The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] I have often pointed out how modern humanity’s need for a socialization of the social order stems precisely from the antisocial impulses in people, which are more pronounced today than in earlier times. In terms of their emotional life—and indeed their entire inner life—people today are fundamentally more antisocial than in earlier times. And one might say: In relation to the more elemental, natural development of humanity, antisocial impulses are on the rise. One can further say: Over the course of the last four centuries, people have more or less—and this is, after all, based on a historical necessity—surrendered to certain antisocial impulses across a wide range of social life. And the countercurrent to this surrender to antisocial impulses is the call for socialization. It is precisely because strong antisocial impulses are awakening in people’s subconscious that this call for socialization is flaring up in their consciousness.

[ 2 ] Today, one can trace this all the way into the most intimate recesses of the soul. Yet never has it been so difficult for people to be convinced by anything that challenges their opinions or even by another person’s line of reasoning; never has the stubbornness in clinging to one’s opinions been as great as it is today. And if it ever happens that someone draws attention to the one-sidedness of every human opinion—indeed, to the one-sidedness of everything we call human truth—if it ever happens that someone examines things from different angles, then they are accused of expressing one opinion one moment and another the next. We will not achieve healthy socialization, based on social understanding among people, unless this ability of the individual to adapt to others is also recognized as a quality of the human soul.

[ 3 ] Of course, the fact that antisocial impulses are so prevalent today is deeply, very deeply rooted in historical development. For since the mid-15th century, human beings have been developing in the age of the conscious soul. Human beings are meant to gradually establish themselves on the foundation of individual consciousness. Consequently, they can only attain a social life in a different way than in earlier eras, when group instincts and group egos played a much greater role than they do today. That is why we see discrepancies everywhere in people’s social lives today. We see strange inconsistencies. Human beings always have something within them, somewhere in the depths of their soul, through which they understand everything that may reveal itself at any given time. But usually, their intellectual understanding—their reason—does not go far enough. This can then give rise to a curious phenomenon—one that should be observed precisely by those who join a spiritual scientific movement—namely, that it is precisely those who have learned too much in a particular direction who lag behind in their development. We are experiencing this to a more than sufficient degree today. We would be able to make much faster progress today in understanding what is socially necessary if the masses were not held back by those who have learned too much from the old ways, who live too much in old concepts, who have adapted themselves too stubbornly to those old concepts. On the whole, one can say that today the broad masses of the proletariat would certainly have an understanding of the most progressive impulses if they were not held back by that leadership which, for decades, has conformed to very specific, rigid concepts and is now unable to move forward. The fact that people are held back by those who have learned too much—specifically, too much of what could be learned in the 19th century—is something of great significance for the psychological understanding of our time. Consequently, people will only be able to come to realize something slowly and gradually, even though it is absolutely essential to do so.

[ 4 ] Where—and this is a question we must ask again and again—have today’s leaders formed their concepts, their ideas, their feelings, and even their social aspirations? They have formed them based on the scientific ideas that played such a major, such a decisive role in the 19th century. We must not delude ourselves about this. Scientific concepts have permeated every sphere of life. But scientific concepts, as they have developed over the last four centuries, are applicable only to the dead, to what is dying, to that which no longer possesses life. It is not a superficial matter, but is deeply rooted in the very nature of the matter, that current conceptions of human nature accept only what is derived from a corpse—what is derived entirely outside the context of life. What scientific conceptions can offer about human beings does not lead to the human being, not to Homo; it leads merely to the homunculus. And that is why, when people today begin to think in social terms, they actually always miss the mark when it comes to reality. They think only of what, in essence, destroys social organization—what breaks it down—and not of what infuses social organization with new, life-giving vitality. Because people have not absorbed any concepts of the living over the past four centuries, they have also failed to learn how to infuse a healthy organism with fruitful life. It is the tragedy of our time that we live solely on concepts of the dead, and that the social organism demands of us that we bring to bear impulses that are directed toward life. But precisely within what is regarded today as human education, we have no concept of the living. Does anyone today ask about the social organism as if it were a living being? They do not.

