The Threefold Commonwealth

by Rudolf Steiner

In the organisation of economic life, that familiarity with business, which comes from practical experience and specialist training, will give the point of view needed by the person at the head of affairs. In the “rights” organisation, the laws and administration will give effect to the general sense of right in the dealings of persons and groups with one another. The economic organisation will assist the formation of Associations amongst people who from their calling, or as consumers, have the same interests or similar requirements. And this network of Associations, working together, will build up the whole fabric of industrial economy, The economic organisation will grow up on an associative basis, and out of the links between the Associations. The work of the Associations will be purely economic in character, and be carried on on a basis of “rights” provided by the rights-organisation. These Associations, being able to make their economic interests recognised in the representative and administrative bodies of the economic organisation, will not feel any need to force themselves into the legislative or executive government of the “rights-State” (as, for instance, a Landowners’ League, or Manufacturers’ Party, or a Socialist party representing an industrial programme), in order to effect there what they have no power to achieve within the limits of the economic life. If the “rights-State” again takes no part whatever in any branch of industrial economy, then the institutions it establishes will be such only as spring from the sense of right amongst its members. Although the persons who sit on the representative body of the rights-State may, and of course will, be the same as are taking an active part in economic life, yet, owing to the division of function, economic life will not be able to exert such an influence on the “rights life,” that the health of the whole body social is undermined,—as it can be, when the state itself organises branches of economic life, with representatives of the economic world as state-legislators, making laws to suit economic interests.

A typical example of the fusion of the economic life with the rights-life was afforded by Austria. According to the constitution adopted by Austria in the eighteen-sixties, the representatives of the imperial assembly, the “Reichsrat,” of that compound territory, were elected from the communities representing the four branches of economic life:—the landed proprietors,—the chambers of commerce,—the towns, markets and industrial centres,—and the rural areas. Obviously, in this composition of the representative State-assembly, the first and only idea was, that of playing off the economic interests against one another, in the belief that a system of political rights must be the outcome. No doubt the disruptive forces of her divers nationalities contributed largely to Austria’s downfall. But it may be taken as no less certain, that if an opportunity had been given for developing a system of “rights,” working alongside and outside of the economic one, it would, from the common sense of right, have evolved a form of society in which the different nationalities could have lived together in unity.

A person engaged in public life to-day usually turns his attention to things in it that are only of secondary consideration. This is because his habits of thought lead him to regard the body social as uniform in structure. As a uniform structure, there is no form of suffrage he can devise that will fit it; for the economic interest and the impulses of human rights will come into mutual conflict upon the representative body, however it may be elected; and the conflict between them will affect social life in a way that must result in severe shocks to the whole organism of society. The first and indispensable object to be worked for in public life to-day must be the radical separation of economic life from the “rights” organisation. And as the separation becomes gradually established, and people grow into it, the two organisations will each in the process discover its own most appropriate method of selecting its legislators and administrature. Amongst all that at the present moment is clamouring for settlement, forms of suffrage, although they bear on fundamental issues, are nevertheless of secondary consideration.

Where the old conditions still exist, these can be taken as the basis from which to work towards the new separation of function. Where the old order has already melted away, or is in process of dissolution, there individuals and little groups of people must find the initiative to start reconstructing along the new lines of growth. To try in 24 hours to effect a transformation in public life, is recognised by thoughtful socialists themselves as midsummer madness. They look to gradual opportune changes to bring about what they regard as social welfare. The light of facts, however,—must make it plain to any impartial observer, that a reasoning will and purpose are needed to make a new social order, and are imperatively demanded by the forces at work in mankind’s historic evolution.

These remarks will be regarded as “unpractical” by someone who regards nothing as practicable outside the narrow horizon of his customary life. Unless he can see things differently, any influence he may retain in any sphere of life will not tend to heal the disease in the body social, but only to make it worse. It was people of his way of thinking who helped to bring about the present state of affairs. There must be a reversal of the movement which has set in in leading circles, and which has already brought various departments of economic life (e.g., the postal and railway services, etc.), within the workings of the State. Its opposite must begin: a movement towards the elimination of all economic activity from the domain of politics and State organisation. Thinkers, whose whole will and purpose, as they believe, is directed to the welfare of society, take this movement towards State control, started by the hitherto governing circles, and push it to its logical extreme. They propose to socialise all the materials of economic life, in so far as they are means of production. A healthy course of development, however, will give economic life its independence, and will give the political State a system of “right” through which it can bring its influence to bear on the body economic,—so that the individual shall not feel that his function within the body social gives the lie to his sense of right.

When one considers the work that a man does for the body social by means of his physical labour-power, it is plain that the above reflections are grounded in the actual life of men. The position which labour has come to occupy in the social order under the capitalistic form of economy, is such, that is purchased by the employer from the employed as a commodity. An exchange is effected between money (as representing commodities) and labour. But in reality no such exchange can take place; it only appears to do so.[2] What really happens is, that the employer receives in return from the worker commodities that cannot exist, unless the worker devotes his labour-power to creating them. The worker receives one part, the employer the other part of the commodity so created. The production of the commodity is the result of a co-operation between employer and employed. The product of their joint action is that which first passes into the circuit of economic life. For the product to come into existence, there must be a “relation in right” between worker and “enterpriser”; but the capitalist type of economy is able to convert this “rights” relation into one determined by the employer’s superiority in economic power over the employed. In a healthy social order, it will be obvious that labour cannot be paid for, that one cannot set an economic value upon it comparable to the value of a commodity. The commodity produced by this labour first acquires an economic value by comparison with other commodities. The kind of work a man must do for the maintenance of the body social, how he does it, and the amount, must be settled according to his abilities and the conditions of a decent human existence. And this is only possible when such questions are settled by the political state, quite independently of the provisions and regulations made in the economic life.

This settlement of labour conditions outside economics, pre-establishes a basis of value for commodities comparable to the basis already established by the conditions of nature. The value of one commodity, as measured by another, is increased by the fact that its raw material is more difficult to procure; and, similarly, the value of a commodity must be made dependent on the kind and amount of labour which the “rights” system allows to be expended on its production.[3]

Thus economic life has its conditions fixed on two sides. On one, there is the “nature-basis,” which man must take as he finds it; on the other, will be the “rights-basis” which has to be created on the free and independent ground of the political State,—detached from economic life, and out of the common sense of right.

It is obvious, that in a social organism conducted in this way the standard of economic well-being will rise and fall with the amount of labour which the common sense of right expends upon it. This however must be so in a healthy society. Only the subordination of the general economic prosperity to the common sense of right can prevent man from being so used up and consumed by economic life that his existence no longer seems to him worthy of his humanity. And it is this sense of an existence unworthy of human beings that is, in reality, at the bottom of the convulsions in the body social.

Should the general standard of economic well-being be too greatly lowered on the “rights” side, there is a way of preventing this, just as there is a way of improving the nature-basis. One can employ technical means to make a less productive soil more productive; and, if prosperity declines over much, the mode and amount of work can be changed. Only, such changes should not be a direct consequence of processes in the economic life; they must be the outcome of insight, arrived at on the free ground of “rights,” independent of economic life.