. Anyone who has grown together with the land through their entire life circumstances will have an insight into how, let us say, the production of this or that from the land is connected with the entire life circumstances. They have gained their experiences in being together with the land. Questions can be important for this, questions that can only be judged if one has grown together with the local conditions of an area.

You can only gain such knowledge through experience. You can now fully appreciate that it is beneficial for the general human condition when a piece of land is utilized in a certain way, but only yields a certain result from this utilization. These considerations immediately disappear when the principle of monetary capitalism takes the place of the people associated with the land. In this case, it is a matter of land simply passing from one hand to the other as a commodity. But the person who simply acquires land by spending money is only interested in seeing that the money yields interest in the appropriate way. An abstract principle is imposed on everything that used to be a concrete human interest. And the person in question, who only has the interest of money, wonders whether, under the circumstances that the other person, who has grown together with the land, recognizes as necessary, the matter will yield enough for him; if not, then the land must be used for something else. In this way, the necessary human relationships are destroyed only from the point of view of monetary capitalism.

And so the aspects of monetary capitalism have been applied to all human relationships. In economics, they have distracted people from what can only arise when people are connected to production, connected to land, and connected to the products of consumption that circulate among people in some area. This was certainly present in earlier centuries. This has already disappeared under the influence of the economic man, but mostly under the influence of the banker in the 19th century. While until about 1810 the national economy was dependent on the traders and the industrialists, in the 19th century the traders and the industrialists, even if they did not admit it, essentially became dependent on the national and international money economy, on the bankers.

You can only be driven completely into economic egoism by this kind of money economy. But this kind of money economy should not be confused, as often happens today, with mere capitalism. Mere capitalism – you will find this explained in more detail in my Key Points – is meant to make it possible for only those who are capable of using large amounts of capital, whether in the form of the means of production or of money, the representative of the means of production, to grow together with production. And they should only remain connected to it as long as they can use their abilities in the service of production. This bare capitalism is absolutely necessary for the modern national economy, and to rail against it is nonsense. To abolish it would mean undermining the entire modern national economy. It is essential that we look at reality, that we see the difference, for example, that the administration of a large complex of land, in which the combination of forest and land may be necessary can be necessary, will mean one thing in the hands of a capable person and another if someone separates the forest and the land, then parcelled out the land into small holdings and the like. This can be good for certain areas, but in others it would ruin the national economy. Everywhere it depends on the specific circumstances. And we must finally find our way back to the specific circumstances.

But this [lack of concreteness] is not only evident in the national economy, in the individual economy, but is becoming more and more evident in the international economic system. It is quite clear to anyone who studies the matter that people, even if they are capitalists, when they are left to their own devices and supply certain branches of production according to their abilities, do not interfere with each other, but on the contrary work in each other's hands. The real problem only begins when people in some way outgrow their ties to the branches of production. I will give just one example of where this has become particularly apparent under the influence of the monetary economy of the 19th and 20th centuries: in the formation of trusts and cartels. Let us assume that a number of branches of production join together to form a trust, a cartel. What is the consequence?

A trust or cartel must have some purpose, and it is obvious that people make more profit through the trust than they would without it. But they can only do that if they create monopoly prices, that is, if they sell above the usual competitive prices that would be formed. So you have to create the possibility of raising prices, that is, agreeing on prices that are above the usual competitive prices. Yes, such prices can be created, they have been created in many cases. But it did not come to [healthy] production. You see, you can't produce in a healthy way under the influence of this kind of profit. If you don't want to create a mismatch with the costs of the facilities, which would be far too expensive if you only produced what you produce above the competitive price, then you have to produce so much more that the costs for the machines and the entire facility are covered, and you have to produce so much more that you would produce if you only got the competitive price. But you can only sell as much as you sell at monopoly prices. Because if you were to produce at competitive prices, you would have to sell a lot more and therefore also produce a lot more than you sell at monopoly prices. That is an economic experience: you sell less when you sell at monopoly prices, but you cannot produce less because otherwise production will not pay for itself. What is the consequence? You have to go to the neighboring country and get your sales there; you sell below the cost of production. But now you are entering into international competition. This international competition has played an enormous role. If you only take into account the fixing of the price caused by the monetary economy, you create competition that would otherwise not be there by selling differently: in the immediate sales area [above the cost of production] and in the neighboring country below the cost of production. You can do that; if you only calculate accordingly, you will even make more, but you will harm the corresponding producer groups in the neighboring country. If you look for the causes of the moods that led to the causes of war in the West, you will find the causes in these things. Then we will find what a huge step lies in the [social] damage on the way from capitalism to trust formation, to cartel formation, to monopolization by cartels. The capitalist as such, who produces at competitive prices, never has an interest in protective tariffs. The protective tariff is also something that has played a role in the causes of war. There you have the damage done by the monetary economy in international life. All this is so clear to anyone who studies modern economic life that there is actually nothing that can be said against it. The question must therefore necessarily arise: how do we get beyond these damages? There is no other way to get beyond the damages than to reconnect the human being with the product, to once again directly establish the bond between the human being and production.

This is the aim of the economic idea of social threefolding: what used to exist between the individual human being and production as a bond under very different circumstances can only be brought about today by the fact that those who produce in the same way connect with each other and those who are united by profession in turn join together in circles, in associations, with the other branches of production and the corresponding consumers. In this way the associations, the united people, will know how to set production in motion, and not just the money that flows over production as something homogeneous. But this could in turn bring about in a very essential way that which only a prosperous economy makes possible for humanity.

You see, it was necessary for someone to take a good look at reality today, because all the socio-economic stuff that has been talked about in recent times is basically said without looking at reality. Of course, individual people have made apt remarks about one thing or another. But most of what has been said, and especially all that under the influence of which modern world capitalism on the one hand and wage-slavery on the other have developed, this cancer of modern life, has come about because people have no longer really looked into the lawful context of economic life, and because they no longer saw – while living as a human being in economic life – how the. because money has obliterated everything. But when the associations are there, it will be clear and obvious how one thing or another must be produced. Then the person who has something to produce will receive customers through the people who are in the appropriate associations, and it will be discussed and determined whether so much of this or that can be produced. Without the enforced economy of Moellendorff's loquacity, something can arise; because one person is taught by the other in free exchange, everything can be organized so that consumption is truly the decisive factor for all.

This was the point of the idea of threefold social order: to speak to humanity from the full reality. Because people are so unaccustomed to approaching reality in the present, that is why it is so difficult to understand the matter; people are unaccustomed to approaching reality. What do people understand of economic life as a whole? The architect understands something of building, the master carpenter of carpentry, the shoemaker of shoemaking, the barber of cutting beards, everyone understands something of the corresponding economic activity with which he is connected. But all that these “practitioners of life” somehow know about economic life is only connected with their own and not with that of others. That is why it is so abstract. It was necessary to speak to humanity from the real context of the whole of social life. Because people have become unaccustomed to using the experiences of life as a guide, they regard as utopian precisely that which is born out of reality. But that is why this idea of social threefolding is recognized as the counter-image to all utopia, as something that is born out of real life and can therefore be applied to real life. And that is the only thing that matters: that people should understand these things. Then everyone, whatever their background, will understand the idea of the threefold social order, especially if they understand the connection between their production and the world's overall economic process. This idea of the threefold social order does not shy away from close scrutiny by those who understand something of economic life through their whole relationship to life. But today not many people understand anything about economic life or social life at all; they let themselves drift and are best off when they do not need to participate in any kind of decision-making about the social order, but when the government takes care of it for them. That is why people come up with such complicated ideas that they regard what is real in life as utopian. Of course, the situation today is somewhat obscured by the fact that the Western powers have fought for and won the opportunity not to come up to date. What is demanded today in the idea of threefolding is demanded by the times. This is the point that human development has reached today. The victory of the Western powers means nothing more than a reprieve to remain under the old social conditions. The Western Powers can afford this luxury; they have fought for it. But the Central Powers cannot afford this luxury; they are dependent on satisfying the demands of the time. If they satisfy them, it will have an effect on the whole world. If they do not satisfy them, they will perish.

This must be stated quite clearly today, because today it is an either/or situation. That is why it is so frivolous when clever people keep saying, for example, “Now there will be a disagreement between the French and the English.” The English do not want to conclude a militaristic alliance with the French out of their old traditions; they also do not want to grant any loans; they also do not completely agree with the intentions of the French regarding the Rhine border, and so on. This is the continuation of what had such a devastating effect during the war and before the war. There was always speculation: Now the enemies are once again at odds; perhaps we can make a separate peace with someone. With this diplomacy, they have finally managed to have almost the whole world against them. If people of this caliber continue to corrupt people's ideas and continue to speculate that the French and the English are once again at odds, then that is a pipe dream; it is not a grasp of reality. It is a continuation of the old diplomatic way of thinking, which Czernin described so well in his book, in which he demands that the extraordinary importance of diplomats must be recognized. But the extraordinary importance of diplomats consisted in their being able to move in the appropriate salons, observing the mood there and then writing long letters about this mood and so on. During the war, this was continued very nicely, as far as one could, only there one judged the mood more on secret paths. The catastrophe of the war was partly caused by this assessment of the mood before the war. And now people are starting to speculate in the same way again. But when people wake up, they will see that in reality they have only managed to sit between two chairs themselves. There is talk of a deep gulf opening up between the French and the English; the clever people are talking about it today. When people wake up, they will see that this gulf is indeed there, but people agree that they themselves are sitting in the middle of the deep gulf. The impulse for the threefold social organism is based on the realization that this way of thinking, which is so disastrous for humanity, must give way to a way of thinking that is in line with reality. And when this is understood, people will turn to this threefold social organism with an inner necessity.

After Rudolf Steiner's introductory words, the discussion was opened; various personalities spoke:

Georg Herberg believes that in view of the price increases in recent years - as an example, he cites the price of a ton of iron, which used to cost 13 marks but now costs 1700 marks - it is necessary to take a closer look at the price problem. In doing so, the opposite pole of consumers, that is, the producers, must be considered.

Before the actual discussion begins, Siegfried Dorfner would like to draw the attention of those present to three fundamental facts that could be seen as typical of the whole situation in the work of threefolding: firstly, party leaders had been invited for this evening; however, they are not present. Secondly, when they do come, they usually remain silent in the discussions; there are no speakers. Thirdly, the attitude of followers of anthroposophy is very often: “I like anthroposophy, but not the threefold social order.” And so the lack of success of the whole threefold social order efforts is not surprising. Carl Unger would like to come back to the above and points out the importance of trusts in today's economic life. The example of iron was mentioned; there one must assume that one was dealing with a steel trust in this area. The German sugar factories also have a similar monopoly position; there are an infinite number of beet fields in Germany, but the price is inflated compared to this large supply.

Walter Johannes Stein believes that the situation in the German sugar industry points to a very central problem, to the relationship between land and the means of production in general. The question arises, for example, of whether a cow is a means of production or whether it belongs to the land. But the matter becomes even more complicated when the cow is finally slaughtered; whether it then does not take on the character of a commodity. So he asks Rudolf Steiner to explain in more detail the relationship between land, means of production and goods.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! Regarding the distinction between land and the means of production, the essential thing is that land is limited, it is not elastic, and in a certain sense it cannot be increased, while the means of production, which themselves arise through human labor, can be increased, and by increasing the means of production, production can in turn be increased.

Now, when making such distinctions, it is often necessary to start from different points of view. By distinguishing land from the means of production, one designates what is there first and has not been made by human hands as “land”. From the point of view of the political economist, a cow, which man by his labor does not himself manufacture, simply belongs to “land and soil” as long as it is not slaughtered; when it is slaughtered, it is of course a commodity. But then it appears in a very specific way on the commodity market, and we are dealing with two facts: firstly, the fact that it is withdrawn from the productive power of the land, and secondly, the fact that it appears as a commodity; in a sense, the cow is a marginal product. Such marginal products are everywhere. But the point is to, so to speak, hold on to what you have in mind by using the terms that can be taken from the respective characteristic representative.

Is that not so? In the economic process, we are dealing, firstly, with what is necessary for production but cannot itself be produced. This includes land itself and a number of other things; we simply summarize this under “land”. Secondly, everything that serves to produce something else but must first be produced itself, such as machines, is part of the economic process. In the context of the national economy, the process of working, the labor that must be used to produce the means of production, does not apply to land. This is the essential economic point: the labor equivalent is only a valid way of looking at the means of production until the means of production are actually ready for use in production. At the moment the means of production are available, they are actually integrated into the economic process in exactly the same way as land. As long as one is working on the means of production and has to make use of the national economy in order to be able to work on the means of production, a distinction must be made between how the means of production and land are placed in the national economy. At the moment when the means of production are finished, they are subject to the same economic category as land. As long as I still have to fabricate the locomotive, I have to assess the economic process in which the fabrication of the locomotive takes place differently than in the moment when it is finished. When it [as a finished means of production] is on the rails and is moved by people for further production, it is just as much a part of the economic process as land. The difficulty in the distinction is that the finished means of production actually falls under the same category as land. What labor has to be expended to create a means of production is the essential thing, and that is added to the means of production and is lacking in land. Of course, this is connected with the following. If land were elastic, it could be increased. It would either have to grow by itself or people would have to produce it. But I do not want to discuss this question further. The fact that land is available to a certain extent is what distinguishes it from the means of production. It can only be used to a greater or lesser extent, which makes it similar to the means of production.

Now, of course, we must also consider the third element, the actual commodity. It is characterized by the fact that it is consumed. In the economic process, this makes it something essentially different from the means of production, which itself is not directly consumed, but only worn out. Thus, a commodity is also something different from land, which also serves little for consumption, but at most needs to be improved, and so on.

Thus, these three things are to be distinguished as essentially different in the economic process: 1. land, which [exists] without human labor having been expended on it; 2. the means of production, which begins when human labor has been used; both – land and means of production – are not there for immediate consumption; 3. the commodity, which is there for immediate consumption.

But you see, the thing is that the whole thing is also a question of time. Because the moment you think about the fact that means of production, for example of a mechanical nature, are used up within a certain time, the moment you do that, the means of production appear to you as a commodity – only as a commodity that takes a longer time to be used up. When you make distinctions in life, these distinctions tend to be highly inconvenient; they are never such that you can make a strict division. You have to remain flexible on these issues. Because in fact, the means of production also have a commodity character to a certain extent. Land does not have this commodity character, which the means of production can have, in the same way, which is why you have to make a stricter distinction there. It is nonsense to apply the concept of the commodity to land from a purely monetary-capitalist point of view. So you see, if you apply something in reality, you cannot stop at abstract concepts. That is something that people who read the “Key Aspects of the Social Question” raise as an objection: they want nicely boxed terms. Then what they read is nice for them; then you know after reading half a page what you have read. In reality, however, a means of production can only be grasped if one knows: it is not consumed at first, but if one uses it over a longer period of time, it is the same as a commodity. So you have to keep in mind that the means of production has both the property of being consumed and of not being consumed, and the concept must correspond to that.

We need to have flexible concepts. People today do not want that; they want nested concepts. They do not want to think their way out into reality at all. Otherwise, things like this could not arise: people saying, for example, “I like anthroposophy quite well, but I don't want to know anything about threefold social order.” Those who speak in this way are rather like someone who says, “Yes, I am interested in the spiritual, but this spiritual must not encroach on the political; this spiritual must be independent of the political.” Yes, my dear friends, that is precisely what the threefold social order seeks to achieve. But because the spiritual is nowhere independent today, it is an illusion to believe that you can only be interested in the spiritual. In order for your abstract ideal to become concrete, so that you have something to take an interest in that is not influenced by politics, threefolding must first conquer such a field, so that there is a field in which one does not need to take an interest in politics. Threefolding is fighting for precisely that in which sleepy souls want to feel at home, but only have it as an illusion. These sleepy souls, oh, how we would like to wake them up! They feel so tremendously at ease when they are inwardly mystics, when they grasp the whole world inwardly, when they discover God in their own soul and thereby become such perfect human beings! But this inwardness has value only when it steps out into life. I would like to know if it has any value when, in this day and age, when everything is in a rush and the world is on fire, people cannot find their way to have their say in public affairs. That is a nice interest in anthroposophy, which only wants to be interested in anthroposophy and does not even find the opportunity to have a say in what anthroposophy wants to inspire. Those anthroposophists who are only interested in anthroposophy and not in what can become of anthroposophy in relation to life are like a person who is charitable only with his mouth, but otherwise quickly closes his pockets when he should really be charitable. Therefore, what is found in people who only want to take an interest in anthroposophy in their own way is anthroposophical chatter. But the reality of anthroposophy is what is transferred into life.

Afterwards, a discussion about the future work on threefolding with the leaders of the local groups takes place. There are three main questions for discussion. First: Is it permissible to compromise? Second: Should one participate in the elections? Third: In what form should propaganda for the threefolding idea be carried out?

Paul Kretschmar, from Cologne, argues that one should try to influence the existing works council and parliament. The newspapers would play a not insignificant role in this regard. One would therefore have to form a kind of journalistic office to write articles for trade journals. It was also important to train competent speakers; these would have to be able to rely on a kind of primer on the threefold order, similar to the way Damaschke had published a brooch. It was also necessary to found a publishing house to effectively support newspaper propaganda. Basically, even participation in the elections should be considered.

Mr. Klug, also from Cologne, warns against participation in the elections that is completely independent. At most, it is debatable whether it would be possible to proceed together with other independent parties. Furthermore, it would be important to discuss whether consumer associations could be formed.

Hermann Heisler believes that a kind of “Catechism of Threefolding” is really needed; this should provide a guide to how threefolding can be introduced into practical life, especially into economic life. In the present situation, three questions arise in particular. Firstly, how could threefolding, if it were actually realized in Central Europe, counteract the expected European famine? Secondly, what goal must be given to the working class now? Thirdly, how far can one go in the practical events of the political parties and profess the objectives of threefolding?

Siegfried Dorfner is convinced that the best way to propagate the threefold order is to leave the party.

Walter Conradt believes that, as far as the treatment of the press is concerned, it must be assumed that a decentralization of opinions has occurred on the other side. As for the treatment of the proletarian party, however, the events of the last year – especially in connection with the “poster mission” – have shown that the proletariat has been “moved” for a year, so it can no longer be counted on for the time being.

Richard Seebohm says that it has certainly happened that a newspaper has addressed individual questions, but one should not forget that even if state supervision has now been lifted, the newspapers are still under the control of industry. And it should not be overlooked that there are also threefoldingers who do not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy. For these reasons, it is important to stand behind the existing threefolding newspaper.

Paul Kretschmar mentions the Cologne “Generalanzeiger”, in which articles on threefolding could certainly be accommodated.

Ernst Uehli mentioned a foreign friend who had confirmed to him that the press could not be won over for big ideas; in general, it could be said that the idea of threefolding was much criticized in the newspapers. The pursuit of true “humanity” and the press could not be reconciled, as the German philosopher Karl Christian Planck had already established.

