The first function,—the economic one,—has to do with everything that must exist in order that man may keep straight in his material adjustments to the world around him. The second function has to do with whatever must exist in the body social because of men’s personal relations to one another. The third function has to do with all that must spring from the personal individuality of each human being, and must be incorporated as personal individuality in the body social.
The more true it is that our social life has of recent years taken its stamp from modern technical industry and modern capitalism, the more necessary it is, that the injury thus unavoidably done to the body social should be healed by bringing man, and man’s communal life, into right relation to these three systems of the body social. Economic life has, in recent times, singly and of itself, taken on quite new forms. And because it has worked all alone, unbalanced, it has asserted undue power and preponderance in human life. The two other branches of social life have not until now been in a position to work themselves in this matter-of-course way into the social organism and become incorporated with it according to their own proper laws. Here man must step in, with the instinctive sense I spoke of, and set to work to evolve the threefold order, each individual working on the spot and at the spot where he happens to be. To attempt to solve the social problem in the way meant here, will leave not one individual without his task, now and in the days that are coming.
To begin with the first division of the body social, the economic life:—This is grounded primarily in conditions of Nature,—just as the individual man starts with special qualities of mind and body as the basis for what he may be able to make of himself by study, education and the teaching of life. This nature-basis sets a unique stamp on economic life, and through economic life on the whole organism of society. It is there, this nature-basis, and no methods of social organisation, no manner of socialising measures, can affect it,—at least, not radically. One must accept this nature-basis as the groundwork of life for the body social,—just as, in educating an individual, one must take his natural qualities as groundwork,—how nature has endowed him in this or that respect, his mental and physical power. Every experiment in socialisation, every attempt at giving man’s communal life an economic form, must take this nature-basis into account. At the bottom of all circulation of commodities, of all human labour, and of every form of spiritual life too, there lies something primal, elementary, basic, which links man to a bit of nature. The connection between a social organism and its nature-basis is a thing that has to be taken into consideration,—just as one has to consider an individual in regard to his personal endowment, when it is a question of his learning something.—This is most obvious in extreme cases. Take, for instance, those parts of the earth, where the banana affords man an easily accessible form of food. Here, it will be a question of the amount and kind of labour that must be expended to bring the banana from its place of origin to a convenient spot and deliver it ready for consumption; and this will enter into all considerations of men’s communal life together. If one compares the human labour, that must be exerted to make the banana ready for human consumption, with the labour that must be exerted in Central Europe, say, to make wheat ready for consumption, it is at least three hundred times less for the banana than for the wheat.
Of course that is an extreme case. But similar differences in proportion to the nature-basis exist between the amounts of labour that are requisite in the other branches of production represented in the various social communities of Europe. The differences are not so marked as in the case of bananas and wheat,—still, they exist. Accordingly, it is inherent to the body economic, that the amount of labour-power which man has to put into the economic process is proportionate to the nature-basis of his economic activities. Compare the wheat-yields alone:—In Germany, in districts of average fertility, the returns on wheat cultivation represent about a sevenfold to eightfold crop on the seed sewn; in Chile, the crop is twelvefold; in Northern Mexico, seventeenfold; in Peru, twenty fold. (See Jensen.)
The whole of this living complex of processes, that begin with man’s relation to nature, and continue through all that man has to do to transform nature’s products, down to the point where they are ready for consumption,—these processes, and these alone for a healthy social organism, comprise its economic system. In the social organism, the economic system occupies somewhat the same place as is occupied in the whole human organism by the head-system, which conditions the individual’s abilities. But this head-system is dependent on the lung-and-heart system; and in the same way the economic system is dependent on the services of human labour. The head, however, cannot of itself alone regulate the breathing; and neither should the system of human labour-power be regulated by the forces that are operative within the economic life itself. It is through his interests that man is engaged in economic life, and these have their foundation in the needs of his soul and spirit.—In what way can a social organism most expediently incorporate men’s interests, so that on the one hand the individual may find in this social organism the best possible means of satisfying his personal interest, whilst being economically employed to the best advantage?—This is the question that has to be practically solved in the institutions of the body economic. It can only be solved, if these individual interests are given really free scope, and if at the same time there exists the will and possibility to do what is necessary to their satisfaction. These interests arise in a region outside the confines of the economic life. They grow up as man’s own being unfolds its soul and physical nature. It is the business of economic life to make arrangements for their satisfaction. The only arrangement however that the economic life can make, are such as are limited to the delivery and exchange of commodities,—that is of goods which acquire their value from men’s wants. The value of a commodity comes from the person consuming it. And owing to the fact, that its value comes from the consumer, a commodity occupies quite a different position within the social organism from other things that have a value for man as part of that organism. Study the whole circle of economic life, putting aside all preconceptions,—the production, circulation and consumption of commodities going on within it. One observes at once the difference in character between the relation that arises when one man makes commodities for another, and that human relation that has its foundation in mutual right. One will not however stop short at merely observing the difference; one will follow it up practically, and insist that economic life and the life of “right” should be kept completely separate within the body social. Institutions devoted to the production and exchange of commodities require men to develope forms of activity that are not immediately productive of the very best impulses for their mutual relations in “right.” Within the economic sphere man turns to his fellow because it suits their reciprocal interests. Radically different is the link between man and man in the sphere of “right.”
