The Threefold Commonwealth

by Rudolf Steiner

To-day, it is necessary to see, that one cannot form any judgment adequate to the facts, without going back to those primal creative thoughts which underlie all social institutions. The body social requires a constant fresh supply of the forces that reside in these primal thoughts; and if the suitable channels are not there, through which these forces can flow, then social institutions assume forms which impede life, instead of furthering it. But although the conscious thoughts of men may go astray, although they may,—and have,—created facts that impede life, yet these primal thoughts live on in men’s instinctive impulses. Tumultuously and destructively they break against the world of established facts that hem them in; and these primal thoughts it is, which open or disguised, find their way out in convulsions that threaten to overthrow the social order. Such revolutionary convulsions will not cease to occur, until the body social takes a form, in which there may be always both an inclination to notice when any institution is beginning to deviate from its first intention in those primal thoughts, and at the same time the possibility of counter-acting every such deviation before it becomes strong enough to be a danger. In our times, the actual conditions, throughout a wide range of human life, have come to deviate very widely from what the primal thoughts require. And these primal thoughts, as they live on in the impulses of the human soul, are a commentary,—a commentary that voices itself loudly enough in facts,—of what has been taking shape in the body social during the last few centuries. What is wanted, is good will and vigorous resolution to turn again to these primal thoughts. We must not be blind to the mischief that is done, especially at this moment, by dismissing these primal thoughts from the field of actual life as “unpractical generalities.” The facts of life itself, and the claims of the working-class masses, afford a practical commentary on what the modern age has made of the body social. The task of our age, in face of these facts, is not merely to criticise, but to set about remedying them; which means going to the primal thoughts for the direction in which we must now consciously guide them. For the time is gone by, when the old instinctive guidance could suffice for mankind; what it could accomplish up till now, is now no longer enough.

One of the main questions raised by the practical criticisms of the times is this:—How is a stop to be put to the oppression which working-class humanity suffers under private capitalism. The owner, or controller, of capital is in a position to press other men’s bodily labour into the service of any work he takes on hand? In the social relation that arises in the co-operation of capital and human labour-power, there are three elements to be distinguished: the enterprising activity, which must rest on the basis of individual ability in some one person or group of persons;—the relation of the “enterpriser” to the worker, which must be a “relation in right”;—and the production of an object which acquires a commodity value in the circuit of economic life. For the “enterprising” activity to find its scope in a healthy way in the social order, there must be forces at work in social life which afford men’s individual abilities the best possible mode of manifesting themselves; and therefore there must be one province of the body social which secures a person of ability free occasion for the employment of his abilities, and makes it possible to leave the estimation of their value to other people’s free and voluntary understanding.

It is obvious, that the social activities, which a man is enabled to exercise by means of capital, fall within that domain of the body social which takes its laws and administration from the spiritual life. If the political State interferes to influence these personal activities, then it is unavoidable that its influence should involve a disregard of individual abilities. For the political State is necessarily based on what is similar and equal in all men’s claims in life; and it is its business to translate this equality into practice. Within its own domain, the State must ensure every man having a fair chance to make his personal opinion tell. For the work the State has to do, the question of understanding or not understanding individualities does not come in; and therefore whatever the State does towards realising its own principles ought not to have any influence upon the exercise of men’s individual abilities. Nor should it be possible for the prospect of economic advantage to determine the exercise of individual ability where capital is needed. Many persons in weighing the pros and cons of capitalism lay great stress upon this economic advantage. In their opinion, it is only through the incentive which this gives to individual ability that individual ability can be induced to exert itself; and they refer, as “practical men” to the “imperfections of human nature,” with which they claim to be well acquainted. No doubt, in that social order, under which the present state of things matured, the prospect of economic advantage has come to play a very important part, and is in no small measure the very cause of that state of things, of which we are now feeling the effects, and which calls for the development of some other, different incentive to the exercise of individual ability. This incentive must lie in the “social sense,” that will spring from a healthy spiritual life. Strong in the freedom of the spiritual life, a man’s education and schooling will send him forth equipped with impulses, that will lead him, thanks to this social sense, to realise the bent of his personal abilities.

There is not necessarily anything high-flown or visionary about such a belief. No doubt high-flown illusions have wrought immeasureable harm in social endeavour, as in other fields. But all that has been said before is enough to shew, that the view here urged is not based on any fanciful notion that “the spirit” will work wonders, provided the “spiritually-minded” only talk enough about it. It is the outcome of observation, of watching how people actually work, when they work together freely in the spiritual field. This work in common, takes, of its own nature, a social character, provided it can develope in real freedom.