[ 5 ] I pointed this out to you the other day: Let’s imagine that someone were to ask, “Why do we always have to eat?” We satisfy our hunger by eating, but we achieve nothing other than feeling hungry again afterward; so we might as well just stay hungry! — Wouldn’t it be foolish for anyone to think that way about the natural organism? Yet people actually always think along these foolish lines when it comes to the social organism! This means that this social organism must constantly be shaken and shaken again by upheavals which, if the misunderstanding of social life persists for a particularly long time, inevitably become revolutionary upheavals and even full-scale revolutions. Because in recent centuries people have become entangled in all manner of social illusions, this is why the terrible revolutionary trend has arisen in our time. What can possibly help here? The only solution is to view social life as something truly alive. What, after all, is a revolution? You see, a revolution is nothing other than the sum total of countless necessary small revolutions. Revolutions, in fact, are always taking place. Just as in the natural human organism, which also undergoes very significant revolutions from one period of saturation to the next, so too are there always revolutions in the social organism. Why? Because it cannot be otherwise: through the interplay of individual human abilities—the spiritual aspect of human beings—with economic life, there is a constant tendency for some individuals to gain the upper hand over others. This tendency is simply always present in economic life and in spiritual life. In economic life, for example, there is always a tendency to accumulate capital. If this tendency to accumulate capital were not present in economic life, economic life itself would have to come to a standstill. For it is only through capital that the complex means of production can exist in our advanced age.

[ 6 ] But the output of these means of production can be achieved by nothing other than individual human abilities. As capital accumulates, small hotbeds of revolution naturally arise. And governing must consist of being vigilant about the formation of these small hotbeds of revolution. We must constantly work against the revolution, but not by asking: How can we prevent capital from arising? — but rather: What must happen to capital once it has developed in one place for a certain period of time? — It must be transferred from one individual to another! That is what matters. A way must be found—even for material goods, which are expressed in the means of production—that, as I recently told you, is deemed the most practical for the most mundane good that today’s humanity regards as the most mundane good. What is produced intellectually is, after some time, lost to the producer’s family; it passes into the public domain. Material goods, on the other hand, must be transferred to the social organism the very moment they no longer have any connection to an individual’s capacity, so that they may in turn be put to the best use by other individual capacities. Socialist thinkers today ask entirely the wrong questions with regard to the social organism. Socialist thinkers today ask: How can we prevent private ownership of the means of production, including land? In other words: How can one kill the life of the social organism? We have just seen, in the course of the capitalist economic order, that private capital in the means of production and in land causes great harm. The simplest question then seems to be this: How does one eliminate that which causes harm; how does one prevent it from arising in the first place? But that is a destructive question. A living question is this: What should be done with private capital so that it no longer causes harm? How can it be appropriately separated from the private capitalist and transferred—when he himself no longer produces in the service of the social organism—to another producer? These questions must be posed from a much deeper understanding than present-day humanity even suspects. Humanity today actually lives in its illusions only because it does not draw the real-world consequences of these illusions. All sorts of professors of economics at universities around the world today teach various things according to the formula: “Wash my fur, but don’t get it wet.”—That is the foundation of these teachings, which are only half-heartedly aimed at socialization. The very old antisocial doctrines are now advocated only by a few old fogies. But the fact that these respectable professors teach such things is only possible because they do not draw the necessary conclusions. Lenin and Trotsky are the ones who draw the conclusions from what these professors teach. There is a continuous connection here. And we really ought to rise to a completely different way of thinking about the social organism. We simply must not remain stuck in old ways of thinking, but must move on to new ways of thinking, because the old ways of thinking, if carried out consistently, must lead to the overexploitation of the old social order. And yet people find it so difficult to bring themselves to adopt new ways of thinking. This may not happen until people truly think in terms of the spiritual sciences and, alongside the ideas they acquire through the spiritual sciences, also have teachers—or perhaps, more accurately, disciplinarians—to guide the way they think socially. It will always remain a half-measure, after all, if one merely disseminates social teachings today without imbuing them with the actual spiritual-scientific teachings—which are what make thinking, feeling, and imagining, and above all judgment, as flexible as we need them to be today if we wish to adapt to the great complexity of life that has inevitably descended upon modern humanity.

