The Rudolf Steiner Archive

105. The Key Points of the Social Question

[ 1 ] The Key Points of the Social Question. This was the subject of a lecture delivered on Wednesday evening by Dr. Rudolf Steiner on behalf of the “Federation for the Threefold Social Order” in the Lutherhaus Hall before a very large audience, and which has also been discussed in greater detail by the aforementioned gentleman in a book bearing the same title. Mr. Steiner sees the salvation of our fatherland from the predicament into which the peace treaty has plunged it as lying in the immediate implementation of the following demands: 1. Complete autonomy of spiritual life, including education and the school system. 2. Limitation of state activity to all those areas of life in which all people are equal before one another. 3. Regulation of the restructured wage and property relations by the rule of law, with complete separation from economic life, so that the latter has nothing to do with anything other than the production, distribution, and consumption of goods. While in the realm of economic life, works councils are called for—which, united into a works council system, would ensure the practical implementation of a rational socialization—the renewal of intellectual life should be undertaken in parallel through the establishment of a Cultural Council. Mr. Steiner seeks to chart new paths in the realm of domestic and foreign policy and is striving to recruit supporters from all professions, walks of life, and political parties for the ideas he advocates regarding the threefold social order. One must acknowledge that he advocates for his cause with great passion and unwavering conviction; however, it cannot be readily affirmed that the path he has laid out is the correct one. In any case, we as Social Democrats cannot be blamed for considering the path laid out by our elected leaders—from the capitalist economic system to a socialist social order for the benefit of all humanity—to be the more correct one than the one presented to us, in a manner not always easy to understand, by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. The “immediate” action demanded by Mr. Steiner is not enough. The path toward the socialization of our economic life is a long one, fraught with obstacles, and must be traversed systematically if we are not to collapse halfway through. And the threefold social order is no panacea for escaping the mutual struggle of opinions and forces; mutual isolation or detachment from the whole by no means eliminates the points of friction between them. Nevertheless, one must admit that Steiner’s further development of the fundamental ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels represents quite remarkable contributions to solving the question of how to shape the social world, even if some things will turn out differently from how he and others theoretically construct them today.

[ 2 ] When Mr. Steiner remarks, with a hint of bitterness, that Germany would be better off today if his ideas had been given more consideration earlier on—and, in particular, if they had been contrasted with Wilson’s 14 Points—it must be said that, before the revolution, democratization and socialization were, unfortunately, an abomination to all the influential forces in the state, and it is only under the pressure of the revolution that this issue is now being addressed more closely. However, it is unlikely that Steiner’s ideas would have found more favor with the hate-filled capitalism of the West and Anglo-American imperialism than the 14 Points of one of their own—and indeed, one of the most powerful among them. Mr. Steiner, however, undoubtedly deserves great credit for bringing the ideas of socialism to circles that stay away from Social Democratic gatherings, as was indeed the case on Wednesday evening, when the majority of those in attendance consisted of members of the bourgeois parties, who followed the two-hour presentation—carried by enthusiasm for socialism as the liberator of the people—with rapt attention and offered lively applause. – During the ensuing discussion, the USPD triumvirate of Trantz, Spengler, and Schmidt sought to stoke their own party agenda in the flames of the newly kindled enthusiasm, with each of the gentlemen picking out from Steiner’s lecture the points that particularly appealed to him and seeking to emphasize them or interpret them in line with his own party’s views. However, Mr. Steiner vehemently objected to this—and in particular to the comparison of the works councils he advocated, which are, after all, similarly enshrined in the Reich Constitution, with the Russian council system—after another speaker had already expressed the view that it would have been better to refrain from such a discussion. The works councils have absolutely nothing in common with the Russian council system, which is based on anti-democratic principles; indeed, Mr. Steiner categorically rejected dictatorship. It was not until around 11:30 p.m. that the highly interesting lecture evening—which certainly won many supporters for Steiner’s circle of ideas—came to an end. These issues are to be further debated in closed meetings of the Federation for Threefold Social Order.