Emil Molt points out that the Federation for Threefolding intends to conduct a course for agitators — a course for speakers — under the direction of Rudolf Steiner.

After the discussion, Rudolf Steiner is asked to comment on the various questions raised, despite the late hour.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees! First of all, I would just like to say that I will be obliged to speak in brief hints, and I ask you to take this into account. So the individual questions asked can no longer be discussed in detail. Perhaps we can do that next time.

First of all, we want to pick out the relatively most important question, the question:

How would the threefold social order work in the context of the coming European famine?

I would like to say, although it may seem strange to some, that there is a completely different question behind this one that makes answering difficult. But in general, the following must apply to this question. Isn't it true that, say, ten years ago, the world did not have what is called a famine, at least not what can and probably will come as famine in the near future, since souls sleep. But we must consider the following, however simple and primitive they may appear: there are no fewer raw materials in the ground than there were ten years ago; there are no fewer fields than there were ten years ago; and there are essentially no fewer human workers than there were ten years ago – millions have perished in the war, but not only as producers, but also as consumers. So in general, the economic possibilities and conditions are exactly the same as they were ten years ago.

It was perhaps eight weeks ago when a letter written by the well-known politician, the Russian Prince Kropotkin, was published in the newspapers, in which he made two curious statements. One is that he is now working on an ethics - interesting that he is now beginning to write an ethics. The other message is that there is now only one thing that is being delivered from the West to Russia: food, bread. Of course, it is easiest when there is no bread to take it from the side where it is available. Well, other people also have such views sometimes. A fortnight ago I received a letter from a lawyer and notary in central Germany. The letter sounded very much like a lawyer and notary, for it was coarse and stupid. But it also said that you can't lure a dog out from behind the stove with some kind of idealism, that it's a matter of fighting for the naked loaf.

Now, you see, everything I have just explained does not take into account the simplest and most primitive. Because if you take that into account, you will know that it is only a matter of getting people to organize in such a way that it can and will be done from the antecedents that exist now as they did ten years ago. This will certainly not be achieved if people are fobbed off with either what the old “Czernine” regard as state and popular wisdom, or the old “Bethmänner”, written with or without h, nor what the old Social Democrats, this particular kind of “negative Bethmänner”, suggest; but what matters is that people are given goals again, that they see what we are working towards. And that can be given through the movement of threefolding. What matters is not to say what many people say today, even if it is relatively correct: We will not have a famine or we can overcome it if people work again. Yes, if! But when people face the hopelessness of work that arises from the old programs and old machinations, then they do not want to work. But if you bring something to humanity that ignites, so that people see something ahead of them that can lead them to a dignified existence, [then they will want to work], and then bread will also be able to be produced. This is an important prerequisite for making bread: trust in humanity. If we do not gain this trust, then famine will come with certainty. But in order for trust to arise, threefolding is necessary. I can only hint at this in this context. But if you pursue this thought, you will see that famine can essentially only be prevented by propagating threefolding. However, one necessity exists: that this idea of threefolding must take root in as many minds as possible, so that these minds do not fall for anything that is just a continuation of the old system. This continuation of the old system is becoming very, very widespread – only in a seemingly new form. Because, you see, on certain sides today it is as if the leading personalities had set themselves the task of bringing about famine. Today, all kinds of prices are rising in an incredible way. But prices only make sense if they are relative to each other. The prices of the most important foodstuffs are being artificially kept down today. I am not saying that they should go up, but they must not be disproportionate to the prices of other things. This disproportion prevents anyone from wanting to devote themselves to the production of raw products, of food, in the near future. The production of a famine has thus become a government measure. This must be seen through.

Secondly, it must be emphasized that this is indeed an international issue and the question can be raised:

Can anything be achieved in Central Europe alone by introducing the threefold order – or whatever it is called?

I must refer you to what I have written in the threefolding newspaper, and I have done so repeatedly and from a wide variety of perspectives: if only people would really pluck up the courage to propagate the threefolding, even under the most unfavorable conditions, even during a famine – that would have an effect if people in the western or eastern regions could see something positive being done by us.

So today we still stand on the same position as the world did when the peace offer was sent out to the world in 1916, where phrase after phrase was used, but nothing concrete was said before the world. Just try it out and see how it would work in international life if you came up with something that has hand and foot, that has substance and content like the idea of the threefold social organism. At present, we see how, for example, British statesmen in particular are becoming more and more afraid from week to week of what is happening in Germany. It is actually something highly unfamiliar to them. And because they cannot make head or tail of it, they are seized with fear that something worse than Bolshevism could arise here than in Russia. But if they knew Bauer, Ebert and Noske better, it would even be a good remedy for their fear. Because the truth is that nothing is happening here, that in reality month after month passes without anything happening. Just imagine what it would mean for international life if something substantial were to come out of Central Europe. Only when one is clear about these things can one approach such a question as how threefolding will work in the event of a famine; in relation to everything else, that is not the question. It is true that only the threefold order is capable of bringing about an organization in which work will be done again and trust can be restored. Then famine can be prevented.

In order to be effective internationally, however, the idea of threefolding must take root in people's minds. Then I would not be worried that it will not work in international relations. As long as negotiations are conducted only out of chauvinism, no progress will be made. If something of significance were invented here in Central Europe, it would gain international recognition. If sound ideas take hold here, international barriers will fall away by themselves; for people will act according to their interests and take what is good where they can find it.

And I wanted to give you a few more suggestions on the newspaper question: I do not want to deny that some of what has been said is very important. And it will be commendable if one or the other of our friends gets an article published in some newspaper or another. But the essential thing remains that just as little can be achieved by crawling to the parties, little can be achieved by crawling to the other newspapers. It can be done, but it is actually the same thing, only in a different color. I do not criticize it; I am quite in agreement when it happens. But I would see the positive side in our friends promoting our newspaper, our threefolding newspaper, as much as possible. You may say: That is all very well, but the newspapers in which we want to place articles are only available to people who already subscribe to them. They have to subscribe to them in addition. Not all of them will do it, but a number of them will. Then we will be able to transform the threefolding newspaper into a daily newspaper. Only then will we be able to publish the articles we want to publish; then it will be effective. So the point is to work so hard for the threefolding newspaper, which is still a weekly paper, that it can be converted into a daily paper through its own earnings. Then we won't have to “crawl” to the others; that's what matters. Why shouldn't it be possible to put something that is of such eminent importance on its own two feet!

Then various other points were made. Regarding participation in the elections, I would just like to say the following: Of course, in abstracto one can certainly say that participating in the election and entering parliament and working there supports the present state. - You can't say that just like that. I don't even want to speak so strongly for or against; whether or not to participate in the election depends on the various specific circumstances. But if you take a strict view of threefolding, it is not entirely right in principle not to participate in parliament. The right thing to do in principle, consistently thought out in terms of threefolding, would be to participate in the elections, have as many people elected as can be elected, enter parliament and obstruct all questions relating to intellectual and economic life. That would be consistently thought out in terms of threefolding. The point is to separate off the middle part, the life of the state. This can only be achieved if the other parts on the left and right are discarded. The only way to do this is to actually get elected, enter and practice obstruction in all that is negotiated and decided in the fields of intellectual and economic life. That would be a consistent way of thinking in terms of the threefold social organism. This idea is something that must be thought through consistently and can also be thought through consistently in relation to concrete circumstances, because it is derived from reality. — That would be to say in relation to the most important questions.

Regarding the new goal that should now be given to the workers, I have to say that, based on my experiences with the works councils, it seems to me to be more of an academic question. The question will have to be approached differently; [we have to ask] whether such a goal should be set at all. The question of the works council has been raised. Every possible effort has been made to get the works councils going. The workers have promised all sorts of things and kept none of them. At first they turned up at the meetings, then they stopped coming. The same thing would happen again with the next new goals if they were carried into the current workers' organizations.

social order: Dear attendees! I would like to talk today about the threefold social order in such a way that some light can be shed on what has been called the land question in modern times from the point of view of the economic facts that my remarks will deal with. It is a peculiarity of the idea of threefolding that through it we learn to see that certain discussions and agitations in the old style must cease if we are to make any fruitful progress at all — for these discussions and agitations have, after all, developed out of the conditions that led us into decline.

The land question is something that interests broad sections of society because the price, and also the availability and usability of land, is closely related to human destiny and to people's living conditions. Isn't it true that everyone is directly aware of how land prices are factored into what you have to pay for your apartment, and how they are factored into the price of food? One need only reflect a little and one will find that what originates from land has its effects on all other economic conditions. Depending on the land prices one has to pay for one's food, one has to be paid for any occupation one is in, and so on. But it is not only these vital questions, which directly affect people, that are connected with humanity's relationship to land and property, but also many more far-reaching cultural and civilizational conditions. We need only think about how the relationship between the countryside and the city is connected to land and property, and how what then is the difficulty or ease of living conditions in cities is connected to conditions in the countryside. From these, in turn, it will become clear what can develop in the city itself. Depending on how wealth or prosperity is distributed in a city due to a particular relationship between the countryside and the city, what we call our public intellectual life develops in the city — at least under our modern cultural conditions. Of course, you can also become a lonely mystic in the countryside; but in the context of modern science, technical operations, and the art business, you can basically only stand if you have some kind of relationship to city life. This is something that is immediately apparent from even a superficial observation of life. And many other things could be mentioned that would already show how the land question - and with it the question of the relationship between the city and the countryside - cuts deeply into our entire cultural situation. Therefore, the land question must also be connected in some way with what has driven us into the decline of these cultural conditions.

Now, the more recent treatment of the land question is particularly related to the fact that the injustice of the increases in the value or price of land has been noticed by a large number of people. It has simply been noticed how little it has to do with human labor whether one piece of land or another can increase in value over a certain period of time. I know how great an impression a very well-known land reformer repeatedly made when he presented the following to his audience in fundamental lectures: Imagine that someone owns a piece of land that he has bought with the intention of building a factory near it, or that the city will expand towards this piece of land, or that a railroad will be built past it, or something similar. He bought this piece of land with the knowledge that such circumstances would cause its value to increase quite considerably in the next few years. He bought the piece of land at the very moment when he had to live with the foresight that he would spend the next three years in prison. After buying the property, he goes to prison, stays there for three years, and when he comes out, his piece of land is worth five times as much as it was before. The man has done nothing to increase the value of his property by a factor of five except to serve three years in prison. These are things, ladies and gentlemen, which naturally have an extremely strong effect when one wants to make something clear with them. And one cannot even say that these things work unfairly. Here something works that is, quite rightly, easily understood, because it can be exactly so. And then – I would like to say – one can omit many things, then it follows from such insights that, of course, the whole [way of] integrating land value into our economic process is something that cannot continue like this, that it must be subject to reform in some way.

And now the most diverse reforms have been introduced, but they all point in the same direction: Henry George, Adolf Damaschke, and many others in between. What all these reforms have in common is the idea that land, to a greater or lesser extent (the exact form is not so important here), must be something that belongs to the community, so to speak. Not that all land reformers want direct nationalization of land, but they do want a very substantial percentage of the particularly large increases in value to be delivered to the community as a “value increase tax” – a percentage that perhaps almost brings the land back to its former value if it has increased in value without the owner's merit. One can also think of other forms in which the land is, to a certain extent, transferred into a kind of common property. But it is undoubtedly obvious that the person who has harmed his fellow human beings to such an extent that they felt compelled to lock him up in prison can, when he returns after three years, justifiably be required to hand over to the community the increased value of his land.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, Damaschke emphasizes that he is not thinking of extending the same fate that he inflicts on land in this way to any other means of production. He demonstrates how the other means of production increase their value in a completely different way within human property; he proves that increases in the value of the means of production take place in a completely different ratio, which cannot be compared at all with the increases in the value of land, which occur frequently. Now one can say that something like this is certainly plausible and cannot really be treated in any other way than by agreeing in a certain sense.

But, ladies and gentlemen, you have no doubt seen that there are nationalizations today, that is, the transfer of what would otherwise be produced purely by private enterprise and for which the equivalent value is received privately, into the administration of a certain collective. But one cannot say that the experience that humanity has had in such matters in recent years is one that is universally satisfactory. Because I believe – at least some of you will have noticed something about it – that not all people fared as well as they should have done in terms of rationing, that is, in a certain sense of communization, for example, of food and other things. I believe that some people have experienced a certain hoarding during these years, when a great deal was communized.

And the social impulse that is to be given with the threefold order is not at all willing to deceive itself and deceive others, but is willing to give such impulses that do not just remain on paper and serve a certain type of person, while others are able to avoid the things in question, and to do so in abundance. The impulse that is to be given by the threefold social order is meant to be a reality impulse that actually realizes what it intends. Only someone who knows life can truly understand what the impulse for threefolding seriously wants. Anyone who strives to understand life and truly understands life will have no doubt that there can also be hoarding of land value increases if land is communized in the way that land reformers want, who think out of the old ideas. It is quite possible, in both the Leninist and the Damaschkean system, to render ineffective through all kinds of back doors what enters the world as a law. The impulse for the threefolding of the social organism simply cannot, because it wants something real, close itself off from the fundamental insight that social reality truly cannot be made by those laws that arise when the old social and state ways of thinking and imagining are continued. It depends on the people and on that social organization, on that social organism, which alone ensures that people find no means of unfairly or immorally circumventing anything that lies within the scope of that social organism. We must come as close as possible to such a life-affirming approach.

We can look at what we call the threefold social order from a variety of perspectives. We can consider the points that I initially set out in the Key Points, so to speak, to provide a first impetus. One can also characterize the necessity for threefolding from other sides, as I and a few others have been doing for more than a year here in Stuttgart. One can, for example, also assert the following points of view; one can say: In the course of the development of modern humanity, we have come to the point where we simply can no longer bear certain institutions because of the way we think today, and our entire human state of mind demands other institutions. The fact that we have such chaos throughout the world arises precisely from the fact that certain conditions that have arisen from the development of humanity in recent centuries can no longer be tolerated by people of the present. One person feels vaguely that the conditions can no longer be borne; he hears Damaschke speak and hears that an enormous amount of injustice depends on the fact that a convict can quintuple his land ownership in three years without earning anything. Another is presented with Marxist theories and accepts them. A third is told: if we do not protect the old institutions and the old so-called nobility, then the whole world will descend into chaos, so we must protect it.

But basically, the reasons why people are dissatisfied with the current situation lie deep within the human being; and today it is already the case that what is developed as programs are basically only dreams, only illusions that people delude themselves with. They do not even come up with what they actually want. And so one person makes some theory or other out of their previous habits, which he calls logical. It is already the case today that basically it depends only on whether a person lives in the proletariat or was born in a Prussian Junker house, whether he is a Marxist out of the old habits of life or a conservative in the sense of Mr. von Heydebrand and the Lasa. These programs, which are made from left and right, actually have nothing to do with reality today. And one can say: If something like a Reichstag election takes place today, what is said on this occasion is about the same as if an evil world demon were dreaming and these dreams were transferred into the consciousness of people, party members and party leaders, and people were talking about something that basically has nothing to do with what is supposed to happen. Because humanity today is moving towards a very specific goal. It is just unclear about this goal.

First of all, humanity feels that things cannot go on as they have done so far with spiritual matters, with the order of spiritual matters. This is simply because, despite all materialism - which is very, very much in the style that I also discussed in yesterday's public lecture - filtered spirituality is present in the abstractions to which people devote themselves today, the proletariat, for example, most of all. Although this proletariat seems to be most concerned with “realities”, “production conditions” and the like, it surrenders to spiritual abstractions and can never arrive at any institutions that grasp reality. People feel that they must hold on to something spiritual, and the spiritual must also be there to intervene in social life, to form the social structure of the social organism that is, after all, inhabited by people. What, then, has basically been shaping the structure of our social organism to this day? The spirit? No, I think it is not the spirit. If, for example, I inherit a large country estate from my father, it is something other than spirit; it is a natural connection, it is blood. And blood is the thing that, together with all kinds of other circumstances that have become attached to it, can still bring a person into a certain position today. And the spiritual position of the person depends on this position. He can absorb certain educational content purely by being placed in a certain social position as a result of old circumstances, which in turn are largely based on blood ties. Basically, humanity initially feels this as something that can no longer be tolerated in the spiritual life. Instinctively, humanity feels that instead of everything being determined by blood, as it has been since time immemorial, the spirit must have a say in social institutions in the future. True, in order to be a companion of that which has developed [in this way in the past] and which can no longer be tolerated today, the Church has indeed submitted to that council decision, which was made at the eighth ecumenical council in the year 869 in Constantinople, where, as it were, the spirit was abolished, where it was decreed that the human soul may indeed have individual spiritual qualities, but that man consists only of body and soul, not of body, soul and spirit. Under this world view, which spread throughout the civilized world, the demands of the spirit were suppressed, and in the whole activity of spiritual life that which is not determined by the spirit could develop.

And today, from the bottom of their hearts, people want the spirit to have a say in determining the social structure. But this can only happen if the spiritual life no longer remains an appendage of the state that emerged from old blood conquests, but if the spiritual life is placed on its own, if the spiritual life works only according to the impulses that lie within it. Then we can assume that the leading figures in this spiritual life will do what is incumbent upon them — we will talk about some more of what is incumbent upon them in a moment; after all, the “Key Points” mention many things — namely, to guide people into the social structure according to their abilities, their diligence and so on, and that they will do so purely through the knowledge of natural conditions, without laws, purely through the knowledge of natural conditions. And one will have to say: In the field of spiritual life, which will stand on its own and work from its own impulses, it is the knowledge of the actual that will be the determining factor. Let us say, then, briefly: spiritual life, the spiritual part of the social organism, demands as its right knowledge [of the actual forces], but this knowledge must be the knowledge of the power of action.

Let us now turn to the second part of the social organism, the legal or state part. Here we come upon something that is not so subject to the external as is spiritual life. My dear audience, our entire social organism, insofar as the spiritual works in it, is bound to what appears with each new generation, yes, what leads new forces into the social organism from indeterminate depths with each new human being. Take the present moment. Are you in any way allowed, on the basis of the conditions of the present time, to set up any kind of organization that determines the way people live together in a very specific way? No, you are not allowed to do that! For with each individual human being, new forces are born out of unknown depths; we have to educate them, and we have to wait to see what they bring into life. We must not tyrannize what is brought into life through the spiritual gifts by existing laws or an existing organization; we must receive what is brought to us from spiritual worlds with an open mind, we must not tyrannize and dogmatize it with what is already there. Therefore, we need such a link in the social organism that works entirely out of freedom, out of the freedom of human potentialities that are constantly being reborn into humanity.

The second link in the social organism, the state-legal life, is already somewhat less dependent on what comes in from spiritual worlds. For, as we know, it is people who have come of age who are active in the field of the legal life, the life of the state. And, ladies and gentlemen, when we come of age, we have actually already been seized by a great deal of mediocrity. In a sense, the levelling of the philistines has hit us in the neck. And in so far as we are all equal as mature human beings, we are already - and this is not meant in a bad sense - in a sense a little caught up in the schoolbooks of philistinism. We are caught up in that which can be regulated by laws.