[ 7 ] Shouldn’t we actually ask: What, then, is this human being who is to be placed within the social organism, this human organism? Can we really hope to have a proper understanding of the social organism if we do not first have a proper understanding of the human being himself? For the human being is, after all, a member of this social organism. Yet, despite all its great advances, natural science has led us away from an understanding of the real human being, not toward it. This is what must be taken into account.

[ 8 ] When you talk to people about this today: “Look, a healthy social organism must consist of three independent members: the spiritual organization, the political and legal organization, and the economic organization,” and when you then point out that the natural human being also consists of three members—the nervous-sensory system, the lung-heart or rhythmic system, and the metabolic system—the clever people come along and say: “There goes that game of analogies again!” But this is not a game of analogies; the point is to train the spirit, on the one hand, to correctly understand the natural human being, so that with a spirit thus trained, one can also correctly grasp the social organism. It is not a matter of drawing conclusions from one to the other, as Schäffle did in the past and Meray is doing now, but rather of making one’s thinking so flexible in relation to the human organism that one can truly understand the social organism in terms of its needs.

[ 9 ] One of the fundamental aspects of our future understanding of the human being will be precisely this: how the human being descends from a spiritual life at birth, how he lives his physical existence between birth and death and leads a social life within society, and then returns to the spiritual world through death. The point here is to truly understand the human being as such in his threefold nature. The modern anatomist, the modern physiologist, has the human being before him; for him, a muscle in the head is the same as a muscle in the arm. He does not divide the human being into his three parts; this modern natural scientist knows nothing of how the human being originates from three sources. He does not ask the right questions, and therefore he does not arrive at the correct answer regarding, for example, what a human being receives from the mother and what from the father. We have spoken about this matter often; today we can once again discuss it from a certain perspective. You know that when a human being lives this ordinary life, he lives in two distinct states of life or consciousness. While awake, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I” interpenetrate one another. During sleep, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed; in the spiritual world are the “I” and the astral body. In the morning, the ego and the astral body reunite with the physical body and the etheric body. Try to visualize this: when a person sleeps, they lie in bed without the ego and without the astral body. Of course, that is not a human being; yet it is still something essential of the human being who lives on the physical Earth. You can very clearly distinguish that which remains of the human being who lives on the physical Earth—and which manifests itself in the physical body and etheric body while he sleeps—from the whole human being. Let us now set aside the whole human being for the moment; let us look at that which lies in bed at night when the I and the astral body are absent, and let us ask about the origin of this human being—who consists of the physical body and the etheric body—who lies in bed at night; let us ask about its immediate origin: Where does this come from? It is, after all, only a part of a human being, but where does it come from? — What lies there in bed, in terms of its constitution and its powers, is not as it is initially formed in the fully developed human being, the adult, but in terms of its constitution and its powers, it comes from the mother and is already present in the mother before any fertilization takes place. That which enters merely through the woman in terms of forces is what then lies fully formed in bed when the human being sleeps. That is not a human being; nor can it ever become a human being, since it comes solely from the mother.

[ 10 ] Classifying human beings into these parts—which are commonly referred to—is not mere idle talk, but points to very real things. When we speak of the physical body and the etheric body, we are referring to what is predisposed in the mother before conception—whatever is predisposed in the mother. When a human being, from spiritual heights—after having lived for a time through the life between death and rebirth—turns once more toward physical life, he senses, as it were, that within a female personality related to him lies the predisposition into which he can pour that which has developed within him since his last life, from the rest of the organism to the head. Human embryonic development, after all, begins at the head. The head is what first develops to a certain degree of perfection in human embryonic development. What influences this formation of the head—which actually originates from the cosmos—is already present in the “I” and in the astral body. And the fact that the “I” and the astral body can coexist with the physical body and the etheric body stems from fertilization. Conception mediates the coexistence of the I and the astral body with the physical body and the etheric body. What is the purpose of conception? Conception is primarily aimed at the human being’s mere metabolic life. It is aimed at giving the human being a new metabolic and respiratory organism, for the forces of the head organism originate from the previous incarnation. Thus, everything that brings the human being—coming from the previous incarnation—into connection with the head organism is owed to the human being’s relationship with the spiritual world. Everything that, so to speak, enters into the human being during embryonic life once fertilization has taken place is owed to the human being’s coexistence with the earthly being.