It is only the lack of freedom in spiritual life, which has kept its social character in abeyance. The fashion in which the forces of social life have found expression amongst the leading classes, has restricted their use and value to limited circles of mankind, in a way which is anti-social. What was produced in these circles could only be brought artificially within reach of working-class mankind. This section of mankind could draw no strength for the support of their souls from this spiritual life; for they had no real part nor property in it. Schemes for “popular instruction,” for “the uplifting of the masses,” “Art for the People,” and so forth,—all such things are not really the means of spreading spiritual property amongst the people, whilst spiritual property keeps the character it has acquired in recent times. For “the people,” as regards their inmost life and being, are not in it. All that it is possible to give them, is as it were a bird’s-eye view of these spiritual treasures from a point outside. And if this is true of spiritual life in its narrower sense, it has also its meaning for those offshoots of spiritual activity, which find their way into economic life on the basis of capital. In a sound order of society, the worker will not stand at his machine, and come into contact with nothing but its mechanism; whilst the capitalist alone knows what is the destiny of the manufactured commodities in the round of economic life. The workman must share fully in the whole concern, and be able to form a distinct conception of the part that he himself is playing in social life through his work in making the commodity. The enterpriser must hold regular conferences, with the object of arriving at a common field of ideas that shall include both employers and employed. Such conferences must be regarded as being as much a part of the business as the actual work. This is a healthy way of conducting business, and one that will arouse in the workers a sense, that by the control of capital, if he uses it properly, a person benefits the whole community,—including the worker, as a member of it. The above-board dealing, necessary to a willing understanding on the part of others, will make the “enterpriser” careful to keep his business methods above suspicion.

All this will not seem negligible to anyone with a sense for the social effects of that inner community of feeling and experience, which arises from the prosecution of a common task. Those who possess this sense, will clearly perceive, how greatly it is to the benefit of economic activity that the direction of economic affairs, based on capital, should come from the spiritual life, and have its roots in the spiritual domain. This preliminary condition must be fulfilled, before people’s present interest in capital and in increasing it simply for the sake of profits, can give place to an interest in the actual business of production and the doing of the job on hand.

Persons of a socialist turn of mind at the present day aim at bringing the means of production under the control of the community. What is right and desirable in their aims can only be achieved if this control is exercised through the free spiritual domain. Such control through the free spiritual domain will do away with all possibility of that economic coercion, which brings with it such a sense of degradation, and which the capitalist exerts when his capitalist activities are born and bred of the forces of economic life; and it will also prevent that crippling of men’s individual abilities, which inevitably results when these abilities are directed by the political State.

Earnings on everything done through capital and individual ability must depend in a healthy social order, like all other spiritual work, on the free initiative of the doer and on the free appreciation of those who wish the work done. The estimate of what these earnings should be, must, in this field, be in accordance with a man’s own free view—on what he is willing to regard as a suitable return on his work, taking into consideration the preliminary training he requires for it, the incidental expenses to which he is put, etc., etc. Whether he finds his claims gratified or not, will depend on the appreciation his services meet with.

Social arrangements on the lines here proposed will lay the basis for a really free contractual relation between the work-director and the work-doer,—a relation resting not on barter of commodities (or money) for labour-power, but on an agreement as to the share due to each of the two joint authors of the commodity.

The sort of service, that is rendered to the body social on the basis of capital, depends of its very essence on the part played in it by men’s individual abilities. Nothing but the free spiritual life can give men’s abilities the impulse they need for their development. Even in a society, where the development of individual ability is tied up with the administration of the political State, or to the forces of economic life, even there, real productivity, in everything requiring the expenditure of capital depends on as much of free individual power as can find its way through the shackles imposed upon it. Only, under such conditions, the development is an unhealthy one. It is not the free development of individual ability, exercised on a basis of capital, that has brought about conditions under which human labour-power can be nothing but a commodity; it is the shackling of these powers through the political life of the State or in the circuit of economic processes. An unprejudiced recognition of this fact is at the present day a necessary first step to everything that has to be done in the field of social organisation. For the superstition has grown up in modern times, that the measures needed for the welfare of society must come from either the political State or the economic system. And if we pursue any further the road along which this superstition has started us, we shall set up all manner of institutions, that, far from leading man to the goal towards which he is striving, will increasingly aggravate the oppressive conditions from which he is seeking to escape.