But you will say: Yes, we cannot make all intellectual life dependent on children; but there must also be intellectual ability and intellectual diligence beyond the age of majority. Not really, however paradoxical it may sound. For our abilities that go beyond the average, when we have passed our twenties, are based precisely on the fact that we have retained what we had in childhood as a disposition and so on. And the greatest genius is the person who carries the powers of childlikeness the most into their thirties, forties and fifties. One then only exercises these powers of childlikeness with the mature organism, the mature soul and the mature spirituality, but they are the powers of childlikeness. Unfortunately, our culture has the peculiarity of trying to kill these powers of childlikeness through education, so that in the smallest possible number of people, childish peculiarities remain into old age, and people become un-philistine. Because actually, all non-philistinism is based on the fact that the preserved childhood powers precisely un-philistinize, that they break through the later philistinism.

But because something is emerging that does not have to be continually renewed in relation to the present needs of humanity's consciousness, in modern times the conditions of legal and state life can only be regulated by laws on a democratic basis. Laws are not insights. With insights, we must always confront reality, and from reality we must receive the impulse for what we are to do through insights. This applies to education and to everything else, as I have shown in the “Key Points”, that it must proceed from the spiritual member of the social organism. But how is it with laws? Laws are given so that state-political life, legal life, can exist. But one must wait until someone needs to act in the sense of a law, only then must one concern oneself with this law. Or you have to wait to apply the law until someone breaks it. In short, there is always something there, the law, but only in the event of something possibly occurring. The essence of eventuality is always present, the casus eventualis. This is something that must always underlie the law. You have to wait until you can do something with the law. The law can be there; if it does not affect my sphere, then I am not interested in the law. There are many people today who believe that they are interested in the law in general, but it is as I have just indicated – if one is honest, one must admit this. So: the law is something that is there, but that must work towards eventuality. This is what must now underlie the legal, state and political aspects of the threefold organism.

With the economic aspect, we cannot get by with law alone, because it is not enough to merely issue laws about whether this or that should be supplied in a certain way from these or those circumstances. You cannot work for eventualities. A third element comes into play alongside knowledge and the law: it is the contract, the specific contract that is concluded between those who do business – the corporations and associations – which does not work towards the eventuality as the law does, but towards the very specific fulfillment. Just as knowledge must prevail in intellectual life and as the law must prevail in political and legal life, so must the contract prevail in economic life, in all its ramifications. The system of contracts, which is not based on contingency but on commitment, is what must bring about everything you find described in the “Key Points” as the third link in the social organism.

We can therefore say that we have three illustrative points of view from which we can understand what these three elements must be like in essence. Everything in life that is subject to knowledge must be administered in the free domain of the spiritual element. Everything in life that can be harnessed into laws belongs to the state. Everything that is subject to binding contracts must be incorporated into economic life.

Dear attendees, if people believe that what has been explained in the “key points” is a few crazy ideas, they are very much mistaken. What is expressed in the “key points” can be discussed from the most diverse points of view, because it is taken from life. And you can describe life as it is in a tree that you photograph: from one side you have this aspect, from a second side you have a different one, from a third, fourth side there is yet another image and so on. That is the peculiar thing: When something comes from life, when it is not just a complicated utopia or a complicated idea, but really comes from life, then you can always find new aspects, because life is manifoldly rich in its content. [Threefolding takes this diversity of life into account.] Basically, you can never stop learning to see the necessities of the threefolding of the social organism [everywhere in this diversity]. But it is not something vague and nebulous, but something that can be grasped in the sharpest terms, as I showed you today with reference to knowledge, law and contract.

Now the point is to say to oneself: one must work in the direction of threefolding, and one can work from the ordinary real conditions today in the direction that is given by finally breaking down this social organism into three interacting administrative sub-organisms. And we must finally recognize that all the answers we give ourselves, based on old conditions and which actually only lead to a reorganization of the old conditions, are outdated today. Therefore, when the land reformers say that those whose land ownership has increased in value without their merit, without their work, must deliver such and such a large portion to the state as a tax, they are counting on the old form of the state. They do not consider that this state, too, must be reformed. They do not consider that it can only be one link in the social organism. That is the strange thing, that even the most radical reformers of the present time cannot imagine that something must be newly created out of the depths of the social conditions of humanity. And they cannot conceive that everything that must be achieved today cannot be achieved if, on the other hand, what is at stake is forced into the old forms. The state remains, even if it puts into its coffers what it takes from the real estate speculators, and perhaps lets it flow back to them or to other people in ways that are still possible. But examine what follows from the idea of threefolding for the establishment of the social organism: if you seriously take up the idea of threefolding, if you seriously apply what threefolding is based on, then you will find that everything that is in that direction becomes impossible, that you just pour the old nonsense into a different form.

For what actually is land? You see, land is obviously a means of production. We produce with land. But it is a means of production of a different kind from the other means of production. We must first prepare the other means of production through human labor, and land, at least in the main, is there without being prepared by people first. Therefore, one can say: the means of production initially take the path of the commodity; then, when they are finished, when they are handed over for their task, they are no longer a commodity. We have emphasized this repeatedly – I myself have emphasized it from this platform on many occasions –: means of production may only be commodities in the economic circulation process until they are finished and handed over to the national economic life. What are they then afterwards? Then they are something that is subject to political or state life, to democracy, and that with reference to the work that people have to do through these means of production, in that they must get along with each other as responsible human beings. The means of production are something that is subject to state life, in that they pass from one person to another, so that it is always the person who needs the means of production who really has them. But they are also something that is subject to the institutions of spiritual work. For it is not out of old inheritance relationships, but out of the institutions of spiritual life that, through knowledge - as modern consciousness alone can bear it - it must now be determined how, when one no longer works with the means of production, it passes to those who, through their abilities and talents, can continue to use the means of production. Thus we can say: If threefolding underlies life, the means of production are commodities only as long as they are being produced. Then they cease to be commodities and are subject to laws and insights. Through laws and insights they fit into the social structure.

Land cannot be produced; it is therefore not a commodity from the outset. It is therefore never subject to the principle of the commodity, which is the subject of contracts. Land is therefore not at all concerned with what is contracted for. It must be gradually introduced into the social structure in such a way that, first of all, the distribution of land with a view to human cultivation is a democratic matter for the political state, and that the transition from one to the other is a matter for the intellectual link of the social organism. The living relationship in the democratic state decides who works on a piece of land for the benefit of the people. Land is never a commodity. From the very beginning, it is something that cannot be bought and sold.

What we must strive for first is not to buy and sell the land, but to ensure that what transforms the land into the sphere of human activity, legal and spiritual conditions, legal and spiritual impulses. Only someone who does not think clearly about these matters can think there is anything utopian about this. For basically it is only a change in the way something is done today: today we pay for land with money that comes from the sale of goods; that is not the truth, it is a social lie. Money used as an equivalent for land is, in the economic process, something different from money used as an equivalent for a commodity. And you see, that is something that is so difficult to see through in the present social chaos. Suppose you buy cherries, you give money for them. You buy any manor, you also give money for it. Now, when the two people who have received money, one for cherries – a sufficient amount of money, of course, it does not depend on whether it is possible in this direction – and the other for his manor, and when they mix up their money, you cannot distinguish which money was paid for the cherries and which for the manor. But precisely because one cannot distinguish between them, one is led into a pernicious and terrible illusion. Because, you see, if I draw crosses here and then small circles and were to mix them up, I would still be able to distinguish them.

But if I had no sense of the difference between crosses and little rings, then I would no longer be able to distinguish what one is and what the other is. In other words, if I were to make the crosses and little rings in such a way that I turn the crosses into semicircles and the little rings into semicircles and draw both, then it would no longer be possible to distinguish between them. But what about in reality? You see, let's say I get the cherry money and the manor money. If I mix them up, I can no longer distinguish which money comes from the manor and which money comes from the cherries. You might think: money is money. But that is the terrible illusion. It is not true. In the economic process, the little rings that come from the manor house have a different effect on the whole of human life than the little crosses that come from the cherries. It is not the money that really matters, but the after-effect of where the money comes from. And a veil is simply drawn over this; it is no longer there for human observation. And so money is the living abstraction. Everything gets mixed up without differentiation. Man is no longer capable of being with what he belongs to, what he produces with, what he works on. Everything gets mixed up through money, just as everything flows together in the unclear mystics and becomes a few abstract concepts. And just as these abstract concepts [of the mystics] are useless in our process of knowledge, so too is what people imagine about money, because it is also just an abstraction, something beside reality, and thus nothing that can be used in life.

When you think about something like this, you realize the tremendous practical importance of land in people's lives. You realize that it should never depend on whether I am the owner of the land without any interest in it, or whether I only receive my pension from the land, but am indifferent to everything else. Anyone who has a proper grasp of the national economy knows what that means: I live off the land, but basically it makes no difference to me whether I live off the land or off the proceeds, let's say, from a CriCri or poker game; basically it's all the same to me, all that matters to me is acquiring a sum of money. The fact that one is indifferent as to how one acquires a sum of money is not so important when it comes to the fact that one really only earns this sum of money. But when you receive it from something that is connected with the weal and woe, with the fate of human beings, indeed with the whole cultural configuration, as land is, when you think about it, then it is not possible to transform this land into indifferent, abstract money. For it is precisely land that makes it necessary for the person who works it, who has something to do with it and who transfers what depends on the land into the economic process – that is not the money he brings in, but the fruit that thrives on it – that he is [really completely] involved in it.

Dear attendees, land within its territory cannot be administered according to the economic categories that have emerged in modern times. Just try to calculate when someone fertilizes his land with the manure that is produced by his cattle – try to figure out how to arrive at a value statement for this manure, how to determine the market value of the fertilizer, for example, what the fertilizer would be worth if it contaminated any of the markets in the cities. This is just a drastic example. If you follow the train of thought to its conclusion, you will find that there is a huge difference in the way in which what is produced on a property fits into the economic process. Compare the way in which a property functions that is subject to so-called self-management, that is, where the person who, on the property, whether it be a small or large property, actually considers the provision of the property from his abilities , and compare it with the way a community functions and must function that is organized only to maximize its monetary yield, to get as much as it can out of it. But as we stand in public life today, things must even out, that is, the one who is a self-manager cannot help but adapt to the one who leases the estate and only draws the rent from it. Thus, through adaptation, what emerges from the concrete – and in the case of land, how the individual products must relate to each other, how one must support the other; this is the self-management out of very different motives than if the things were only brought to the money market – so little by little what emerges from the concrete, the self-management, becomes dependent on what are quite abstract monetary conditions. This has already happened, which is why we have unnatural conditions today. Land that cannot be a commodity is being commodified; this introduces a real lie into life. It is not only what is said that is false, but also what happens. As soon as land is regarded as a commodity, that is, as soon as it can be bought and sold, one lies by one's actions.

If, however, you have the threefold social order, you cannot buy and sell land. The [legal] circumstances by which land passes from one person to another are subject to state laws, which have nothing to do with the buying and selling of goods. The question of how land is transferred from one person to another is subject to the spiritual aspect of the social organism, which has nothing to do with inheritance and blood relationship, but with such things as I have described in the “Key Points”. So you see, you only need to understand what threefolding is, and if you move in that direction, you are on the way to solving the social question.

What does Damaschke want? He takes the land question, he thinks about it, and the land question is to be solved through reflection. My dear audience, real things are not solved through reflection. I would just like to know how you intend to crush sugar, chop wood or the like, or how you intend to eat, through reflection. Just as you cannot crush sugar or eat out of contemplation, you cannot solve the land question out of contemplation. One can only say: land is today part of certain human circumstances. If we now consider what people do to the best of their ability in the social organism, incorporating the impulses of the threefold social order, then the facts that arise from devoting oneself to this threefold social order solve the land question not only in thought, but [in a practical way] just as the knife breaks the sugar, as the hoe chops the wood. Likewise, the threefold social order solves the land question by the fact that the land will simply be integrated into the threefold organism in such a way that it will no longer be treated as a commodity, as it is today. It will no longer continue in an unjustified way in consanguinity, but will be subject only to what man today feels to be the only tenable thing: that the transfer of land from one person to another occurs out of spiritual knowledge, that is, out of the impulse of the spiritual member of the social organism.

You see, the land question should be solved by threefolding not through programs, not through some abstract or utopian concepts, that is, not in a similar way to how Damaschke deals with the land question, but in such a way that one says: however tricky today's land conditions may be, devote yourselves to threefolding, introduce the facts of threefolding into social life, [take up] the things that lie in the direction of this threefolding; what then happens leads the land into conditions that are beneficial for people — as far as anything on earth can be beneficial at all. Threefolding does not want to solve the burning questions through ideas but through facts. People will place themselves in these facts if they devote themselves to such ideas that depend on themselves, and not to such ideas that continue to work with old traditions. It is one thing to say that one is trying to work in the direction of threefolding, and quite another to say that the state is a good person that can do everything and does everything right. Threefolding solves the land question by divesting the land of the character of a commodity, into which it has been swept; the state does not prevent [the unjust distribution of land], it It is he who appoints the officials who fill the housing vacancies, it is he who determines how much each person is allowed to have, it is he who prevents hoarding – this must no longer be the case!

You might say that it is all right if people think the way Morgenstern [in a poem] has suggested. Someone is run over by a car. He is taken home sick. Palmström – that's the man's name – wraps himself in wet cloths, he is suffering, but he does not give in to his pain because he is a good believer in the state. He consults the law books and finds: There, at the place where I was run over, no car is allowed to drive; so no car could have driven there, because that would contradict the laws, and since it contradicts the laws, I was not run over, because: what cannot be, must not have happened. You see, it is something like this when one wants to reform something rooted in reality by saying: if the value of land increases in an unspecified way, it will be handed over to the state, which will then know how to prevent hoarding – because hoarding does not occur when the state has spoken. It is forbidden, so it does not exist.

Now, dear attendees, from this example you can see how different the whole method is, the whole way of looking at life is, into which the threefold social order brings all social life. It is not a matter of merely thinking that external institutions can be changed by taking the money of those who have too much through an institution and giving it to the state. They find this very difficult, and they have no desire to do so. If you proceed from a sense of reality and from the principles set forth in The Essential Social Questions, you will see that the point is to base the associations everywhere are supported by those who are intimately connected with what they produce or consume – the latter will be less in evidence, but the former will be in evidence.

Now, you see, above all, all circumstances are obscured, veiled, by the fact that we live in the abstraction of the money economy, as I have indicated here today and also last time on such an evening. For example, one does not observe in a proper way what the relationship is between larger goods and smaller goods. Because today one wants to have everything conveniently, one will agitate against large goods or for small goods or vice versa. But everything is led into a certain monism of abstract thinking: either only large goods are good, or only small goods are good for the national economy. But that does not correspond to reality. What is important is that, in certain circumstances, it is precisely the interaction of small and large goods, of large economies with small economies, that is the right thing to do. However, this only comes about through the associative, which is characterized as the essential in economic life in the “key points”. Large economies work together with small ones and thereby achieve the best for the national economy. It is not a matter of treating everything the same, but of ensuring that large and small goods interact according to certain conditions. Do you think it is not in line with certain real conditions that the Prussian manors, with regard to beet alone, produced 54.8% of the total production – that is, over half of the production – while in relation to the small estates they produced less than half, under 50%, of all the other things? All this is based on real conditions. It can only have a fruitful effect on the real economic process if the people who are involved in the management of the goods establish associations based on these real conditions. Then it becomes clear how the one must support the other, because then one does not work from the abstract, but from reality. And then one can determine by contracts how to balance what is now an increase in production on one side with the other, and so on. That is why it was justified for me to say [at the beginning]: I want to speak to you about the conditions in the threefold order in such a way that they can shed light on the land question. I did not want to speak about the land question in the usual way, but rather I wanted to show how any question of social life must be approached when one is grounded in the threefold social order. And you can approach this question very concretely, while you can never approach this question in an orderly way from the old conditions.

You almost have to be like Pastor Planck when you think: social organism, threefold order — these are three triangles next to each other, and nothing goes from one into the other. No, the threefold social organism is really an organism, and one always plays into the other, so that in each of the three members there is something of the other two. In the human organism it is the same: not only the nervous-sensory system is at work in the head, but rhythm and digestion also take place in it. Thus, in economic life, public life also plays a role, it only has its own center of administration, and so in economic life the spiritual also plays a role, precisely in the transition of the means of production from one to the other.

But we see this interplay in much more everyday things. Take, for example, an aspect of public life where three things flow into one: that is, social intercourse. On the one hand, social intercourse is connected with land and property because it needs the street. But because the traffic area, streets and so on, cannot be privately owned, it can also not be a commodity, it can be seen that we have to get out of the commodity, that at least this part of land and soil cannot be considered a commodity. But our whole culture is also connected with the traffic system. Actually, all traffic is subject to three aspects. [We can ask:] What is subject to traffic? Firstly, goods; secondly, people; thirdly, messages. You can place everything that is subject to traffic in any of the three categories: messages, people, goods. You see, because goods are included in traffic, what relates to the movement of goods must be regulated according to contracts, according to the impulses of economic life. What relates to people is regulated by state life, these are the legal relationships. The movement of people must also be regulated according to legal relationships. Communication is subject to spiritual life; it is spiritual life in intercourse. And you will find how the three sides of the threefolded system of intercourse must be administered, something that the old institutions have not achieved. Calculate for yourself what an absurdity it is that in our country goods and messages are still handled in the same way by the same institution, that postal packages and messages are delivered, which do not belong together at all and for which there is no necessity in the external institutions. But the old state institutions were unable to separate the parcel service from the postal service, so that one interferes with the other. If you take a look at the postal rates, you will see what a waste of money it is that the postal service is used for both messages and goods.

Especially where life must begin to be practical, especially where life today has become too narrow for us because it is no longer practical – in every nook and cranny, impracticality sits – there threefolding is called upon to restore the practical. Only one thing belongs to this threefolding: a little courage. However, anyone who does not dare to take away the postal packages from the postal service and hand them over to the ordinary railway service, anyone who always raises objections and does not do the actual math to see what one or the other means, will never understand the threefold social order. For threefolding is based precisely not on holding on to old institutions, not on holding on to ideas of old human vignettes, of old state vignettes and so on, but this idea of threefolding is based precisely on the consideration of real conditions.