[ 11 ] There you can see how complex the process is that results in what a human being actually is. In a sense, a human being’s physical members—which also include the internal metabolic system—are given to them from the Earth. What functions within the human head is given to them from the spiritual world. And what constitutes the respiratory and cardiovascular systems lies in between.

[ 12 ] And now you might ask: What, exactly, is it that we can inherit from our father and mother? In which system of the human being do the forces lie through which we can inherit something from our father and mother? — We inherit nothing for our mind from our father and mother, for what functions in our mind is something we bring with us from our previous incarnation. We inherit nothing for our metabolic system, for that is given to us by the Earth only after conception. We inherit only within the lung-heart system; we inherit only in all the forces that are active in breathing and blood circulation—that is where we inherit. Only one member—the middle member of the human being, the respiratory-circulatory member—is the one that owes its origin to both sexes. That is how complex the human being is. He is a threefold being even in terms of his physical organism. He has his head, which he can use only for that which is not earthly; he has his limbs with the metabolic system, which he can use only for that which is earthly; and he has that which lies in respiration and circulation, through the relationship from human to human.

[ 13 ] I can only hint at what leads to a vast, vast field of knowledge of human nature. What I have hinted at may seem like a theory. But for our time, it is not a theory; rather, there is something within people today that feels in the sense of what I have just said. Something is developing in the present that feels within people in this threefold sense. Today, deep within their being, people have complex feelings, even though they are not yet fully aware of them. Through their head, they know themselves as a citizen of an extraterrestrial realm; through their lung-heart system, they know themselves in a relationship from human to human. Something within the human being says: When I encounter another human being, this encounter is a reflection of what has been implanted within me, also from human to human—namely, through father and mother. Through their lung-heart system, human beings feel truly placed among other human beings. Through his metabolic system, a person feels himself to be a part of the earth, as belonging to the earth. These three modes of perception are already present in people today. But the intellect refuses to go along with them. The intellect wants everything to be simple; the intellect wants everything to be reducible to some kind of “monon.” And this is what ails people today. They will cease to be afflicted by this only when the threefold sensibility within—which is truly already present in human beings—is matched by a threefold social organism, when human beings find a reflection of their being in the external world.

[ 14 ] You see, this is the terrible thing that lies in the subconscious of people who belong to the social movement today. For three to four centuries, spiritual life and everything that governs human social coexistence has developed in such a way that this spiritual life has become a mirror of material life. But deep down, there is a longing for external life to be a mirror of inner life. This is what ails humanity today. People would like to shape external life so that the external social organism is a reflection of the human being, whereas today the human being is a reflection of the external world. And people today overlook this; they find it complicated, they find it theoretical. They find it easier to present the human being as a whole. It is, of course, more complicated to have to answer the question, “What is the human being?” by saying: “Look at the representative of humanity in the middle, Lucifer above, and Ahriman below!” All three belong together in the unity of the human being. But the human being is, in fact, threefold, and you cannot understand the human being otherwise.

[ 15 ] This is not a theory, but something that is very, very real in life, something that occurs in human nature. Because human beings begin to perceive themselves and the world in a threefold way, they subconsciously demand a threefold social organism—not merely a unified, monistic state organism that also encompasses economic and political life: a spiritual organization in its own right, a legal, political, or state organization in its own right, and an economic organization in its own right. Only then will human beings find themselves in this external world. And the earthquake-like upheavals of our time stem from the fact that a culmination—a peak—has been reached in terms of the mismatch between the external social organism and the human inner life. While people are essentially striving to perceive the independent threefold structure of the social organism, their leaders—the leaders of the socialists—step forward and say: “Everything will work itself out from economic life if we allow economic life to develop properly; if we just reverse it a little, so that what was previously at the bottom moves to the ‘top,’ and what was at the top moves to the bottom—then the right thing will develop.”

[ 16 ] Nothing meaningful will develop from economic life alone; rather, it will develop only if we acknowledge the independence of economic life on the one hand, and on the other hand, that of political and legal life, security, and spiritual organization as such. If one truly places spiritual life on its own footing, then it must shape its reality from within itself. Otherwise, the chasms between the human classes will always remain. Today, people have no idea how these chasms actually came to be. After all, one can sometimes find oneself face to face with the most justified view in the sense of contemporary culture, and yet fail to realize how what one person—belonging to a particular class—must perceive as entirely justified cannot be understood by another.

