The Threefold Commonwealth

by Rudolf Steiner

In Utopian minds, the book will rouse all manner of questions. Artists and other spiritual workers will anxiously ask whether genius will find itself better off in the free spiritual life than in the one at present provided by the State and the economic powers? In putting such questions, however, they must please to remember, that the book is in no respect intended to be Utopian. Hence it never lays down a hard and fast theory. This must be so and so, or so and so.

Its aim is to promote the formation of such forms of human social life, as, from their joint working shall lead to desirable conditions. And anyone, who judges life from experience, and not from theoretic prejudice, will say to himself “When there is a free spiritual community, whose dealings with life are guided by its own lights, then anyone who is creating out of his own free genius will have a prospect of his creations being duly appreciated.”

The “social question” is not a thing that has cropped up at this particular point in the life of man, which can be solved straight away by a handful of people, or by parliaments, and, once solved, will remain solved. It is an integral part of our new civilised life; and it has come to stay. It will have to be solved afresh for each moment of the world’s historic evolution. For man’s life has entered with this new age upon a phase, when what starts by being a social institution turns ever and again into something anti-social, which has each time continually to be overcome afresh. Just as an organic body, when it has once been fed and satisfied, passes after a while into a state of hunger again, so the body social passes from one state of order again into disorder. There is no more a panacea for keeping social conditions in good order, than there is a food that will satisfy the body for ever and always. Men can however enter into forms of community, which, through their joint action in actual life, will bring man’s existence constantly back into the social path. And one of these forms of community is the self-governing spiritual branch of the body social.

All the experiences of the present time make it plain, that what is socially needed is, for the spiritual life free self-administration, and for the economic life associative labour. Industrial economy in modern human life is made up of the production of commodities, circulation of commodities and consumption of commodities. These are the processes for satisfying human wants; and human beings and their activities are involved in these processes. Each has his own part-interest in them; each must take such a share in them as he is able. What any individual actually needs, only he himself alone can know and feel. As to what he himself should perform, this will be judged by him according to his measure of insight into the mutual life of the whole. It was not always so; nor is it so to-day all the world over; but in the main it is so amongst the at present civilised portion of the Earth’s inhabitants. Economic evolution has kept widening its circles in the course of mankind’s evolution. Household economy, once self-contained, has developed into town economy, and this again into State economy. To-day we stand before world economy. No doubt, in the New much still lingers on of the Old; and much that existed in the Old was already a forecast of the New but the above evolutionary order is the one that has become paramount in certain relations of life, and the destinies of mankind are conditioned by it.

It is altogether a wrong-headed notion to aim at organising the economic forces into an abstract world-community. Private economic organisations have, in the course of evolution, become to a very great extent merged in State economic organisations. But the State communities were created by other forces than the purely economic ones; and the endeavour to transform the State communities into economic communities is just what has brought about the social chaos of these latter times. Economic life is struggling to take the form its own peculiar forces give it, independent of State institutions, and independent also of State lines of thought. It is only possible through the growth of Associations, having their rise in purely economic considerations, and drawn jointly from circles of consumers, traders and producers. The actual conditions of life will of themselves regulate the size and scope of these Associations. Over-small Associations would prove too expensive in the working; over-large ones would get beyond economic grasp. The needs of life as they arise will shew each Association the best way of establishing interconnections with the others. There need be no fear, that anyone, who has to spend his life moving about from place to place, will be in any way hampered by Associations of this kind. He will find removing from one group to another quite easy, when it is not managed by the State-organisations, but by the economic interests. One can conceive possible arrangements within such an associative system, that would work with the facility of a money-currency.

Within any single Association, where there is practical sense and technical knowledge, a very general harmony of interests can prevail. The production, circulation and consumption of goods will not be regulated by laws, but by the persons themselves, from their own direct insight and interests. People’s own active share in the life of the Associations will enable them to acquire the necessary insight; and the fact, that the various interests are obliged to contract a mutual balance, will ensure the goods circulating at their proper relative values. This sort of agreed combination, determined by economic considerations, is not the same as the form of combination that exists in the modern trades-unions. The activities of the modern trades-unions are expended in the economic field; but the unions are not framed primarily according to economic considerations. They are modelled on the principles taken from practical familiarity in modern times with political considerations, considerations of state. They are parliamentary bodies, where people debate, not where they come together to consider economic aspects and agree on the services to be reciprocally rendered. In these Associations, it will not be “wage-workers” sitting, using their power to get the highest possible wages out of the work-employer; it will be hand-workers, co-operating with the spiritual workers, who direct production, and with those interested in consuming the product, to effect a balance between one form of service and another, through an adjustment of prices. This is not a thing that can be done by general debate in parliamentary assemblies. One must beware of these. For who would ever be at work, if an endless number of people had to spend their time negotiating about the work! Everything will take place by agreement between man and man, between one Association and another, whilst the work goes on alongside. For this, all that is necessary is, that the joint agreement should be in accordance with the inside knowledge of the workers and with the interests of the consumers.

In saying this, one depicts no Utopia. No particular way is laid down in which this or that matter must be settled. All that is done, is to point out how people will settle matters for themselves, when once they set about working in forms of community which are in accordance with their special insight and interests.

There are two things that operate to bring men together into communities of this kind: The one, is human nature,—for it is nature that gives men wants. Or, again, a free spiritual life, for this engenders the insight that finds scope in communal life. Anyone, who bases his thoughts on reality, will admit, that Associative communities of this kind can spring up at any time, that there is nothing utopian about them. There is nothing to hinder their springing up, except that the thought of “organisation” has been so suggested into the man of the present day, that he is obsessed with the notion of organising industrial and economic life from outside. In direct contrast to such organising of men for the combined work of production, is this other kind of economic organisation, that rests on voluntary, free Association. Through this mutual Association, one man establishes ties with another; and the orderly scheme of the whole is the resultant of what each individual finds reasonable for himself.

It may of course be said: What is the use of a man, who has no property, Associating himself with a man, who has? It might seem better for all production and consumption to be regulated “fairly” from outside. But such organising kind of regulation checks the flow of free individual creative power, through which economic life is fed, and cuts the economic life off from what this source alone can give it. Putting aside any pre-conclusions, just make the experiment of an Association between those, who to-day have no property, and those who have; and, if no forces other than economic ones intervene, it will be found that the “Haves” are obliged to render the “Have-nots” service for service. The common talk about such things to-day does not proceed from those instincts of life, that experience teaches, but from certain attitudes of mind, that have arisen out of class or other interests, not out of economic ones. Such attitudes of mind had a chance to grow up, because, in these latter times, just when economic life especially was becoming more and more complicated, the purely economic ideas were unable to keep pace with it. The cramped and fettered spiritual life has acted as a drag. The people, who are carrying on economic life, are fast caught in life’s routine; they are unable to see the forces that are at work shaping the world’s industrial economy. They work on, without any insight into the totality of human life. But, in the Associations, one person will learn from another what it is necessary that he should know. A collective experience of economic possibilities will arise from the combined judgment of individuals, who each have insight and experience in their own particular departments.

Whilst, then, in the free spiritual life the only forces at work are those inherent to the spiritual life itself, so in an economic system modelled on associative lines, the only values that count will be those economic values that grow up under the Associations. The particular part that any individual has to play in economic life will become clear to him from actual life and work along with his economic associates. And the weight that he carries in the general economic system will be exactly proportionate to the service he renders within it. There will be those who are unfitted to render service; and how these find their place in the general economy of the body social is discussed in the course of the book. In an economic system, that is shaped by economic forces alone, it is possible for the weak to find shelter against the strong.