For, ladies and gentlemen, one cannot expect the threefold social order impulse to deal with reality and practice in such a way that it now indicates how a Privy Councillor or a government councilor will position himself in the threefold social order organism. Yes, that is more or less the kind of question that is asked. This is just one of the grotesque questions. One cannot say how a privy councillor and a government councillor will fit into it, but it is not necessary to state this. The spiritual, legal and economic relationships between people will be clearly regulated according to knowledge, law and contract, but within these three areas, some things that were previously highly valued will no longer exist. But, my dear audience, must we not admit that in the old regime, people sometimes paid more attention to whether someone was a privy councillor than to what he achieved and what he did for the social organism? But in reality, it is not important whether someone is a privy councillor or not, but what they achieve for the social organism. Therefore, the idea of threefolding must look beyond what still comes from the old days as a vignette, if we do not want to face the complete downfall of the Occident. It must look at what must arise in the new era as the fruit of the work that a person accomplishes in some form in the service of the threefolded, but entire social organism.

After Rudolf Steiner's speech, various personalities asked questions:

Walter Johannes Stein: Land is a finite totality. So there is only a certain amount of land. A certain number of people live on it. Therefore, one can calculate how much land there is for each individual. Now I would like to ask whether such a calculation has any real value, that is, whether it provides a measure that can be used for economic purposes. Or is it just idle statistics?

Hans Kaltenbach: Dr. Steiner has not presented all the findings of the

German land reformers; in his remarks he only mentioned the tax on the increase in the value of land. But this would only account for a small part of the proposed land reform. The introduction of a land rent tax is clear proof that the land reformers do not want laws in the sense of the old state system. What they have in mind is a contractual development that has nothing to do with old lawmaking. It is based on the idea that everyone must pay a land-rent tax for the use of the land, because the rent that he receives from the use of the land should be donated to the community. This procedure does not involve parliamentary laws or laws in the old sense at all, but many individual contracts.

A participant in the discussion: But in the end it is the state that collects the land rent tax.

Another participant in the discussion: No matter how you look at it, without land reform there can be no progress; it must be there as the basis for the further development of our society.

Walter Johannes Stein: Dr. Steiner has often described the threefold social order to us as a functional threefold order and not as a threefold order of areas. However, many people are mistaken; they think of each area separately and with a corporation at the top. This is therefore a misconception. I would like to ask what such a falsely structured social organism would actually look like.

Hermann Heisler: How does one come by a dwelling, and how does an exchange of dwellings take place? How is a house built? The land is a means of production; it is made available by the spiritual organism. When the house is finished, is it no longer a means of production? Most people would like to have a small garden. How is that to be done, since there is not so much land available? What role does the legal sphere play in the administration of land and property?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is true that land and property are not made of rubber and cannot be expanded at will, and it is therefore also true that there must be a certain connection between a self-contained area of land and the people living on it. Now the thing that plays here as an ideal-real relationship is that, in fact, simply by being born, a person effectively, so to speak, occupies a piece of land – this corresponds to the total available land area, divided by the number of previous inhabitants of the land, plus one. In fact, at birth, each person ideally and actually claims the piece of land that falls to them, and a real relationship is simply formed between the available land area and what the newborn person claims in this way. That is a real relationship. But it is not true, in fact, in this social reality, not everything goes according to plan. The laws – I now mean natural laws, not state laws – are there, but they are only approximations. If, for example, different plants live in a certain area and one type of plant develops particularly strongly, it displaces the other type of plant; it can no longer grow. If it is essentially the case that this one piece of land, which I have been talking about, becomes much too small for a newborn human, then, so to speak, the valve is opened and emigration, colonization and so on occurs of its own accord. When the population increases in a particular area, it is possible to check whether more fruitfulness can be drawn from the soil than in earlier times. This has essentially been the case, for example, with the soil of former Germany.

So there is a relationship between the human being and a certain piece of land, as Dr. Stein indicated. We must be clear, however, that this relationship is an ideal-real one, which, however, when threefolding becomes reality, is always decided by contracts, insofar as goods are produced on the land. The land is administered by people, and the people who administer the land must enter into a relationship with each other simply because they do not all produce the same products. They must conclude contracts, and once they have concluded contracts, there must be something to ensure that they carry them out. So what happens in the mutual dealings of the people who cultivate the soil is subject to the legal, political and state relationships. But what happens when a single area of land passes from one person to another is subject to the spiritual law, which is formed in an independent, emancipated spiritual life and flows into the administration of the land. The legal relationships intervene in the interactions of the people who manage the land; these are relationships that can only be regulated by law. When the threefold social order intervenes in this way, it becomes really apparent whether the land is still sufficient or not, or whether colonization relationships are somehow being created — but not by mere instinct, but by an instinct guided by reason.

On the whole, however, it can be seen that something strange is happening. There is something in the most ordinary, everyday life that regulates itself beautifully, although, of course, only approximately. It regulates itself quite well, although people can do nothing about it through state laws or anything else: namely, the ratio of the number of women to the number of men on earth. It has not yet been possible – and it will not be possible in the way the Schencks dream – to regulate by any state laws or anything else that there are approximately as many men as women on earth. Imagine what it would be like if there were only 1/5 women and 4/5 men or vice versa.

It is better to leave it to the laws, which work together as harmoniously as the laws of nature. Once the threefold social order is really in operation, what arises will also adapt to the circumstances. For example, not all people will pursue scholarly occupations and see this as something special. Circumstances will now develop that will, for example, bring a suitable number of people to a certain area of land, so that the fertility of the area that ideally corresponds to the individual corresponds to the existence of that individual. Even if, in a figurative sense, five or a hundred such areas are managed by a single person who has the special ability to do so, what is cultivated on these areas still benefits the others.

Now, I did not understand the second question from Dr. Stein. It seems to me that he asked what would happen if the three areas of the social organism were wrongly structured.

I have already mentioned that today people take great pleasure in engaging in all kinds of “Traubism”. They accuse anthroposophically oriented spiritual science of borrowing from Gnosticism, of borrowing from Indianism, of borrowing from the Egyptian Isis mysteries. One writer has even discovered that a very old book, said to come from the Atlantic regions, contains what spiritual science copies and so on. This is gradually becoming a technique, so to speak, [to make such claims], although they are actually blatant untruths, and in many cases outright lies. Because it is of course quite simply like this: if I write a mathematics textbook today and it contains the Pythagorean theorem, and I am counting on readers who have not studied it, then I will write what they need to know. But if something is added after the Pythagorean theorem that Pythagoras did not have, the reader must not say that the whole thing is borrowed just because I was obliged to say what was already there. The point is always to tie in with the known and then add the unknown. It is dishonest when the Traubists then come and say that it is borrowed from Gnosticism and so on. One must know what a blatant untruthfulness is being practiced on this very page. You see, if you are an official representative of a modern confession, you are already very, very much inclined not to tell the truth. As a professor, you are also in a strange position in relation to the real truth. But if you are both and then write a book - I will not develop the idea any further.

But you see, the same story will also start with the threefold order. Since I am not claiming that I have discovered the number three, nor that the number three has not already been applied in the most diverse ways to any physical circumstances, for example to the human being, people can also come and say: Yes, in old Arabic books there is also a threefold structure of the human being, there one has already divided the human being into three parts. But what our threefold division is about, you will find in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Mysteries), where I start from functional concepts. I do not say: the human being consists of three tracts. I say: there is a nervous-sensory area, there is an air and blood area, and there is a digestive area. But I say explicitly: digestion is in the whole human being; the three areas are in the whole human being. I distinguish according to the functions; there I speak of a nerve-sense activity, not of some area, and I distinguish from it the function of rhythmic activity and, thirdly, the function of metabolism. That is the human being, structured according to functions. You see how I have strictly characterized all of this as functions in the book “Von Seelenrätseln”.

Now someone discovers in an old book that in Arabia, the human being is divided into three parts, three tracts. He could then also say: There speaks someone of the threefold nature of the human organism; he has borrowed the important thing, the number three, from ancient traditions; that is not original. And furthermore, this old book is also divided according to analogies – this is something that I have just applied to a certain interpretation; read what the 'Key Points' say about analogies – in this book, the external state system is divided according to analogies; a distinction is made between areas, and at the head of each area is a prince. There are three princes at the top, so in this case too there is nothing but the number three. Well, princes – if that should ever come about, then you can take a stand on it yourselves. It does not depend on three princes; but the inner spirit is something quite different in the social threefold order, [there it depends on the functional aspect]. If one does not look at the functional aspect, the error would arise that one could have two or three parliaments side by side, as a Tübingen professor once wrote in the Tribüne. The point of the threefold order is precisely that there will not be three parliaments alongside each other, nor three princes, but only one parliament in the democratic state structure. For in spiritual life there will be no parliamentarization, but an appropriate administration will be active out of the matter, as well as in the economic sphere. So, one can allow people to have their fun looking up the threefold order in old books. But if we are to work fruitfully with the idea of threefolding, then we really must go back to the description in The Core Points.

Now to Pastor Heisler's questions: How do you get a flat? — and so on.

These kinds of questions are just too rigid. I'm not saying they're not important, they're extremely important. There is such a severe housing shortage in the world that people try to get housing in the most grotesque ways. It has even happened that someone has got married in order to find a flat so as not to be on the street. It is extremely important to know how to find a flat, but one should not color one's whole conception of threefolding with something that still thinks too much in the style of what must be overcome.

Imagine the threefold social order realized – one need not think abstractly, for when it is a question of how something should be thought, then one must look to this realization of the threefold order, however far away it may be; not everything can be answered merely in terms of goals. In the threefold organism, the human being will not only have a dwelling to look for, but will also do something else. He will be something or other, a factory director or a carpenter or something else. By being a factory director or a carpenter, one can live; for this one is remunerated. In the threefolded social organism, however, this bringing together of the human being with his work must gradually be transferred to the administration of the spiritual part of the organism: getting a home then belongs to the remuneration; that is combined. So you must not think: I am a human being and must get a place to live, but you must start from the assumption: I am not just a human being, but I also have something to do in a place, and among the things that I receive as remuneration for this — if normal social conditions prevail — is also a place to live. It is not just a matter of asking the abstract question: How do I get a place to live? but one must ask: What happens when the threefold social order is in place? - Then, at some place or other, a person, if they are a person - and that is usually the case unless they are an angel who is everywhere - receives their salary as well as a home, and that is subject to what comes from the organization of spiritual life. Or, if it is a matter of not being transferred to a new area but otherwise working in a different context, then it is subject to the state or the political sphere. But such questions cannot be posed in the abstract.

We will have to wait and see what conditions arise from the threefold order, or we will have to use our imagination to picture how conditions will develop. Then we will really be able to answer the question of how to negotiate when taking up a position somewhere, i.e. doing a job, so that we can also have a small garden and the like. These are really things that do not get to the nerve of threefolding. You can be sure that they will be regulated in such a way that you can truly have your little garden in front of the house, once the conditions are in place that are brought about by threefolding.

Likewise, the question of how houses are built needs to be addressed. What is it? It is connected with the land question. But if the land question is no longer a question of the commodity, but a question of the law and of the spiritual life, then the question of how houses are built is also a question that is connected with the whole cultural development of humanity. It is self-evident that houses are built out of the same impulses that lead a person to enter into their work. So the point is not to ask these questions in the abstract, not to ask them in such a way that the human being is torn out of their whole concreteness as an abstract being. In a living, threefold social organism, it is not the case that one is only confronted with the question of how to get a home, but one is confronted with the question in the whole concreteness of life, and there everything depends on treating these things realistically.

Mr. Kaltenbach has already said something correct [when he pointed out the importance of land rent]. Of course, I have only picked out one example, the capital gains tax. But I would have had to say exactly the same thing with regard to the taxation of land rent. But, ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to know whether the question that was raised has not already been answered? Because for me it was not important whether it was a land rent or an increase in value, but rather that in principle a tax is given to the state; Mr. Kaltenbach clearly said “tax,” and by that he means something that is given to the state. What kind of tax it is that is to be given to the state is not important. But what is important is that the state be restricted to a single link in the social organism, not the structure in which it is today. One cannot say that the land reformers do not want laws in the sense of the old state system. They do want that. They want to build something on the old state that they believe the old state could do. It never can. Of course I know what role it plays when someone has become immersed in an idea; they cannot let go of it. But I think that everything that has been said about the land tax is already answered by the spirit of what was said about capital gains.

One would like so much that the old does not reappear. One would not want just one person to come and say: I do not want the secret government councils to be just like the old secret government councils, but I want the threefold organism to produce new government councils. — [It comes out the same] whether one says this or whether one says: Yes, the land reformers do not want to give anything to the state. — But they do want to give taxes, and taxes can only be paid to the state in their present form. This gets you stuck in the question: Who should you pay tax to? And if we are talking about contracts, then, you see, no state allows itself to be bound by a contract about taxes. The situation between the state and the individual when taxes are to be paid is quite different; it is truly not a matter of contracts.

It is a matter of trying to take in a living way how the idea of the threefold social organism wants us to rethink. But this is precisely what stands in the way – even if one often admits with good will that one should and must rethink – that when one then tries to rethink, one sticks to the word, for example to the word “law”. Yes, I have already been asked the question: How should the state introduce the threefold order? That's it: we have to get out of our habitual ways of thinking and speaking. We have to come to sharply defined thoughts, otherwise the impulse of the threefold order of the social organism will not be understood.

At the beginning of the study evening, Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz will give a lecture “On foreign policy in the light of spiritual science and threefolding”. Rudolf Steiner will then take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would like to say a few words, perhaps aphoristically, about some of the things that Count Polzer touched on today, since, after all, things that I have touched on here and there over the course of time have been repeatedly alluded to.

One can clearly see from various phenomena how the fact that Count Polzer wanted to point out, this rupture, I would say, which then led to the catastrophe, appears in the more recent political development of the 19th century. He spoke of these years of transition and of the complete bewilderment of the Central European peoples, of the 1870s and 1880s, when the battles over the occupation of Bosnia, the Slav question and so on took place in Austria. This was preceded by the 1860s, when there was still a certain after-effect of those European political moods that originated in 1848. These sentiments can be traced throughout Central Europe, both in the Austrian lands and in what later became the German Empire: it is what one might call the emergence of a certain abstract liberalism, an abstract-theoretical liberalism.

In Austria, at the end of the 1860s, the first so-called People's Ministry, Carlos Auersperg's, emerged from the Schmerling and Belcredi ministries. It had a distinctly liberal character, but a theoretical and abstract one. Then, after a very short interim government, in which the Slav question was brought to a certain height under Taaffe, Potocki, Hohenwart, the so-called second bourgeois ministry, the Adolf Auersperg Ministry, emerged in Austria in the 1870s, and with it a kind of bourgeois-liberal direction. These movements were paralleled by the struggles waged by the liberal parties of Prussia and the individual German states against the emerging imperialism of Bismarck and so forth. These liberal currents that emerged are extremely instructive, and it is actually a shame that today's generation remembers so little of what was said in Germany, in Prussia in the 1870s and 1880s, by men like Lasker and so on, and what was said in Austria by Giskra, mentioned today by Count Polzer, and other similar liberalizing statesmen. One would see how a certain liberal, good will arose, but which was basically abandoned by any kind of positive political insight. That is the characteristic feature: an abstract liberalism is emerging in Central Europe that has many fine liberal principles but that does not know how to reckon with historical facts, that talks of all possible human rights but knows little about history and is particularly unskilled at drawing conclusions from it. And it was perhaps the undoing of the whole of Central Europe – the World War began in Austria, or at least it started from Austria – it was the undoing that this liberalizing tendency in Austria was so terribly unpolitical towards the great problems that arose precisely in Austria and to which Count Polzer has pointed out in the most important parts.

Now we must study a little more closely what this liberalism in Austria actually represents. We can study it by listening to the speeches of the older and younger Plener today. You can study it by listening to the speeches of Herbst, that Herbst who wanted to be a great Austrian statesman of the liberalizing tendency. Bismarck, the realist, called Herbst's followers “die Herbstzeitlosen”, one of those bon mots that are deadly in public life. And this liberalism can be studied in another place, in Hungary, where Koloman Tisza repeatedly appeared in the Hungarian parliament with an extraordinarily strong sense of power, and in his outward demeanor, I would say, the true representative of a liberalism that is turned away from the world, that is unworldly, and which - without the historical facts - only reckons with what emerges from abstract, general principles. Tisza, the elder, the father of the man who played a role in the World War, showed this even in his outward behavior. He could never appear anywhere without a pencil in his hand, as if he were going to expound his principles, which are fixed in pencil notes, to those who represent a believing audience. In a sense, one can study a somewhat inferior edition in the person of Bismarck's opponent Eugen Richter, who, however, belongs to a later period in Prussia-Germany. These people can be used to analyse what has emerged as a thoroughly fruitless policy. In particular, all these people learned politics in the English political school. And the most important fact, the essential thing, was that everything that Plener, Giskra, Hausner, Berger, Lasker and Lasser put forward, everything that the Tisza put forward in Hungary, was something positive, concrete for the English; that it means something to the English because it refers to facts, because what is being pursued there as liberalizing principles, applied, can gradually lead to imperialism in the world. Yes, I would like to say that imperialism is strongly inherent in these things in the English representatives of these principles. When the same principles were advocated by the above-named personalities in their parliaments, they were like squeezed lemons; the same principles referred to nothing; they were abstractions. This is precisely where one can best study the difference between a reality and a phrase. The difference is not in the wording, but in whether one is in reality or not. If you say the same things in the Viennese or Berlin parliament as in the London parliament, it is something completely different. And that is why what came from England as a liberalizing trend and was a positive, concrete policy in England was just empty phrases and empty-phrase politics in Berlin and Vienna.

I cannot develop all these things here today, but just a few aphorisms, perhaps just images. But if one wants to see the contradictions that exist, it is interesting to hear or recall how speakers like Suess, Sturm or Plener spoke in the Austrian parliament of the time, or in the delegations, during the debate that followed on from the planned and then executed occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And then a man appeared who spoke from the perspective of the Slavic nation. I still vividly remember a speech that made a certain great impression at the time. It was the speech that Otto Hausner gave in the Austrian Parliament, which he then published under the title 'Germanness and the German Reich'. Unfortunately, I was unable to get hold of it again. I would very much like to have it again, but I don't know if it is completely out of print. If one reads this speech in connection with another that he gave when the Arlberg tunnel was being built, if one reads what he said there from the point of view of higher politics and what he threw into the Austrian parliament from the political podium when Andrássy set out to work for the occupation of Bosnia, then realities were spoken. Hausner was, on the surface, a kind of fop, a kind of faded, snobbish and masked fop who could constantly be seen with his monocle in the Viennese mansion, whom one always met at a certain hour in Café Central, an old fop, but thoroughly brilliant and speaking out of realities. If you take all these speeches together, then basically [the catastrophe of] 1914 to 1918 was predicted back then, even what we are experiencing now, the soul sleep that is descending on this Central Europe. And there you can see how anyone who looks at reality — and I could give you many more such examples — must indeed come to the second thesis that has been mentioned to you this evening, out of reality.