It may be thought perhaps, that the distinction which life requires between the two things is adequately recognised, if the institutions established for the purposes of economic life also make provision for the “rights” that are involved in the mutual relations of the people engaged in it. But such a notion has no root in reality. The relation “in right,” that necessarily exists between a man and his fellows, is one that can only be rightly felt and lived outside the economic sphere, on totally different soil, not inside it. In the healthy social organism, therefore, there must be another system of life, alongside the economic life and independent of it, where human rights can grow up and find suitable administration. But the “rights” life is, strictly, the political sphere,—the true sphere of the State. If the interests that men have to serve in their economic life are carried over into the legislation and administration of the “rights” State, then these rights as they grow up will merely be an expression of economic interests; whilst, if the “rights” State takes on the management of economic affairs, it is no longer fitted to rule men’s “life of rights”; since all its measures and institutions will be forced to serve man’s need for commodities, and thereby diverted from those impulses which make for the life of rights.
A healthy social organism, therefore, requires, as a second branch alongside the body economic, the independent political life of the State. In the separate body economic, the forces of economic life itself will guide men to such institutions as best serve the production and interchange of commodities. In the body politic, the State, institutions will arise, where dealings between individuals and groups will be settled on lines that satisfy men’s sense of right. This demand for complete separation of the “rights-State” from the economic sphere proceeds from a standpoint of reality. Reality is not the standpoint of those who seek to combine the life of rights and economics in one. The people engaged in economic life of course possess the sense of right, but they will only be able to legislate and administrate in the way “right” requires,—i.e., from the sense of right alone without any admixture of economic interests,—when they come to consider questions of right independently, in a “rights” State that takes, quâ State, no part in economic life. A “rights” State, such as this, has its own legislative and administrative bodies, both constructed according to those principles that ensue from the modern sense of right. It will be built up on those impulses in human consciousness, which go to-day by the name of “democratic.” The legislative and administrative bodies in the economic domain will arise out of the forces of economic life. Such transactions as are necessary between the executive heads of the legislative and administrative bodies of “rights” and economics respectively, will be carried on pretty much as between the governments of sovereign states to-day. This co-ordination of the two systems will make it possible for developments in the one body to exert the needful influence on the other. This influence of the two spheres on one another is prevented, when one of them tries to develope within itself the element that should come to it from the other.
The economic life, then, is dependent on the one hand on those relations in “right,” which the State establishes between the persons and groups of persons engaged in economic work, just as, on the other hand, it is subject to the conditions of the nature-basis (climate, local features, presence of mineral wealth, etc.). The bounds are thus marked out on either side for the proper and possible activities of economic life. Just as nature creates predetermining conditions, which lie outside the economic sphere, and must be accepted by the man at work in it as the given premises on which all his economic work must be based,—so everything in the economic sphere that establishes a “relation in right” between man and man, must, in a healthy social organism, be regulated by the “rights-State,” which, like the nature-basis, goes on alongside and independently of the economic life. In the present social organism,—as developed in the course of mankind’s historic evolution up till now,—economic life occupies an unduly large place, and sets the peculiar stamp that it has acquired from the machine-age and modern capitalism upon the whole social movement. It has come to include more than it should include in any healthy society. In the present day, trafficking to and fro within the economic circuit, where only commodities should traffic, we find human labour-power, and human rights besides. At the present day, within the body economic, one can truck not only commodities for commodities, but commodities for human labour,—and for human rights as well, and all by the very same economic process. (By “commodity” I mean everything which through human activity has acquired the form in which it is finally brought by man to its place of destination for consumption. Economists may perhaps find this definition objectionable or inadequate; but it may be serviceable towards an understanding of what properly belongs to economic life.[1])
When anyone acquires a plot of land by purchase, one must regard it as an exchange of the land for commodities for which the purchase money stands proxy. The plot of land however does not act as a commodity in economic life. It holds its position in the body social through the “right” the owner has to use it. There is an essential difference between this right of use, and the relation of a producer to the commodity he produces. From the very nature of the producer’s relation to his product, it cannot possibly enter into the totally different kind of man-to-man relation created by the fact that someone has been granted the sole right to use a certain piece of land. Other men are obliged to live on this land, or the owner sets them to work on it for their living; and thus he brings them into a State of dependence upon himself. The fact of mutually exchanging genuine commodities, which one produces or consumes, does not establish a dependence that affects the man-to-man relation in the same kind of way.
To an unprejudiced mind it is clear, that a fact of actual life, such as this, must, in a healthy society, find due expression in its social institutions. So long as there is simply an interchange of commodities for commodities in economic life, the value of these commodities is determined independently of the relations-of-right existing between individuals or groups. Directly commodities are interchanged for rights, the “rights relation” is itself affected. It is not a question of the exchange in itself; such an exchange is the inevitable life-element of the modern social organism, resting as it does on division of labour. The point is, that through this interchange of rights and commodities, “right” itself is turned into a commodity, when the source of “right” lies within the economic life. The only way of preventing this, is by having two sets of institutions in the body social,—one, whose sole and only object it is to conduct commodities in the most expedient manner along its circuit, the other regulating those human rights involved in commodity-exchange which arise between the individuals engaged in producing, trading and consuming. Such rights are not distinct in their nature from any other rights that necessarily exist in all relations between persons, quite independent of commodity-exchange. If I injure or benefit my fellow-man by the sale of a commodity, it falls within the same social category as an injury or benefit due to some action or negligence not directly expressed in an exchange of commodities.