[ 17 ] Take, for example—to choose an obvious one—a well-painted landscape, a landscape painted with real artistic skill. The member of the bourgeois class has now acquired certain feelings, certain ideas about what a well-painted landscape should look like. Armed with these feelings and these ideas, he stands before a framed landscape painting and admires it. The proletarian may well be led to admire it as well, because he can gradually be persuaded that admiring such a thing is part of “culture”; after all, many who are not proletarians also know nothing about a landscape painting and admire it precisely because they have been persuaded that this is part of their education. But this even fosters insincerity, for if one does not belong to the class—among those who perform physical labor— and even some are bred who are allowed to engage in physical labor so that they can paint, so that they can figure out how one must paint—one remains true only if one confronts such a landscape in such a way that one says: What’s the point of this? Someone is creating a patch of forest on a canvas with splashes of paint—I see that every day when I walk through the forest, and it’s much more beautiful. You can never make a landscape painting as beautiful as it is out in nature. Why do people who don’t want to look into nature hang a piece of landscape—a piece of landscape that is, after all, only a clumsy imitation of nature—in a gold frame in their room? — That would be the true feeling. And this feeling lies deep in the souls of many people who cannot be trained, for educational reasons, to admire things in a certain way. Certainly, the admiration of a certain class is sincere; but the admiration of the vast majority of people for such a landscape cannot be sincere, because they have not been raised in the same way.

[ 18 ] One must tap into much deeper aspects of emotional life if one wants to understand today what abysses lie between human souls. We will not awaken an appreciation for art—and you can apply this to other areas of life—until, for example, even in painting, people seek to capture not what can be seen every day in nature, but what must be brought down from the spiritual world. Everyone will understand this, and through this detour, something new will emerge. The spiritual must be brought down from the spiritual world by human beings. Trust will arise once again from person to person, because one person must bring down this from the spiritual world, and another person that. It will not be possible for soul to find social connection with soul again in any way other than by bringing things down from the spiritual world.

[ 19 ] So one must, I would say, delve deeper into what is pulsing through our times today than is usually done. Unctuous preachers—who are really just offering a pale imitation of what Catholic pulpit orators do better in their own way—are now going around a lot, talking about how people should “find themselves inwardly,” now that this terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half years has shown how little people are inclined toward a life of inner harmony. Yes, but people cannot be led to find themselves “inwardly” through mere platitudes; they can only find themselves inwardly if they have the will today to truly and radically shift to different habits of thought and feeling. Recently, someone said that one must have experienced poverty in order to develop a sense of social awareness. It is not enough today simply to have observed poverty, to have walked through some neighborhood in a large city and seen how ragged people are, how little they have to eat; that is not enough today. Today, it is enough only to truly know the souls of those who want to work their way up socially. It is not merely necessary today to know poverty, but to know the poor in their souls, in their innermost lives—that is what is necessary today. But one can only achieve this by finding a new path to the human soul, by truly learning to penetrate the innermost essence of the human being. And then one will find that people can no longer be anything unless they find the mirror of their own being in the external social organism.

[ 20 ] One must be able, on the one hand, to lead people to the highest heights of spiritual life and, on the other hand, to truly immerse oneself in economic problems with one’s spirit. One has to say some strange things these days, though. On the one hand, one must say: Take the schools away from the state, take spiritual life away from it, ground spiritual life in itself, let it administer itself—then you will compel this spiritual life to wage the struggle continuously out of its own strength. Then, however, this spiritual life will also be able to relate to the constitutional state and economic life in the proper way of its own accord; for example, spiritual life will—as I have elaborated in my social treatise, which will be completed in the next few days—then spiritual life will also be the proper steward of capital.