These things that are connected with the threefold social order are certainly not something that has been thought up theoretically, they are not something professorial, but they are taken entirely from reality. And anyone who experienced how, in Austria, Austrian Germanness – for that was essentially the mainstay of Austrian liberalism – clashed with the then emerging and pretentious Austrian Slavdom, had to crystallize the view that Pan-Slavism is a positive force. Pan-Slavism has truly come into its own as a positive force. And perhaps more important than what came from Czechism – from Palacki to Rieger – is what came from Polishness. The Poles played an exceptionally important role in Austria as a kind of advance element, as a vanguard for Slavdom, and they represented all-embracing political points of view. Hausner, who was of Polish origin, once said in a speech that “Rhaetian-Alemannic blood globules” - a strange chemistry - rolled in his veins; but he felt he was a primeval Pole. But there were other Poles speaking in the Viennese parliament during these important times: Grocholski, Goluchowski and Dzieduszycki and so on, and it must be said that they did come up with some great political points of view, while the liberal German element unfortunately degenerated into empty phrases. It could not hold its own, so that it finally merged into the party that Polzer-Hoditz also mentioned, the Christian Social Party, which among young people in Vienna who were involved in politics at the time, and I was one of them, was called the “Party of the foolish fellows of Vienna”; it then became the Lueger Party.

This contrast between a declining direction and a rising one is very interesting. And in a sense, the Poles were unscrupulous, so that all sorts of things came out, for example the following: In Austria, they wanted to return to the old school law, to the old, clerical school law – I say “Austria”, but, to express its concreteness, they spoke in the Austrian parliament, [the Reichsrat], not of “Austria” or something like that, but of the “Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat”; Austria-Hungary had a dualistic form of government; one part was called “the Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat”, the other “the representation of the countries of the Holy Crown of Stephen”. So when they wanted to go back to a clerical school law in Austria, a majority could not be formed by the Germans alone, but either the Poles or the Ruthenians had to join forces with them. Whenever the opinion went in a certain direction, a coalition was formed between Germans and Ruthenians, and when it went in a different direction, between Germans and Poles. At that time, the issue was to create a clerical school law. The Poles tipped the scales, but what did they do? They said: Yes, all right, we agree to this school law, but we exclude Galicia. So they excluded their own country. So at that time a school law was created by a majority that had Polish delegates in its bosom, but these Polish delegates excluded their own country and imposed a school law on the other Austrian countries. This ultimately resulted in one area ruling over the other and enacting something that it did not want applied in its own area. That was the situation. How could the huge political tasks that arose be tackled with such a background!

It so happened that after this second bourgeois ministry, the government finally passed to this Taaffe ministry, which itself issued the certificate: In Austria, if you want to govern properly, you can only muddle through – that is, juggle from one difficulty to another, save one thing by another, and so on. The ministry that Taaffe headed as prime minister was then also “wittily” led. Taaffe owed his position less to his intellectual capacities than to the fact that at the time at the Viennese court - the Viennese court was already in a state that sailed into the gruesome drama of Mayerling —, that at that time at the Viennese court there was a great receptivity for the special art of Count Taaffe, which consisted in his being able to make little rabbits and shadow puppets with a handkerchief and fingers. The Viennese courtiers were particularly fond of them at the time, and that is how Taaffe's position was consolidated. He was able to keep this Austrian chaos in a corresponding current for a decade. It was actually quite bleak when you saw it happening. I really talked to quite sensible people at the time. They knew that Taaffe was kept in power by the little men. But people like the poet Rollett, for example, said to me: Yes, but Taaffe is still the most intelligent of them. It was a bleak situation. And we must not forget how, little by little over the course of that half-century to which Count Polzer has referred, the stage was set for the situation in which, during the World War, the very witty but thoroughly frivolous Czernin was able to play a leading role at the most important moment. How could one hope that something like the idea of the threefold social order, which was born out of the inner forces of history and brought to the Central European powers in 1917, would be understood otherwise than through adversity? People just didn't understand it, and that's not surprising, because after all, the threefold order is not understood by making bunnies. Other arts will be needed to penetrate into these things.

Now, you see, I have presented all this as a kind of image. One could show in many similar images how this whole catastrophe has been in preparation for a long time and how [in Central Europe] what was and is a reality in the West has become a cliché. And that was mainly something that I always used as a way of putting things to people [such as Kühlmann] - you needed a way of putting things to Kühlmann -: the fact that English politics is part of the great historical perspective in reality. This English policy has been preparing for centuries what has happened out of historical events. I believe that, of course, to understand the whole thing, it is necessary to delve into what underlies the external development and presentation of history.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, read the memoirs of people. You will see how, in fact, where people present themselves in a certain way, as they are, we are confronted with what can be called: Central Europe is gradually degenerating in terms of the greatness of ideas, and the ideas that are particularly fruitful for Central Europe are emerging in England. It is interesting to follow, for example, the figure of the predecessor of Andrássy, Count Beust, that remarkable minister who could represent every form of patriotism and serve everyone. I would also like to describe Count Beust to you figuratively – there are various accounts in memoirs of how he related to Western European personalities: he would fold up into his knees, very politely, but he would fold up into his knees. So that is the Central European statesman who is actually unable to keep up. I have to mention all this because I was immediately asked about it by Count Polzer: How does it show itself, what has been working from the West for centuries, namely as a conscious English policy working with the historical powers?

The actual external agent [of this English policy] is King James VI, and I would like to say that the gunpowder conspiracy is something quite different from what is presented in history. It is actually the outward sign, the outward symptom of the importance of what is going through Europe from England as an impulse. This is a policy of the great historical perspective. You can see quite clearly the thesis that Count Polzer mentioned today and which I put forward when I first advocated the threefold order: you cannot take some measures – which are foolishly called the League of Nations today – to eliminate from the world what is factually given and must continue to have a factual effect, namely the Central European-English-American economic struggle. This struggle exists, just as the struggle for existence exists within the animal kingdom. It must be there, it cannot be eliminated from the world, but it must be taken up because it is a fact. The supporters of this Anglo-American policy see through this very well. And there something comes to meet us that can be clearly demonstrated – I am not telling hypotheses, but I am telling you things that you could hear in speeches in England in the second half of the 19th century. It was said quite clearly there: a great world war must break out in Europe – as I said, I am only quoting from speeches from the second half of the 19th century – this world war will lead to Russia becoming the great *testing ground for socialism. There, [in Russia], experiments will be carried out for socialism that we in the Western countries would not dream of wanting to strive for, because the conditions there do not allow it. There you see great aspects, the greatness of which you recognize by the fact that they have largely come true and – you can be sure – will continue to come true. But these aspects are not from yesterday; the “minds” of today's people are from yesterday, but not these aspects – they are centuries old.

And what Count Polzer will show you in a week's time as the actual spirit of Peter the Great's testament was simply what was to be opposed [from the East] to the imperialism of the West. Western imperialism, the Anglo-American essence, wanted to found the Anglo-American empire from the standpoint of the universal producer, so to speak. In the East, it has truly been thought of for a long, long time to tie in with the principles of the testament of Peter the Great – you will hear more about whether the testament is true or a forgery; but these are things that are actually of very little importance. And this, what is there in the West, should have been countered, so to speak, by a universal empire of consumption – the latter has already taken on terrible forms today. But these two realms are confronting each other. One can say that basically the one is as evil as the other in its one-sidedness. And in between, what appears to be a foray by the West into the liberalizing politics of Beust, Andrässy, Tisza, Berger, Lasker, Lasser and so on, is rubbing up against what appears to be an advance of Western liberalism. What appears to be an offshoot of Western liberalism comes up against what comes from the East. In Prussia, this is only a form of undifferentiated Polishness, while in Austria it is the strong characters that are there. For in fact, all types of character are represented in this Slavdom: the short, stocky, broad-shouldered Rieger with the broad, almost square face, with the tremendously powerful gaze – I would say that his gaze was power; in Rieger lived something like an after-effect of Palacky, who in 1848 from Prague had Panslavism; the old fop Hausner, very witty, but with him another nuance of what is active in the East emerges; and then people like Dzieduszycki, who spoke as if he had dumplings in his mouth, but was thoroughly witty and thoroughly in control of the matter. There one could study how Austrian Germanism in particular preserved a great, wonderful character. When I was in Hermannstadt in 1889 and had to give a lecture, I was able to study the declining Germanism in the Transylvanian Saxons – Schröer wrote a grammar of the Zipser Germanism and that of the Gottschee region. I have emphasized some of the greatness of this declining Germanness in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). There we find these remarkable figures, who still had something of the elemental greatness of Germanness in them, such as Hamerling and Fercher von Steinwand. But Fercher von Steinwand, for example, gave a speech in the 1850s that encapsulates the entire tragedy of Central Europe. He said: What should one actually think of when thinking of the future of Germanness? He describes the gypsies, the homelessness of the gypsies. It is remarkable how some things have prophetically dawned on the best people in Central Europe. And it is true, the best people have actually been oppressed, and those who were at the top were terrible people. And so this adversity has prepared the way, which should actually be the great teacher.

In this state, in Austria, where there were thirteen official languages before the war, it really showed how impossible this old state structure actually is in modern humanity, how impossible it is to call a unified state what one was accustomed to. These thirteen different peoples – there were actually more, but officially there were thirteen – demanded with all their might what then had to be expressed as the idea of threefold social order. And Austria could be a great school for this world-historical policy. Especially if one studied it in Austria in the 1880s – I had to take over the editorship of the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” at that time – in the 1880s, when Taaffe ruled externally, when Lueger was being prepared, one really had the opportunity to see the driving forces. At that time, the whole character of Vienna changed. Vienna changed from a city with a German character to a city with an international, almost cosmopolitan character, due to the influx of Slavs. You could study how things developed. Then you realized that there was something impotent about the outcome of liberalism. It was like the impotence when Herbst spoke. Then it finally came to the point that people thought: This policy is no longer good! But they did not come to this conclusion because they inwardly recognized the empty phrases of a policy like Herbst's, which only produced abstractions, but because the Viennese government was striving for prestige and imperialism and used the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. When someone like Herbst opposed it, people didn't see the emptiness of his words, they just saw that he couldn't identify with imperialist politics. In contrast to this, Plener, who basically spoke the same empty phrases, but who identified with and won over the people who were in favor of the occupation, because he was a bigger sycophant. It was at that time, under the impact of the Bosnian occupation, that Hausner delivered his great speeches, in which he prophetically predicted what basically came to pass. Even in what was said then, where the testament of Peter the Great played a role, there was something of the sheet lightning of what then came to pass in such a terrible way. Particularly in the speeches that Count Polzer mentioned today, in which the testament of Peter the Great and the grand perspectives of the Slavs were so often touched upon, a certain opportunity can be seen to see what one should have done, if one had been sensible, in the face of British policy and its grand historical perspectives.

Politics, ladies and gentlemen, must be studied as a reality and experienced as a reality. And again and again I have to say that it is actually extremely painful for me when the people who get hold of the “key points” do not look at them, that they are written out from a faithful observation of the European and other conditions of civilized modern life and with due consideration of all the relevant details. But, my dear audience, you really can't write all these things in detail in a book that is published as a kind of program book. Today I have only hinted at some things in pictures; but if you wanted to write about it, you would have to write fifty volumes. Of course, these fifty volumes cannot be written, but their content has been incorporated into the “Key Points”. And that is the great – or small – thing: it is the small characteristic of our time that one does not feel that there is a difference between the sentences that are spoken and written out of reality and all the gigantic nonsense that is going around the world today and that is actually treated today as having the same meaning as what is drawn from positive reality and what has been experienced. One should feel that this is included in the “key points” and does not need the proof of the fifty volumes. It is an indictment of humanity, this inability to feel whether a sentence, which may only be two lines long, is alive or just a journalistic phrase.

That is what is necessary and what we must and can arrive at: the ability to distinguish between journalism and empty phrases and content that has been experienced and born of blood. Without this, we will not make any progress. And precisely when an attempt is made to orient ourselves in terms of grand foreign policy, it becomes clear how necessary it is today for humanity to arrive at such a distinction.

That is what I wanted to suggest with a few rather inadequate sentences in response to Count Polzer's remarks.

After Rudolf Steiner's remarks, there will be an opportunity for discussion.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear ladies and gentlemen! It must be emphasized again and again in the present situation – and I mean the very immediate present of today – that it will not be possible to make any progress in the economic, political and spiritual conditions of Central Europe unless the whole way of thinking of those people who take part in public life is changed. Unfortunately, this has not been the case in the broadest circles so far. And that is why they want to forgive me for going a little further today and, so to speak, shedding light on European cultural policy from a few historical points of view, albeit only in the form of aphorisms.

If we want to gain a point of view within the present public conditions, we must first take a close look at the contrast that exists in the state, intellectual and economic relationships between [three areas]: the first area could be called the world of the West, which includes in particular the populations that belong to the Anglo-American element and in whose wake the Romance populations are today. Then, according to the three aspects mentioned, we must sharply distinguish from that Anglo-American area in the West everything that could be called the Central European cultural area. And from this we must distinguish a third area, that is the East, the vast East, which is becoming more and more a unified area – more than one is inclined to assume here according to the very inaccurate news – an area that encompasses European Russia with all that it already dominates and will dominate even more in the future, and also a large part of Asia. It is not always sufficiently clear what considerable differences exist between these three areas and how these differences should also regulate the individual measures of the day according to the three aspects mentioned, if anything in these measures should bear fruit for the future. It is truly deplorable that we are repeatedly forced to witness how, without the awareness that new ideas are necessary for a new structure, even such important negotiations as those in Spa are conducted as if one could really continue to operate today with the same ideas that led to the absurd from 1914 onwards. I will try – as I said, only in aphorisms, and it will look as if it were characterized in a very general way, but the general includes very specific things – I will try to work out the differences between the ways of thinking in the West, the Middle and the East, and it will become clear that fruitful perspectives for the present and the future can be gained from these ideas.

We may assume that my appeal, which appeared in the spring of 1919, was misunderstood in some circles in Germany because it started from the premise that Germany had lost its true purpose since the 1870s, namely to define and gradually consolidate its state borders. One would like to say: This Germany has limited itself to creating a kind of objective framework, but this Germany has not been able to develop supporting ideas, a real substantial content, a cultural content, within this framework. Now, one can be a so-called practical person and denounce the bearers of ideals as idealists; but the world does not get any further with such practical people than to crises, to individual or then to such universal crises, as one such in 1914 has initiated. If you are a practical person in this sense, you can do business, satisfy individual interests, and seemingly also satisfy interests on a large scale; but however well the individual may do and however good his enterprises may seem to the individual, it must repeatedly and inevitably lead to crises under such conditions, and these must finally culminate in a catastrophe such as we have experienced since 1914 as the greatest world catastrophe.

Now, what is it that characterizes the Central European region, especially since the 1970s, more and more? We see that, where it comes to the actual ideological realm, from which a certain cultural content should have emerged, that within Central Europe – including in political and social life – apart from a few laudable measures, basically only a kind of theoretical discussion is being conducted. You will find almost everything that has been spent to cope with the demands of the time, more or less recorded in the negotiations - be it in parliaments or outside of them - that have been practiced between the proletarian party, which has increasingly taken on a social-democratic character, and the various other parties that, based on their interests or traditions, believed they had to fight this proletarian party. Much criticism and anti-criticism has been expressed, much has been said, but what, basically, has come out of all this? What has emerged from this talk as necessary for building a future social order within which people can live? Those of the honored attendees who have heard me speak before will know that I don't like to get involved in theories, but that I want to address the immediate practice of life when it comes to drawing broad lines. And so today, too, I want to back up what I have just hinted at with direct practice.

One of the most interesting contemporary publications is the book “The Economic and Political Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship” by Professor Varga, in which he describes his own experiences and what he himself has done within a small, but not too small, European economic area. Varga's book is extremely interesting because it is written by a person who describes what he himself has experienced, done and what has happened to him, while he himself had the power – even if it could only last for a short time – to organize a limited area almost in an autocratic manner, to shape it socially. Professor Varga was, after all, the Commissar for Economic Affairs, that is, the Minister for Economic Affairs during the brief glory days of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and he has described in this recently published book what he and his colleagues tried to do. He was particularly responsible for economic affairs, and he describes how he wanted to straighten out Hungary economically from a Marxist point of view – from a point of view very close to Lenin's – and he describes with a certain sincerity the experiences he had in the process. Above all, he describes in detail how he expropriated the individual businesses according to the special recipe that could be applied in Hungary, how he tried to create a kind of works council from the workforces of the individual businesses , how he then tried to combine these individual businesses into larger economic entities, and how these were then to be headed by a supreme economic council with economic commissars who were to administer economic life from Budapest. He describes in some detail how he did these things. As I said, he is a man who has gained his entire way of thinking – that is, the way of thinking that was to be put into practice immediately, that was able to operate in Europe for a few months – he has gained this way of thinking entirely as a result of everything that has taken place over the last fifty years between the Social Democratic Party and all that this Social Democratic Party has fought from the most diverse points of view. As I said, his views are very close to Leninism; he emphasizes one point in particular. It is clear to a man like Professor Varga, who describes events with a certain bull-like impulsiveness – a bull-like impulsiveness that we are well acquainted with in the party life of Central Europe – . He was firmly convinced that only the strict and rigorous implementation of Marxist principles, as advocated by Lenin with this or that modification, could bring salvation to the social organism. Now, this Professor Varga is a person who, although not very tall, does not think very deeply, but can think nonetheless. He knows – and he describes it – that basically this whole movement is supported by the industrial proletariat. Now, one thing has become clear to him from the particular circumstances, from his experiences in introducing what he wanted to realize in Hungary: although the industrial proletarians are the only people who, like himself, wanted to adhere just as strictly to the demands of Marxism and believed in them, but that the industrial proletariat, like the urban population in general, are the ones who come off worst if one really starts to do something with these principles. His very brief experience showed him that, for the time being, only the rural population actually had a chance of getting better off somehow with these principles. The rural population gets better off because these Marxist principles reduce the whole culture to a certain primitive level. However, this primitive level of culture is not applicable to the structure of urban life, at most to that of rural life in the countryside. And so Professor Varga has to admit to himself, despite being a Marxist – this is about as self-evident to him as the fact that the Pythagorean theorem is correct – he has to admit to himself: we have to prepare ourselves for the industrial proletariat and the urban population to go hungry.

Now comes the conclusion that a man like Professor Varga draws from such premises. He says: Yes, but first of all, the industrial proletariat in the cities will have idealism and will cling to this idealism even when they are starving. Well, it is of course part of the clichés of modern times that when some idea doesn't work out – an idea that one wants to believe is absolutely right – then one disguises this idea as an idealism for which one might also have to starve. The other conclusion that Varga draws is this: Well, initially things will get much, much worse in the cities and for the industrial population; but then, when things have gone bad long enough, things will get better; therefore, the industrial proletarians and the city dwellers must be referred to the future in the first place. So he says: Yes, at first you may have rather gloomy experiences; but in the future things will get better. – And he does not have before him the very tame workers' councils that we find in the West, but the very radical workers' councils that have emerged from the radicalism according to the Leninist form and as they have been introduced in Hungary. Because the people who keep the whole economic apparatus in order are not appointed by any previous governmental system, they are elected from their own ranks. And that is where Professor Varga's experience came in – he was able to experience all of this himself – he said, and this is an interesting confession: Yes, at first it turned out that the people who were selected and who were actually supposed to ensure productivity work, that they occupy themselves with loafing around and arguing, and the others see this, find it more pleasant and would also like to advance to these positions; and so a general endeavor to advance to these positions ensues. This is an interesting confession from a man who not only had the opportunity to develop theories about the reality of Marxism and Leninism, but who also had the opportunity to put things into practice. But something is even more interesting. Varga now shows how such economic commissars – who were to be set up for larger areas, and where, incidentally, a rather bureaucratic approach had to be taken – actually had neither the inclination nor the opportunity to do anything real.

You see, Varga's book about Hungary under the Soviets is extraordinarily interesting from a contemporary cultural-historical point of view, because of the descriptions, which go into great detail and are as interesting in their details as the few things I have mentioned. In the book, however, the most interesting thing was something that was written in about three lines. I would like to say that the most important thing is precisely what Professor Varga says when he talks about the tasks of the economic commissioners and how they were unable to fulfill these tasks. He says: Yes, but these economic commissioners will only gain in importance and significance in the future if the right people are found for their positions. Professor Varga does not seem to realize the powerful confession contained in these three lines, which are among the most interesting in the whole book. We see, quite unnoticed, the confession of a person who, I might say with Leninist strength, has grown out of the ideas of the 20th century and who had the opportunity to turn these ideas into reality; we see the confession [to the contrary] of what has been preached over and over again in almost every Social Democratic meeting: Yes, it is wrong, thoroughly wrong, to believe that history arises from ideas, from the genius of individual personalities; rather, it is true that personalities themselves and all the ideas they can develop arise from economic conditions. It was said again and again by these people how wrong those people were who relied on ideas and personalities, and how one should rely solely on the conditions of production, which, as a superstructure, drive out of themselves the guiding ideas. Now a man comes along and actually introduces [Marxist ideas], and he says: Yes, these ideas are all very well, but they can only be implemented when we have the right personalities for the job. One can hardly imagine that what makes up the essence, the nerve, the innermost impulse of the way of thinking of such a person as Varga, this Central Economic Commissar, this Minister for Economic Affairs in Council-Hungary, could be more ad absurdum. He shows quite clearly that the future-oriented ideas concocted in the Central European regions were bound to fail the moment one set out to build anything positive out of them. One has only to read these descriptions and hear these confessions to see how powerless such a person really is, who has been driven to the surface to take the lead in a country that is, after all, important, and to what conclusions such a person comes in the economic field.

But it is also interesting to see what such a person comes up with in the area of state. You see, here one must already hold Professor Varga's remarks together with the circumstances of the time. Perhaps you remember how, in recent decades, more and more complaints have been raised from a wide variety of sources that all offices are being flooded not with technical or commercial specialists, but with lawyers. Do you remember how much was said about this fact from the workings of the old state? In other matters, too, notably in the nationalization of the railways, the actual specialists were always pushed into the background, while the lawyers were the ones on whom all the emphasis was placed and who held the most important positions. Now, how does Professor Varga talk about the lawyers, to whom he also counts himself, incidentally? How does he talk about other state officials, state leaders, state officials? He talks about them in such a way that he says: No consideration is given to them at all, they are simply abolished, they cease to have any significance; the lawyers of all kinds must join the proletariat, because they are not needed if one wants to socialize economic life. Note how two things collide here: the elitist legal state, which has driven lawyers to the surface, and the socialist state, which declares this entire system of jurisprudence unnecessary. So, in the socialist state, lawyers are simply eliminated, no thought is given to them. They are people who are no longer counted on. They are not taken into account when one wants to create a new social order. And the intellectual life is simply regulated by the economic state on the side. That is, of course, it was not regulated at all in the few months of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Therefore, Varga has no experience there; he presents only his theories. And so we see how this Professor Varga, who has written a remarkable work in the current literature, I might say in a world-historical sense, we see how this man is not rooted in reality at all. At most, he is rooted in reality with the only trivial sentence, with the only matter of course: If you want an office to be properly run, then you have to put the right person in it. Everything else is nonsense, worthless stuff; but this worthless stuff should have become reality in a field that is not narrowly defined after all. Of course, such a person finds all sorts of excuses for the fact that the Hungarian Soviet Republic came to an end so quickly – due to the Romanian invasion and whatever else. But anyone who looks deeper into these things must say to themselves: simply because Hungary is a smaller area, so because all the disintegrating and subversive forces had a shorter way from the center of Budapest to the periphery of the country, therefore what is still to come in the East, in Russia, where the distance from the center of Moscow to the periphery is greater, has already manifested itself in Hungary, where the path is shorter, and will manifest itself even more so, albeit in things that can cause us great concern.

You see, basically we are dealing with only two types of leading personalities, of truly leading personalities. On the one hand, we have those leaders who, like the present Reich Chancellor - one still says “Reich Chancellor” - play an ancient role in international negotiations, still working with the most hackneyed ideas. On the other hand, we have personalities like Professor Varga, who wants to establish something new - something new, but only new in that his ideas lead more quickly to dismantling. The ideas of the others also lead to a reduction, but because they do not proceed so radically, the reduction is more sloppy and slower; when Professor Varga comes with his ideas, it is more thorough, more radical.

Let's take Western ideas for a moment. As I said, there is a lot that can be described, and I could go on until tomorrow, but I would just like to give a few points of view. You see, you can think as you like about these Westerners, especially about Anglo-American cultural policy, from a moral point of view or from the point of view of human sympathy and antipathy. For all I care, you can even call it an uncultured policy; I don't want to argue about matters of taste. I want to talk about world-historical and political necessities, about that which worked as an impetus in English politics during the same decades in which there was so much theoretical discussion in Central Europe that Varga's ideas were the first to emerge. If you look at this English policy, you will find that it is based, above all, on something that is a trait, a basic trait – it does not need to please anyone, but it is a basic trait – through which ideas work, through which ideas flow.

How can one properly characterize the contrast between this Central Europe and these Western, Anglo-American countries – including, of course, the colonial offspring in America? One would like to say: it is extraordinarily characteristic that in this train, which goes mainly through the trade policy, through the industrial policy of the Western countries, something is always clearly noticeable - I do not say understandable, but clearly noticeable - something that also expresses itself as an idea. In 1884, an English historian, Professor Seeley, described the matter in the book “The Expansion of Great Britain”. I will quote to you in his own words, preferably the few sentences that express it clearly and distinctly, what it is all about. Seeley says in his book “The Expansion of England”: “We founded our empire partly, it must be admitted, imbued with the ambition of conquest, partly out of philanthropic intentions, to put an end to enormous evils.” - He means evils in the colonies. That is, it is quite consciously aimed at an expansionist policy - the whole book, of course, contains this idea - an expansion of Britain's sphere of influence over the world. And this expansion is sought because it is believed that this mission, which involves the use of economic expansion forces, has fallen to the British people - much as a certain mission fell to the Hebrew people in ancient times. A historian says: In those people who trade in England - I mean trade, who are industrialists, who are colonizers, who are state administrators, in all these people lives a closed phalanx of world conquest. That is what this historian Seeley says. And the best people in England, who also know from the secret societies what it is all about, explicitly emphasize: Our empire is an island empire, we have sea all around us, and according to the configuration of this our empire, this mission falls to us. Because we are an island people, we must conquer out of ambition on the one hand and try to eliminate the evils that exist in completely uncultivated countries out of philanthropy – real or imagined – on the other. All this is based on popular instinct, but so based on popular instinct that one is always prepared to do one thing and not do another if it comes to that, in order to somehow approach the great goal of extending the British way of life. What do we know about the British character? I beg you, ladies and gentlemen, to consider very carefully what I have just said. What do we know about it? We know that the English think: We are an island people. It is the character of our empire that it is built on an island. We cannot be anything other than a conquering people. If someone has a taste for saying “a robber people,” they may do so, that is not important today, only facts and political tendency matter, because they bring about change; in the area in which we are talking, judgments of taste matter nothing. So they [in England] know how to pursue a policy, especially in the economic sphere, which starts from a clear recognition of what it means to be a people in the part of the world in which they live. That is a sense of reality, that is a spirit of reality.

What is the situation in Central Europe? What is the point of constantly indulging in illusions here? You will never get ahead there. One can only make progress by facing reality. What is the situation in Central Europe at the same time when more and more crystallized the English will in what I have just spoken, which emanates from a clear understanding of the area in which one works - what is the situation in Central Europe at the same time? Well, in Central Europe, we are not dealing with a similar recognition of the tasks that arise from the territories in which one lives – not at all. Take the area from which the disaster in Europe originated, Austria-Hungary; this Austria-Hungary is, so to speak, created by modern history to provide proof of how a modern state should not be.

You see, this Austro-Hungarian Empire comprised – I cannot go into this further today, I just want to give a very brief and superficial characterization – this Austro-Hungarian Empire comprised, first of all, the Germans living in the Alpine countries and in Lower and Upper Austria, who were divided in their views , and further north the Czechs with strong German enclaves in German Bohemia, further east the Polish population, still further east the Ruthenian population, then the various other ethnic groups in the east of Austria-Hungary, mainly the Magyars, and further south the southern Slavic peoples. My dear attendees, is all of this held together by a reality-based idea in a similar way to the English: we are an island people and must therefore conquer? No! What held these thirteen different, state-recognized [language] areas of Austria-Hungary together? Held together – I may say this because I spent half of my life, almost thirty years, in Austria – they were held together solely by Habsburg domestic policy, by this unfortunate Habsburg domestic policy. One would like to say that everything that was done in Austria-Hungary was actually done from the point of view of: How can this Habsburg domestic policy be maintained? This Habsburg dynastic policy is a product of the Middle Ages. So there is nothing [to hold it together] but the selfish interest of a princely house, nothing like what the English historian Seeley expressed in 1884.

And what have we experienced in the rest of Central Europe, for example in Germany? Yes, I must say: it has always cut me to the quick when I read, for example, something like what Herman Grimm often writes, who clearly and distinctly describes what he felt during his own student years, in the days when it was still a crime to call oneself a German. People no longer know this today; one must not forget that one was a Württemberger, one was a Bavarian, a Prussian, a Thuringian, and so on, but one was not German. And to be German, a great German, that was a revolution in those days, one could only confess that in the most intimate of circles, it was a crime against the selfish interests of the princely houses. Until 1848, says Herman Grimm, among the Germans the greatest crime in the political field was what among the French was the greatest honor: to call oneself a Frenchman; to call oneself a German was [among the Germans the greatest crime]. And I believe that today many people read Fichte's “Address to the German Nation” and do not even understand the opening words correctly, because they relate them to something else. Fichte says: I speak for Germans, purely and simply, of Germans, purely and simply. He means that he speaks without taking into account the differences between Austrians, Saxons, Thuringians, Bavarians, and so on, just as Germans. He means this strictly [in the sense of] internal politics; nothing in this sentence contains anything that goes outside. Being German [in the political sense] was something that was not allowed to be, that was forbidden. It may seem almost laughable, but it was forbidden – a bit like the principle that occurs in an anecdote about Emperor Ferdinand, who was called the Benevolent, Ferdinand the Benevolent, because he had no other useful qualities. It is said that Metternich reported to him: People in Prague are beginning to revolutionize – and Emperor Ferdinand said: Are you even allowed to do that? — It was more or less along these lines of “not allowed” that the issue of being German was treated until 1848. And then, of course, this “being German” gave birth to an ideal that was later undermined by power politics; that ideal [of unity] gave birth to something that people still long for today. The best way to see how it took its fateful course is to look at the example of the aesthetician Vischer, the “V-Vischer,” who lived here in Stuttgart; he was filled until the seventies with the Greater German ideal, which is contained in the words of Fichte: “I speak for Germans, pure and simple, of Germans, pure and simple.” But then he submitted to the conditions which Nietzsche at the beginning of the seventies characterized with the words: They were an extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich. But one sees how grudgingly a man like Vischer metamorphosed the old ideal into the new one, how terribly difficult it is for him to present the new one as a truth to which he has converted. Vischer's autobiography 'Old and New' is extremely interesting in this respect. And in what I have just explained, it is often the case that when world affairs demanded world politics, nothing developed in Central Europe but the worthless discussion of which I have spoken. What really happened in the 1860s and 1870s was factional politics pitted against factional politics; what should have been born of the German ideal had been replaced. Basically, ladies and gentlemen, the Italians, the French, perhaps even the English would be glad to have a historian like Treitschke was for the Germans. You may call him a blusterer – perhaps he was, and you may not find much taste in the way he presents things – but this German did find some very nice words for the Germans, who are so dear to him. You just had to see past the bluster – you had to do that personally too. When I met him in Weimar for the first time – he was already losing his hearing at the time, so everything had to be written down for him, but he spoke very loudly, distinctly, and with emphasis – he asked me: Where are you from, what nationality are you? – I wrote down that I was Austrian. After a few brief sentences, he said to me: Yes, the Austrians, they are either very ingenious or very foolish. Of course, one had the choice of signing up to one of these categories, because there was no third one. He was a man who spoke decidedly. Treitschke is a good source of information on the struggle for power between the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, which actually determined the fate of the German people, and Treitschke has the words to tell the Hohenzollerns the harshest truths. Now, the strange thing is that when you make policy without knowing your own territorial circumstances, when you make policy in a way that has not been seen in modern times, then unnatural circumstances arise. And when you are in the midst of something so unnatural, you long for it, just as Professor Varga longed for it and still longs for it today: yes, if only you could manage to have the right people in the right places.

But the strange thing is: in the special English circumstances, this developed naturally out of a certain sense of reality. While in Central Europe socialist and anti-socialist theories were being debated, only to be followed by attempts at social reconstruction that could lead nowhere, it was the realistic recognition of their own circumstances that brought men to the fore in the West who, in their positions, really did the right thing for what they wanted to achieve and what Seeley describes. A sense of reality brought the right men to the right place – of course, they were the wrong men for us, but it was not their job to be the right men for us. Take perhaps one of the greatest – there were many others, smaller ones – one of the most typical: Cecil Rhodes. All his activity is actually directed towards practical organization, while in Central Europe people are theorizing. In Central Europe people are theorizing about the state of the future. Cecil Rhodes, who came from a very modest background, worked his way up to become the greatest diamond king. How did he succeed? Because the strange thing is – it seems strange to us – that the Rothschild banking house, still powerful in his day, provided him with the largest world loans; it provided them to a man who had a practical hand, exactly in the direction of doing business, as Seeley describes British world politics from the British ideas that go all the way to the secret societies. For Cecil Rhodes was a man who not only did business, but again and again he went back to England, withdrew into solitude, studied Carlyle and similar people, from whom it became clear to him: Great Britain has a mission, and we put ourselves at the service of this mission. And what results from this? First of all, there is the banking house of Rothschild, [which provides him with loans] – that is, a banking enterprise that is intertwined with the state, but which nevertheless emerged from private circumstances. But then: what is a man like Cecil Rhodes capable of? He is able to regard what might be called the British state entirely as an instrument for the English policy of conquest, and to do so with a great deal of conviction, combined with a belief in Britain's mission. He is able, like many others – only he is one of the greatest – to use the British state as an instrument for this and to reflect what he achieves back onto the ever-increasing British power. All this is possible only because the English population is aware of the special world-historical task of an island people. And nothing could be opposed to this from Central Europe that would have been a match for it. What is happening in the West? An economic policy supported by personalities is growing together with state policy. Why are they growing together? Because English politics has gone completely in the spirit of modern times, and in the spirit of modern times it is only if one is able to understand ideas from the reality in which one lives. Then state politics and economic politics can grow together. But the English state is a state that only exists on paper - it is a conglomeration of private circumstances. It is only a cliché to speak of the British state; one should speak of British economic life and of the old traditions that go into it, of old intellectual traditions and the like. In the sense that France is a state and Germany is striving to become a state, Britain was never a state. But they understood the area in which they lived; they organized their economic life in a way that suited that area. You see, today people think about how England should be something else, how England should not pursue a world policy of conquest, how it should become “well-behaved”. The way many people in our country imagine it today, England could no longer be England; because what it does and has done is based on its very essence as an island kingdom. It can only continue to develop by pursuing the same policy.

What was the situation in Central Europe? There, in Central Europe, there was no development of an understanding of the territories on which one lived; there was no idea of a mission appropriate to one's own reality, this great trait was lacking. While in the British Empire, what is called a state, but is not one, was readily used by the most talented economic politicians as an instrument of English politics, things were different in [Austria-Hungary]; there one could only entertain the illusion that the territory on which one resided could be used for what should be Austro-Hungarian policy. There the things diverged that converged in England. And the study of the Austro-Hungarian situation offers something positively grotesque, because one tried to create an economic territory from a point of view from which it could not be done at all. For Austrian domestic policy would have had to be a kind of [economic domestic policy] from the very beginning. Yes, if the Habsburg domestic policy had been the policy of the Rothschild global house, then an economic domestic policy could have developed; but Austrian domestic policy could not develop into something like the policy on the Orient or the like. That did not work, things went in different directions. The same was true in Germany, although I did not have the opportunity to observe it as clearly as the Austrian situation.

One could also describe the conditions in the East and show how there was no discussion at all. In the West, all discussions had been had; they had actually been over since Cromwell's time, I would say dismissed. Afterwards, the practical developed. In the central area, there were discussions and it was believed that the practical is what arises from a merely abstract-logical necessity. Then in the East they did not even get to [such discussions], but there they simply took what was western, that a tsar, Peter the Great, carried it to the East, or that a Lenin found his way into Western discussions and carried them to the East. It is truly only the mantle that has changed, because basically Lenin is just as much a tsar as the earlier tsars were. I do not know whether he is as successful in actually wearing the mantle as it is said that Mr. Ebert does, for example, according to those who have observed him in Silesia and who claim to have noticed that he has already mastered the correct nodding in imitation of the Wilhelmine manner. I do not know whether this is also the case with Lenin. But no matter how different the mask may be, in reality we still have a tsar before us, only in a different form, who has brought the West into the East. This is the cause of the unnatural clash between the expectant mood of the entire East and the misunderstood ideas from the West. It is indeed strange that things are so for Russia, that 600,000 people control the millions of others very tightly and that these 600,000 are in turn controlled only by a few people's commissars. But this can only be the case because the person who longs for a reorganization of the world as much as the man of the East does, does not really notice how his longing is being satisfied. If someone else had come to Moscow with completely different ideas, he would have been able to exert the same power. Few people today pay attention to this, because most of them are completely immersed in unreality.