[ 21 ] On the other hand: Let economic life stand on its own. When it comes to concrete issues, this is truly not just a catchphrase. If you make economic life self-sufficient—that is, take it out of the hands of the state—then, above all, you must take something very, very concrete away from the state: namely, money, the administration of the currency. You must return the administration of the currency to economic life. In the various regions where people have worked their way up from a barter economy to a monetary economy, they initially managed this with a monetary representative that is a sort of hybrid between a commodity and a mere instruction. Highly learned people argue back and forth about whether money is merely an instruction, whether a banknote is merely an instruction, or ‘whether money is a commodity.’ One can argue about this at length, because money is, in fact, both one thing and the other. It is one thing because it mediates the economic process; in this sense, money is a commodity. It is the other because the state, through its laws, determines the value of the currency in question. But money must be returned entirely to economic life. Then a change will take place—albeit only gradually. For this to happen, precisely what I am now addressing must become an international matter. This will take a long time, because England, the leading trading nation—on which our gold standard actually depends—will not easily relinquish the gold standard. So this will take a long time. But the self-sufficient economic organization—to which the currency, the monetary system, will also be entrusted—will no longer need to insert a commodity like “gold” among the other commodities as a medium of exchange. The economic organization has no need for that. The economic organization will, of course, still have money, but only for the purpose of facilitating the exchange of commodities. For it will become apparent that whatever constitutes the solid, real foundation of economic life will also serve as the monetary basis for money. Gold is money only because it has gradually become a particularly popular commodity among people, because people have agreed to value gold. This may sound amateurish when put that way, but it is far more accurate than what the “non-amateurs”—today’s scholars—say. The value of gold rests solely on people’s tacit agreement regarding this value of gold. Something else could also come to be valued in this way. But with the centralization of the three social members, something that actually has only a nominal value will always come to be valued in this way in economic life. Gold, after all, has in reality only a nominal value. You cannot eat gold. You can be very rich in gold; but if no one gives you anything in exchange for it, you obviously cannot live off the gold. This is based solely on a tacit agreement among people. It is not needed at all in domestic transactions. In international transactions, it is needed only to bring about certain balances that otherwise cannot be achieved because the necessary high level of trust does not exist. But this nominal value attributed to a specific metal will cease to exist once the management of money is handed over to the economic community and the state no longer has a say in the management of money. Then the state will remain within the realm of mere law, based solely on what can be agreed upon between individuals on a democratic basis.

[ 22 ] Now, when certain monetary symbols or money orders are in circulation, the state possesses a certain amount of gold reserves. What will be there then, when truth has taken the place of appearance through the tripartite division? Then everything that serves as backing for the money—which in truth will not belong to the individual, but which the individual will merely work to produce, and which has equal value for all people living within the social organism—will be there: Gold will be replaced by the means of production—that which enables one to produce goods. By setting the means of production in motion—just as only intellectual productions are in motion today—the character of the means of production as the basis of money will gradually be established.

[ 23 ] These matters are very difficult, and one must make very complex economic assumptions—which I do not, of course, expect you to have—if one wishes to prove them scientifically; yet they can indeed be proven scientifically. However, I would rather give you a concrete example of what I mean. You see, I once came across a peculiar form of currency myself—I believe I’ve mentioned it here before. This peculiar form of currency consisted of Goethe’s letters and manuscripts. I met a gentleman—no, several—who were actually quite shrewd as financiers. They began in the 1950s, and throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, they bought Goethe’s letters and manuscripts on the cheap. You didn’t have to pay much for them back then. Now they had them. Then came the time when everything had already been bought up, when—due to circumstances that would take too long to describe—Goethe’s letters and manuscripts became very valuable. That’s when these letters and manuscripts were sold. It was a peculiar form of investment whose value had risen significantly over the course of about thirty to forty years. One of the gentlemen who did this assured me personally that, for a time, no securities on the stock market yielded as much profit as Goethe’s letters. They were the best securities, and they had, in effect, taken on the character of money. You could get a great deal for them. Now think about what that depended on. It depended on the fact that circumstances had arisen that were entirely independent of their original creation. After all, when Goethe wrote his letters, they were perhaps of great emotional value to the recipient. No one bought them. They weren’t money back then. You couldn’t buy bread with them. Mr. von Loeper, who bought Goethe’s letters in the 1850s, was able to purchase a great deal of bread in 1895 with those Goethe letters. They were like good money. The way ordinary money functions within the economic organism is no different from the way it functioned with the Goethe letters. The value of these pieces of paper bearing Goethe’s handwriting was based on a social process, on a social phenomenon, on what had happened in connection with Goethe’s personality from the 1850s to the 1890s. One simply must have a good understanding of the social organism if one wishes to assess these remarkable processes, in which something that, at a given time, need not be worth anything special within the economic process, nevertheless acquires value.