What emerges from all that I have just attempted to state in aphoristic form? It follows that in the West it will take a long time for the idea of threefolding to become popular, because of the way in which so-called state interests have grown together with economic interests. And it also follows that the European center is the area where this idea should definitely take root first, because people should realize that the old conditions have driven everything apart here. Basically, everything is already divided; we are only trying to hold it together with the old clamps that no longer apply. The threefold social order is basically already there below the surface; it is only a matter of becoming aware of it and shaping reality in the same way as what is already present below the surface. For this, however, it is necessary to finally realize that nothing can be done with the old personalities and that those who are clear about the fact that what these old personalities have been thinking since 1914 has been reduced to absurdity and that something new must take its place. That is what I tried to make clear during the disastrous World War to those who might have had the opportunity to work for the cause. And herein lie the reasons why, since the world catastrophe of world revolution temporarily ran its course, we have been trying to carry the idea of threefolding into as many minds as possible; for what we need is as many people as possible with the ideas of threefolding. During the world war, people did not understand that the fourteen abstract points of Woodrow Wilson should have been countered with the concrete threefold social order from an authoritative source. The practical people found them impractical because they have no real idea of the connection between idea and practice. Certainly, Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points are as impractical as possible. And it is perhaps the greatest tragedy that could have happened to the German people that even the man whom they counted on in the last days of the catastrophic period, who could still become Chancellor of the Reich from the old regime, was incapable of taking Wilson's Fourteen Points seriously. For the time being, these Fourteen Points have been rendered impossible by the abstract form of the League of Nations; they have shown their impracticality in practice at Versailles and Spa. But despite their abstract form, they have achieved something: they have set armies and ships in motion. And that is also what the points that come into the world through the threefold order should do; if not armies and ships, then they should at least set people in motion, so that a viable social organism could arise again. This can only happen through the threefold order — this has been discussed here from a wide variety of perspectives.

Today I wanted to discuss it from a few points of view of recent history. This recent history must, of course, be viewed from different perspectives than it is usually viewed when only the scholastic aspect of it prevails. Threefolding will lead us out of this scholasticism by freeing spiritual life. And from the liberated spiritual life, those personalities can then be placed in the places of which even a Professor Varga must say today: if we had them, then perhaps history would have turned out well. But one thing is certain: the paths of Professor Varga do not lead to those personalities who will stand in their rightful place.

After Rudolf Steiner's introduction, various personalities express their views and ask questions.

Max Benzinger: If we really want to implement threefolding, then we absolutely must go public with this idea. It is not enough simply to call for interested people to be brought along to study evenings.

Siegfried Dorfner: In the “Key Points” it says that the means of production should only cost something until they are produced. If a factory produces means of production, for example lathes, should the lathe only cost something until it is produced? But then the manufacturing factory would have no cover for it. Should the finished means of production not be paid for?

Rudolf Steiner: If you produce lathes and want to sell them as lathes, they are not yet means of production. They are still commodities and not means of production; they only become means of production when they are used in the social community for production. It is important to see the concept of the means of production in the real social process. Lathes are only means of production when they are used only as means of production; until then they are sold as commodities, and the person who buys them is a consumer.

Another participant in the discussion: We have been talking about commodities. Must we not distinguish between agricultural commodities and industrial commodities? Agricultural commodities usually produce a surplus, while industrial commodities operate at a deficit.

Rudolf Steiner: This matter will, of course, often be misunderstood today because we do not live in such circumstances that a kind of overall balance sheet would result if we were to simply include everything that is produced in this balance sheet of a closed economic area - such a balance sheet cannot be drawn up. You cannot somehow insert our current agriculture into a total balance sheet if you have so and so many [mortgage] encumbrances on the goods, and then compare that with industry. If I say that industry is fundamentally dependent on living from everything that the land produces, then we have to disregard everything that has been mixed into it in our country, which means that only a disguised total balance can be achieved. If that which cannot be a commodity ceases to be a commodity, namely land and human labor, and only that becomes a commodity which, in the sense of the threefold order, can circulate between producers and consumers, then it will be possible to draw up a balance sheet showing that the expenditures necessary for industry must always be covered by the surpluses of agriculture. It is self-evident that this is not the case at present. But we are living in times when a truly production-based total balance of a closed economic area should emerge. What I have presented has long been recognized on the economic side. You will even find Walter Rathenau emphasizing that every industry is a devouring beast, that is, that profits must constantly flow back into industry and that it must be constantly fed. But that has to come from somewhere, and it can only come from the profits of land. But in our current balance sheets, this is not expressed at all.

Mr. Roser: It is a sign of our time that a man like Varga had to realize that there was a lack of the right men. What is needed is the education of the masses. But even here in the threefolding movement, there is a lack of the right men. Such men are absolutely necessary because threefolding must be propagated on a large scale.

Emil Molt: Something really must be done. Everyone should realize that, if only for their own sake.

Another participant in the discussion: I would like to ask Dr. Steiner another question. There was an article in the Frankfurter Zeitung recently that posed the obvious question: How can spiritual life be freed at all, since it has to be financed by economic life? How does Dr. Steiner answer this question, which was not sufficiently answered at the event referred to in the article?

Rudolf Steiner: We have indeed dealt with this question very often here, as it will be with the economic support of spiritual life. And the note in the newspaper must simply be incorrect if it refers to our discussions in the threefold social order movement as a whole.

Interjection

It may well have happened that someone was unable to provide information; but how often have I myself said that the threefold order is not really about a threefold division of people, but about a division [of the social organism] into three life organizations that must necessarily develop alongside each other: spiritual, state and economic life. People will, of course, be involved in all three. And so it is quite natural that what the personalities who are part of the organization of spiritual life have to administer as the spiritual part of the spiritual life, this only forms the one link. But these personalities, who carry the spiritual life, must also live. Therefore, they will also be part of economic organizations. And there will be no difference whether such an organization consists, let us say, of teachers or musicians or of shoemakers or tailors. For the economic organization is not there to look after just one or the other area of economic life, but to support all people economically. And because they are part of the economic sphere of the social organism, they are economically supported.

One can be surprised at how things are misunderstood there. A nice scheme also appeared before our, if I may say so, three-part eyes, which was worked out by a radical social-democratic party in Halle. It is beautifully academic, isn't it, how to make schemes. There are (it is drawn) so beautifully at the top the central places of economic life - at the very top, of course, is only one. Then it is organized further down. If it worked that way, the future socialist state would be something that would correspond to the highest ideal of the bureaucracy. But at the very end, there were three smaller departments dedicated to intellectual life. And some gentlemen were so charmed by these three departments that they said, “The whole idea of threefold social order is contained in this.”

Now, this was based, above all, on the false idea that the social organism would ever be divided in this way. It should not be divided in this way, just as the human organism is not divided into three parts lying next to each other. And yet there are three parts to the human organism: We are, first of all, a head person, a chest person and a metabolic person. But it is not only the head that is a head person; the head extends to the whole human organism. The whole nervous system belongs to the head person. And the heart person is not only found in the heart; the sense of warmth, for example, extends throughout the whole body, so the whole body is also a heart person. And we have rhythm everywhere, even in the head system. The systems permeate each other. I can only explain this in the abstract, but the corporations of spiritual life will simply also be there as economic corporations. Only these spiritual corporations will have their organizations in the economic part of the entire social organism, and what they do there will not be able to interfere with the organization of the spiritual part of the threefold social organism.

Today, however, there are many reasons for having misleading views on these matters; such views have been found time and again, even among university lecturers. These university teachers should at least be part of intellectual life. But when you say to them that it should be self-evident that those who are part of intellectual life form a community with their peers in order to administer intellectual life themselves – Klopstock already spoke of a republic of scholars – you often hear a university teacher says: No, [I don't want that], because then the one who matters would not be a consultant in the Ministry of Culture, but my colleague; no, I prefer the consultant in the Ministry of Culture to be my colleague.

So the point is that we do not think in terms of anything other than the three estates, the teaching, military and nutritional estates, that we do not think in terms of anything at all [in today's social conditions], but that we are clear that people today do not live in three separate groups [in estates]. [We must be clear] that the human being is completely immersed in all three parts of the social organism. Then it will also be possible to understand how everyone who has to be active in the spiritual life or in the life of the state is nevertheless part of the economic life and must be provided for by the economic life. So it is important that people are part of the whole social organism.

On the occasion of the course “Anthroposophy and Scientific Disciplines”

Roman Boos will give a lecture on “Anthroposophy and Jurisprudence” as part of the course “Anthroposophy and Specialized Sciences”. In connection with his lecture, he will ask Rudolf Steiner a question.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without paralyzing or killing the principle of codification, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we visualize this structuring of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? — Not in a mere analogy, I mean — but in a similar way to the way in which we should visualize the organic threefold structure in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality sets out to describe the human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe, in a truly selfless way, the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already literally within one's grasp. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken in the most diverse ways about threefolding, the objection was raised that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law comes to have content when it is supposed to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned several times today, they understand the law in such a way that, on the one hand, they only recognize a kind of formalism. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas manage their own affairs.

If we think realistically – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the realm of the spirit already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think realistically and practically, then in the free spiritual life it is not legal impulses that come into question at all, but impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living reciprocity, which will certainly have the peculiarity that, because life is alive and cannot be harnessed to norms, these determinations must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child turns forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. In the case of land, for example, it is not a matter of establishing such codified law, but rather of a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the two other characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flow, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. That is what must be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships.

Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary consequence when individual personalities act in an anti-social manner against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a practical and real way. I must say that the much-vaunted jurisprudence has not even managed to achieve a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, 'Das Recht in der Strafe' (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction gives a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses and all the others. Above all, Laistner shows that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and this is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life, for example, by entering his house or his thoughts and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: He has entered my sphere of life, and thus I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or over my own thoughts, so now I also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him has been conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for the fact that he has entered my sphere. That is the only thing that could be found in legal thinking about the justification for punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, these are secondary questions.

But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something here that continually prevents us from having really sharply defined concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social relations that are already full of all kinds of lack of clarity about life. It presupposes, in fact, the right that first an organism is present and through the organism living movement and thus a circulation is present - just as it presupposes the heart that first other organs are there so that it can function. The legal institution is, so to speak, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things develop; it presupposes that other forces are already there. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that no clearly defined legal system can exist. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for legal concepts to be formed publicly, which are then flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was very good that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

During the course of this evening's discussion, questions were asked and various concerns were raised, for example:

Elisabeth Vreede reads out a postcard from Holland calling for the immediate introduction of a council system.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say something in connection with what has just been said. I will start from a book by Professor Varga about the proletarian movement in Hungary. Professor Varga was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs during the Hungarian Council Republic. He was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, along with a few other people, who fled and are now interned at Karlstein. He has now written an extremely interesting book, 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship', in which he explains how he and his colleagues intended to implement this Soviet Republic in Hungary. In between, he intersperses remarks about the experiences gained during the short period of the existence of the soviet republic in Hungary. Now this whole treatise is very interesting because the Hungarian soviet republic was, so to speak, a significant experiment that was so instructive because the consequences can be better surveyed in the relatively small territory of Hungary than in the vast territory of Russia.

The first thing that is remarkable about this book is that it is an eminently professorial work, something quite alien to real life. One gets the distinct feeling that here is someone who has revolutionized an entire country but who has never looked into the real forces of the national economy. Professor Varga stands squarely on the ground of Lenin and Trotsky; only Varga and his colleagues in Hungary had to deal with a smaller area than Lenin and Trotsky in Russia. And that is why many things came to light in Hungary that will only come to light in Russia at a later time. Naturally, Professor Varga does not attribute the failure of the Hungarian experiment to the inherent impossibility of this entire abstract striving and working, but claims that the cause of the failure was that it could not be carried through to the end because the Romanian military power attacked from the flank.

Take one of the main points that we are confronted with. This example is particularly valuable because we are not dealing here with just any Marxist theorist, but with a man who has organized an entire country according to his abstractions, who could do whatever he wanted. He wanted to be a practitioner, and one must ask: could he be one? Professor Varga was indeed obliged to make arrangements that would now bring the Hungarian economy to its feet in a social-democratic sense. He had to emphasize that the real standard-bearers of his reforms are the urban industrial workers, who naturally have the improvement of their living conditions as their driving motive. But now he shows that initially nothing else can come of it than that these actual standard-bearers must experience a significant deterioration in their living conditions during the initial period in which the council republic is introduced; the only ones who gain are the farmers in the countryside. So what does Professor Varga conclude from this? He concludes that the industrial proletariat, those who actually had the only interest in such a revolution, will not achieve what they want to achieve in the near future, but that it is the rural peasants who will achieve it. But he thinks that these conditions will improve for the urban industrial proletariat later on – namely, indirectly through the countryside. All that was needed was to educate the urban industrial proletariat to the point where it would realize that it would have to go hungry and live in rags for a while before things got better.

This is a capital mistake, which is the most absolute consequence of current abstract thinking on social issues. The result would not have been that things would have improved through the detour via the countryside, but that the entire industry would have gradually been wiped out. The cities would have gradually been abandoned and everyone would have moved to the countryside; production would eventually have been limited to the mere exploitation of land and soil. All other forms of life would have gradually disappeared, meaning that we would have reverted to certain primitive human conditions. If you think about it, that must be the conclusion from Professor Varga's remarks.

The second interesting thing is what we find in his social structure. Varga is a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Marxist, so he sees not people, but only categories, in everything that is active in the social organism. He does not see personalities of flesh and blood, but categories. In the existing social organization, he sees the military, the lawyers, the civil servants, and even the proletarians as categories of people. His limitation consists in his wanting to transform the entire existing state into a huge economic cooperative. It is very interesting to see how he deals with the three links of the social organism. He begins by dealing with the second link, the political state. He peels this second link very finely. He lists the individual categories nicely: lawyers, officials, and so on, and declares: all of them will be abolished. - So actually the whole political state will be abolished. And the spiritual life? Professor Varga actually only knows economic life. He says: the intellectual life consists of teachers. He takes comfort from the fact that they generally fall into line, and that for economic reasons, while the first category, the category of lawyers and civil servants, does not fall into line with the new regime and must therefore do proletarian work. Now, in the threefolding movement, we have also found that teachers always ask: Yes, but who pays us? Varga finds that most of them submit and merge with economic life. The others are sent away. So it is not about the intellectual life at all, but about the economic life of the teachers; only the economic life remains.

It is interesting to see how the establishment of the council republic was taken in hand with a certain iron energy. The companies were simply expropriated; however, some consideration was given to foreign countries. That is, the companies were taken over with all their assets and liabilities, and this made it possible to treat the foreign owners of companies differently from the domestic ones. The aim was to municipalize certain companies and to nationalize others. And now something interesting happens. The election of works councils was decreed. As a rule, it was decreed that a works council should be elected from the proletarian workforce. These works councils were such that they did not understand anything. And then Professor Varga says: The “success” was that the people who had advanced from manual labor to become works council members just sat around all day doing nothing, and the actual misery remained. He thinks that things have gradually improved. He does not accept that the misery has grown ever greater and greater; nor does it follow from his experiences that it has diminished. So now the works councils were at the head of the companies, and even in the beginning there was a great deal of corruption among them. Now he says: corruption was also present earlier – it was the same with the bourgeoisie – only now there are more people who can steal, and that is why the figures have naturally increased. According to Professor Varga, however, it would have improved later if there had been more agitation. He also says: in order to manage the centralized economic life, there had to be production commissioners. So they first elected works councils from within the factories – not the kind we wanted in Stuttgart and Württemberg, who should have worked hard to familiarize themselves with economic life and then had to form a works council. But that did not suit people like Varga. They simply voted – what else could they do if they wanted to regulate things from a utopia? The production commissioners were pulled out of the works councils. They were involved in general orders, in the shutdown of factories, in the concentration of branches of industry, and so on, but also in the discipline of the workers. These production commissioners were the actual central officials in economic life.

Now, it is interesting: Professor Varga's entire book is a Marxist thicket of the most abstract kind from beginning to end. He describes the reforms that are to become reality with such matter-of-factness that it makes the same impression as if, for example, a person like Lenin were describing them. And Varga knows how to explain these principles in a way that is plausible for most minds today. Anyone who is familiar with these things knows that the most terrible utopian spirit reigns precisely where people want to put things into practice today. You can't think of anything more utopian than what was supposed to be done in Hungary. Wherever Varga talks about his experiences, he talks about something bad and evil. In council-ruled Hungary, corruption, worker revolts, and so on went hand in hand with such confusion that people said it was good for the people that the Romanians came, because otherwise they would have made fools of themselves even more miserably. It would have been a terrible destruction from within.

The entire 140-page book is a Marxist thicket that should have been practical. With such a thicket, they wanted to set up an entire country as an economic cooperative. But in the middle of a few pages, you suddenly find a sentence that completely falls out of the rest of the narrative and that makes you feel like it's not the same Varga at all, but something foreign. For example, he talks about the great usefulness of the production commissioners and remarks in a parenthesis: ... if the right personalities are in their place. — It is the same with the parenthesis that it is not possible at all to get along with these institutions until “the greedy, selfish ideology of these people” has changed. The Marxists always claim that ideology arises from the economic relations of production. So, if Varga had any kind of healthy, consistent thinking, he would have to say to himself: We Marxists have been claiming for more than seventy years that ideology must arise out of the relations of production, that ideology must arise as a superstructure like smoke that develops out of it. So when we set up our big economic house in Hungary, then the ideology must arise from it, which, after all, has no other meaning than to rise like smoke from economic life. — But Varga does not say that; rather, everywhere he talks about the basis of his institutions, it comes to light — even if only in subordinate clauses: it will only get better when people's greedy ideology has changed. That is, he waits for the time when people will have a way of thinking that is not geared towards the greedy and the selfish; he waits for the transformation of the greedy ideology into a selfless one. Now, that cannot follow directly from the economic mode of production, because he admits that it leads everywhere to the opposite. So he simply waits for this transformation to come of its own accord. One sees: Where it was essential to base the new structure on a change of direction in spirit, where it was essential to come across the concrete spiritual, Varga has nothing but a small subordinate clause, which, however, was meaningless for the whole development in Hungary. That is precisely the sad thing.

Today, in the broadest sense, we are faced with the opinion that one comes from the abstract to the concrete. This emerges from the appeal that Miss Vreede just read, which probably comes from the Netherlands. It proposes some sort of council, but it does not contain the necessary subordinate clause that something will only come of it if the appropriate personalities are in the appropriate places as councils. That is what matters: that you approach the matter from the concrete end. You can talk as much as you like, but none of it will help; the only thing that helps is to bring spirit and soul into the personalities. We have been completely squeezed out, no longer have any idea that it is important to bring strength, spirit and soul into the personalities. That is what the threefold social order is striving for.

I have related this about the man in Hungary so that you can see the spirit in which the things that are created today arise and the reasons why they must break down. Everything that appears like this book and then has to make such a strange confession shows us that it cannot be done with the old spirit. This is what can be seen everywhere today: You can claim anything in theory, but when someone like Professor Varga, who was able to set up something new, sets up something according to his ideas – then you can see how it works.

I say this so that you can see how nonsensical such demands are, like the ones on this correspondence card that Miss Vreede just read.

Emil Leinhas opens the meeting. Various speakers then take the floor, including Emil Grosheintz. Finally, Rudolf Steiner answers some of the questions raised.

Rudolf Steiner: So a number of questions have been asked. We can continue the discussion afterwards. I can take up some of the questions that have been asked here and would like to come back to the last one, the one from Dr. Grosheintz.

It is understandable that, especially in recent decades, efforts have repeatedly emerged from various social ideas to determine how much work humanity [as a whole] has to do if humanity is to make progress with this amount of work. Naturally, labor would be best utilized economically if only as much labor were performed as is necessary for what humanity wants to consume. And it is indeed very difficult to provide more than rough estimates of these things. But in various circles in which efforts have been made to get to the bottom of this question – it is not particularly easy – it has been possible to form an idea of how much manual labor, that is, simple human labor, is being squandered in the present. Of course, it is not possible to know for sure if one approaches the question not in a dilettantish but in a proper manner, but we can at least say the following for a part of human labor, for physical labor. If we assume that everyone would perform physical work according to their physical abilities, then it would be necessary for every person within the civilized world – excluding the “savages” – to work about 2½ to 3 hours a day. This means that if every person works physically about 2½ to 3 hours a day, the necessary labor for humanity would be provided. Of course, this is only an approximate principle to give a general direction, because in practice it turns out that some people have to work more physically and others less. For example, someone who has to do particularly intellectual work may not be burdened with physical labor; then someone else will have to work more. But if you compare that with the amount of physical labor that is done today, then it can be said that by far the greatest part of humanity has to work so long that much more is expended in labor than would actually have to be expended, probably — and again this is an approximation — five to six times as much physical labor. So you see how much human labor is actually wasted today due to the inefficiency that exists. Much more than one might think is wasted. This is what would come about today through the [realization of the] threefold social order and what those who have no practical sense are so reluctant to accept.

How little people today have a practical sense is evident at every turn, particularly in the judgments that are brought to bear on the impulse of the threefold social organism. What is not at all willing to be understood is that today, in the face of what is going under, it is necessary to develop new spiritual forces; and because it is not understood, these spiritual forces must today, I would say, penetrate through the cracks of the social order if they are to be effective at all. For no cultivation of the spirit can arise from that which a state can order and organize. It is a complete illusion to believe that any cultivation of the spirit can arise from state administration. All state decrees regarding intellectual life are partly a desire for recognition and partly commercial profiteering, and what is then actually achieved intellectually is achieved despite these decrees. Roughly speaking, if there are still children learning something today, they do not learn because of the state, but in spite of the state, because a great deal can still be done in schools against the school laws. And what happens in the sense of the school laws does not develop the spiritual forces, but hinders spiritual development. In a free spiritual life, on the other hand, the forces of human beings would first be revealed, above all by the fact that people who have been educated in such a free spiritual life and then introduced to legal and economic life would really have an overview of the individual areas of life, would be able to act economically and would be able to organize that which cannot be organized today. Today, one can indeed despair when one sees, for all I care, how businesses are organized. Anyone who can think a little and is forced to follow the way in which business is conducted will immediately see that in these cases ten times the amount of energy is wasted because there is nowhere enough will to contract and combine the forces economically, but because one approaches things as broadly as possible. Above all, it is a matter of really recognizing the people who work together through associative life – one must first recognize them if one wants to establish economic life. It is only through the threefold social organism that this economy becomes possible, and the waste of resources will gradually cease.

Some questions – especially those that have been put to me here – show how difficult it actually is for people to find their way into a way of thinking that is completely in line with reality, as it underlies the impulse of the threefold social order. You see, people today are actually as if they did not stand with their feet on the ground at all, but as if they were constantly hovering above reality and stretching their heads up so that they feel as little of reality as possible. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore used a very apt image for today's Western European cultural man, comparing him to a giraffe, whose head extends far above its body and detaches itself from the rest of the human being. And so it happens that one cannot imagine how this impulse of the threefold social order is derived from a real life practice and how it can never depend on doing any kind of purely theoretical foolishness in these areas.

I would like to say this in advance when I now read the following question to you:

Could a form be conceived within the three-fold social organism that would be suitable for absorbing the feelings of that part of the people who, by the nature of their character, voluntarily submit to and trust a monarchical principle?

Were not the ideas of the threefold social organism first offered to the old regime?

Well, I would have to give a lecture if I were to answer the question appropriately. I will only hint at a few things: “Could a form be imagined within the threefolded social organism that would be suitable for absorbing the feelings of that part of the people who, by nature, voluntarily submit to and trust a monarchical principle?” I would like to know how much of the content of this sentence is taken from true, realistic thinking! If one wants to follow the impulse of the threefold social order, then one must think practically, that is, realistically. Now, of course, one must take something concrete. Let us take the former German Reich. Let us take the last decades of this former German Reich, of these people who “out of their feelings or out of their nature voluntarily bring subordination and trust to a monarchical principle”. I would like to ask you: where did they exist? Of course, there were those who, in the upper reaches of their intellect, gave themselves over to some illusions in this regard. But take the “monarchical principle” of the former German Reich: who ruled there? Wilhelm II, perhaps? He really could not govern, but it was more a matter of the fact that there was a certain military caste that maintained the fiction that this Wilhelm II meant something - he was, after all, only a figurant with theatrical and comical airs, who comically paraded all sorts of stuff in the world. It was a kind of theater play, maintained by a military caste, which did not act out of mere “nature” and “voluntary subordination and trust,” but out of something quite different, out of all kinds of old habits, conveniences, out of the belief that it just had to be that way - a belief that was not, however, deeply rooted in the human breast. So this whole thing lay, and it was held more than that it really ruled. That has become apparent in the last week of July 1914. I have only hinted at this in my “Key Points” by saying that everything had come to naught. But it is thoroughly grounded in the facts. Then, in addition to what came out of the military chests, this comedy was held together in the last decades by the even more disgusting nature of big industry and big business, which added up and which, from a completely internal point of view, was based on dishonest impulses and thus maintained this monarchical principle.

Now let us again take a single specific moment from which we can see what is actually meant in reality, apart from the conventional lies that maintain something like this out of people's prejudices – which is called the “monarchical principle”. On a certain day in 1917 – you all know it – Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was dismissed as German Chancellor. If you follow this dismissal down to the last detail, you will find who dismissed this man – this man who, of course, played an almost monarchical role in this ill-fated Germany for quite a long time before and after. Who actually dismissed Theobald von Bethmann? You see, it was the fat Mr. Erzberger – and not Wilhelm II, who did not play the slightest role in this. Very few people know what actually happened back then, what fat Mr. Erzberger actually did, how he actually exercised monarchical power in those days, because very few people actually care about what is really going on, but let themselves be lulled by all sorts of things.

When one reflects on something like the “principle of monarchy”, then one must start with the concrete facts, and then one must be clear about what reality consists of, whether it is monarchism or not. Do you think that in today's England, that personality reigns who, in the pictures we get to see, does not really make a very intelligent impression and who is always referred to in government decrees as “His British Majesty's Government”? No, look at England today, and see how the whole country is following Lloyd George and how he is actually exercising monarchical power. Please look at how things are in the so-called republics, see how things are really quite different from the way people believe them to be according to clichéd words and caricatured concepts. But it is essential that, if truth is to take the place of lies, questions must be asked from the basis of reality. Therefore, when speaking of the threefold social organism, the question cannot truly be raised: Would any Lloyd George with monarchical airs be conceivable? The threefold social order says something very definite about its three members: spiritual life, legal life and economic life. The things will already arise; just as the other people in such an organism get the position appropriate to their abilities, so will there also be “monarchs”.

But it seems as if the crux of the question lies in the last few lines: “Were the ideas of threefolding offered for the first time to the old regime?” Yes, but to whom should they have been offered? They had to be offered to those who could do something. What would have come of it is another matter. The point was to look for people from all over who could base what they did on the impulse of threefolding. Yes, what use would it have been, for example, when the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was in prospect, to somehow shout out to the world in those days: abstract principle! What use would it have been; it would not even have been possible. The point would have been to incorporate the threefolding idea into the actual deeds of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk; the point would have been to conclude this peace in such a way that it would have been concluded under the influence of this impulse.

My dear attendees, it was shortly after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk that I came to Berlin and spoke to a gentleman who was in many ways Ludendorff's right-hand man. At that time, it was already clear to those who could know such things what devastation the entire peace agreement of Brest-Litovsk would cause. Furthermore, it was clear that a major spring offensive would begin in the spring.

And I traveled to Berlin via Karlsruhe. It was in January. At that time, it was well known that if there was a crash in former Germany, Prince Max of Baden would become Chancellor of the Reich. I also spoke with Prince Max of Baden in January about the threefold

of the social organism, because it would have been a matter of the power of the impulses of the threefold social organism naturally having an effect on the directly concrete, real facts. Before the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a long time before, when there was truly still enough time, I put forward the whole idea of the threefold social organism to Mr. von Kühlmann in such a way that I made it clear: From America come the crazy ideas and proposals and crazy ideas, the crazy Fourteen Points, which are absolutely abstract and will lead the world into nothingness, and the only thing that could really be done from the European side would be to counter this with this great world program of the threefold social order.

I would have liked to have seen, my dear audience, what it would have meant in those days if someone in an authoritative position had had the courage to counter the zero program of the West with a real, substantial, real-political program, such as the impulses of the threefold social organism! And even if some people to whom I presented the matter said: “Well, write a pamphlet or a book about it!” – [So I had to answer:] ”What really matters is not whether things are published, but how they enter the world of facts.

Now, the conversation I had with Mr. von Kühlmann – the content of which can still be proven today, because the gentleman who was with me is still alive, thank God, and hopefully will be for a long time. The conversation ended with Mr. von Kühlmann telling me in his own way: I am just a limited soul. Mr. von Kühlmann meant, of course, that he also has other statesmen around him and that he is limited in his resolutions; but I thought of a different interpretation of this saying.

Well, I came to Berlin in the spring, and spoke with a gentleman who, as I said, was very close to Ludendorff, and I wanted to make clear what an absurdity it is to undertake the spring offensive, which he spoke of at the time as one was allowed to speak about it. I said: Of course one cannot and must not interfere in strategic matters if one is not a military man, but I am proceeding from all the preconditions that do not play any part in strategy. I assume that Ludendorff achieves everything he can possibly imagine achieving, or if all of Ludendorff's ideas are not achieved, then if he does not achieve them, the effect of the unfortunate war is still the same. At the time, it was possible to clearly show that the effect would have to be exactly the same; and that is what happened later; it is the case now. Then the Lord said to me, although I was constantly afraid that he would return to his chair, from which he had jumped up, he was so nervous: What do you want? Kühlmann had the threefold order in his pocket, and with it in his pocket he went to Brest-Litovsk. Our politicians are nothing, our politicians are zeros. We military have no other obligation than to fight, to fight. We know nothing else!

You see, in the old days things were really offered to the old regime first – it is not a matter of coming up with ideas out of the blue, but really of looking for ways in which they can be realized. Then, ladies and gentlemen, there was the time when I only had access to those parts of the world where it gradually became a rather impractical question to ask how one should behave towards monarchs and what one could do there in regarding the threefold order – other areas are not initially available to me; I am not yet allowed into pseudo-monarchical England, hyper-monarchical America and thoroughly republican-monarchical France, and so on. Those who are grounded in reality will truly not continue to discuss the highly impractical question of how one should behave towards the monarchical principle, because this monarchical principle will not be able to dominate in any way, it will sit in completely obscure corners and will certainly not necessitate a serious discussion in the near future - on the contrary, today completely different things are in need of discussion.

And I only ask you, dear readers, to read my essay on “Shadow Coups” in the threefolding newspaper, in which I tried to show how unnecessary the agitation of the more left-wing pages was against the whole Kapp comedy. Because ultimately, the way things were at the time, the left was no better than the right, and it didn't matter which side was doing the absurd. Now it is a matter of seeking reality only and exclusively, of bringing the threefold order into as many minds as possible, so that they can then carry the threefold order idea. That is the only reality. It may take a very long time if adversity does not shorten it. But more care will have to be taken to bring this threefold order idea into the minds of those who are capable of it. That it has not yet taken root in the minds of the leading figures is shown, for example, by the fact that on the German side, even in Spa, those who are still regarded as leaders are still those who were also regarded as leaders in the past and in whose heads the idea of threefolding certainly does not enter. So you see, it is really not a matter of wasting thought on asking such unrealistic questions, but it is really a matter of working in the spirit of the threefolding idea, so that this threefolding idea enters as many minds as possible. The question today is not whether we should think about how people voluntarily submit, not even to a monarch, but to a monarchical principle, placing their trust in it and so on; whether or not we think about it seems to me to be a matter of indifference. It is completely unnecessary to devote oneself to such false thoughts when one is really dealing with something that wants to work entirely out of reality. I will only touch on the other questions very briefly, as this closing statement has undoubtedly taken too long already:

Will it be possible to have associations without spiritual research? Is it possible to recognize whether someone will develop an invention after years or whether he is just a botcher?

Now, you see, these questions are not based on a proper examination of what the associations will be. Of course, the difficulties that lie in human nature will always be there. The pure belief that one can build earthly paradises is erroneous. Certain difficulties will, of course, always be there. But the decision as to whether or not an invention has any prospects of success must be made by the individual, today as much as in the future. The only difference is that today the individual is dependent on himself or on some traditions. If associations are present, however, he is connected with everything that is associated and what can come out of the people connected with him through their associations. So the judgment that has to be made about such things is essentially supported and carried by the fact that people are connected through associations.

Recently, I have often used an example to show how one can be a very clever person today without coming to a judgment about the capacity of this or that. I then gave the example that there have been people in all kinds of parliaments, educated in practice, who, from the mid-19th century onwards, advocated the gold standard by claiming and substantiating that the gold standard would lead to free trade and thus to such a configuration of trade that they imagined it would be particularly favorable for international human relations. The opposite has occurred: the gold standard has led everywhere to the system of protective tariffs. I have said that I do not claim that the people who predicted that the gold standard would lead to free trade were all stupid, even though it has led everywhere to protective tariffs. For the most part, they were very, very clever people. Read the parliamentary speeches that were delivered in large numbers in the most diverse parliaments about the gold standard, and you will see that very clever things were said about the gold standard. But the whole mechanism of public economic life was individualized, and the individual was not in a position to see the bigger picture. No matter how clever he was, he was not in a position to gain his own experience.

This experience can only come from being part of the whole fabric of associations, from knowing who knows something about this, who knows something about that, yes, who knows anything at all as an individual - not just because the person concerned has been appointed from some position, but because you have dealt with him in the fabric of associations in so-and-so many cases. The connecting element of this associative fabric is something that must arise out of trust. And so one can say: there is no either/or at all in life. But what makes it difficult for people today to recognize whether something that is invented will bear fruit in human life will, to a large extent, be lost in associative life. One must think of things in the big picture. It is truly disheartening when someone says to you, “Well, I agree; everything must become new, everything must take on different forms, and you tell me what these different forms should be.” But then tell me, what will my grocery store look like when these new forms are in place? Yes, my dear audience, it might perhaps be necessary to tell him that such a shop would no longer exist in that form. Then, of course, he would be quite dissatisfied with the answer. The threefold order is concerned everywhere with something that can be tackled directly every day and that will progress as quickly as the people capable of doing so are available. It could happen very quickly.

Only, if you want to tackle it practically, you cannot ask:

Where does a device begin to be a means of production, for example a sewing machine? Does it become a means of production only when I no longer use it just for my own use, and am I then no longer allowed to use it as something for myself?

Yes, my dear audience, when such big questions are at stake as they are today, you really cannot take the answer from a very limited circle; that is impossible. I guarantee you that when the threefold social order is realized, you will have a relationship to your sewing machine that is satisfying. For one usually does not even consider that the sewing machine and the like, for all I care hair combs or the like, can indeed be means of production, because means of production is everything that enables me to carry out my profession. So, you cannot limit the concept of means of production in that way. What it is about is that one should not think so narrowly at all. Just think about it, here is a church, here is the second church - I am choosing an example that is common in Catholicism. Let us assume that Father N lives here (he is drawn on the board). This priest says mass every day, says vespers on Sundays and so on; that is when he puts on his vestments. These vestments that he puts on as vestments all belong to the church. If the pastor N. is transferred, for example from church A to church B, he does not take any of the chasubles with him; it all stays with church A. And there, in church B, he again puts on the chasubles that belong to that church, if one can speak of “belonging”, but you know what I mean.

When it comes to chasubles, you have a completely different relationship to the things associated with the profession than you do to a sewing machine or typewriter that you take with you when you travel from one place to another. I am not saying that the same order should be introduced for the sewing machine in the future as applies to chasubles. As you can see, there are various possibilities for getting what you need to do your work. So we should not think narrowly when it comes to the great issues of the world today. We should not let our concern for our sewing machine confuse our thinking about the threefold social order. The third question is even stranger:

What happens when someone does not want to step down, when they can no longer manage the means of production themselves? Or, if they do not want to step down, will they be forced out? Who will be able to see through it and tell them that they should leave?

Well, these are such terribly abstract questions that they do not arise for anyone who sees the course of events in the reality of the threefold social order. Read my “Key Points”; in the reality of the threefold social order there are innumerable means of forcing someone to resign. And besides, one must only bear in mind that with the threefold social order – and this is the essential point – the whole relationship of the human being to society changes. One thinks, doesn't one: How will it happen at all, that one now appoints one's successor? One should not ask such questions, which are so far removed from reality. One must ask such questions in a very concrete way, based on the experience of the facts. Let us say that someone becomes incapable, incapable due to mental deficiency, and due to this mental deficiency he reaches the point where he can no longer manage any business. Now, in most cases, someone who sees that he is reaching the point of mental deficiency and can no longer find his way around will hire someone to help him. Then the succession will already emerge from this relationship. If the situation is not as I have described, then in real life quite different, but always quite specific circumstances will arise. So if someone does not want to go, life will show him that he must. Because the one who is not capable will no longer find anyone who wants to work with him, and he will then no longer be able to run his business profitably.

So things turn out quite differently in real life than in theory. And that is why it is important to approach things with realistic thinking that puts oneself in the position of real, practical life. If you hear people talking about such things at a socialist meeting today, you will hear all sorts of things being said, because no one is talking about reality. And how could the proletariat, which had been allowed to grow up in this way, without anyone taking an interest in it, which had been put to the machine, which had not got to know real life, real connections, how could the proletariat have an understanding of anything other than completely unworldly theories? But that is the problem: the world has ended because of such unworldly theories, and no new structure is emerging. That is the problem: we must use every possible means to point to reality and grasp everything from reality. That is what matters.