[ 24 ] The Social Democrats’ customary demand for the socialization of the means of production would, of course, lead to the paralysis of people’s intellectual qualities and talents. This is something that is impossible to carry out. But just imagine, for example—and of course one can imagine this in a wide variety of ways—: Anyone who possesses certain talents for any branch of the economy will be able to enter into completely free competition with capital—namely, with saved capital that he raises in the form of loans. Of course, there may be intermediaries involved; I am, so to speak, reducing the process to its simplest form. The individual in question will make certain demands in return for his intellectual contribution, his leadership, and his management. Once a genuine contract is concluded between employer and employee—the contract customary today is merely a sham contract—the employee will realize that his interests are best served when the entrepreneur manages the business well using his own individual abilities, without, however, owning it. And this is precisely possible when the entrepreneur initially sets the terms for his intellectual contribution of his own free will and negotiates them with the workers. If these terms cannot be met, the entrepreneur must simply lower his demands. But the demands must originally be made entirely of his own free will. If the entrepreneur finds no takers, he must, of course, lower his demands. But that is where it must end. He now receives nothing more from the enterprise than the agreed-upon share, which can be increased if his work expands. But it remains interest. Alongside this is the productivity of the means of production themselves—the profit that arises from the enterprise. These are two entirely different things: what one earns through one’s intellectual contribution, and what comes out of the enterprise. For it is quite one thing to work with means of production and quite another to invest one’s saved capital in means of production. Today, no distinction is made between these things. In a healthy social organism, a distinction will be made between them.

[ 25 ] If I invest a certain amount of capital that I have saved myself in a factory, that is something entirely different from using that capital to buy furniture for my room. For when I use the capital to invest in a factory, by having saved that capital myself, I have worked for the social organism. When I use it to buy furniture for my room, I am making the social organism work for me. These things are distinguished in a healthy social organism. They are not distinguished in today’s sick social organism. Of course, I am not saying that no one should buy furniture. But in a healthy social organism, buying furniture will mean something entirely different than it does today. Today it may be exploitation; later, it will mean using home furnishings as a means of production, because one will have nothing from them unless, with their help, one produces something—whatever it may be—for the social organism. The concept of “means of production” will only be placed on a healthy foundation in a healthy social organism.

[ 26 ] There you can see that it is possible to make a clear distinction between what someone receives as interest and what comes from the direct use of the means of production. As long as someone uses the profit from the means of production to expand the business, fine—that’s how it should be. However, the moment something is gained from the means of production that is not used to expand the business, the manager is obligated to transfer what has been gained to someone else who can use it for further production.

[ 27 ] There you have the circulation of capital. There you have the transfer to another individual. Anyone who does not consider themselves capable of transferring their capital to another individual transfers it to a corporation of the intellectual organization, which is not permitted to use it itself, but which in turn transfers it to an individual or a group of people, or to an association. In this way, you bring everything produced by the means of production into the social flow, into a genuine social circulation. That which circulates in this way within the social organism—that which is in a continuous cycle—has lasting value, even though it is constantly changing. But it has lasting value precisely because what is worn out must be replaced. If you look up in economics textbooks today why gold is so well-suited to serve as money, you will find all sorts of admirable qualities of gold; first, that it is universally popular among all people; second, that it is durable, does not wear out, does not oxidize, and so on. This ideal commodity, which circulates as a means of production, possesses all these admirable qualities. The future backing for banknotes—if money is created and managed within the economic organism rather than the state organism—will be the capital goods that do not accumulate as private property; it will be the means of production that can truly generate returns in the economic process.

[ 28 ] My dear friends, it will be the Central European states—and Russia in particular—who will have to swallow the bitter pill of believing this first and foremost. The Western states will not believe in this for the time being, as long as the reprieve lasts; they will continue to believe in gold for now. The Central and Eastern states will have to accept that their now completely derailed currency, their utterly ruined currency, cannot recover in any other way than by taking economic life into their own hands. No matter how many projects for improving the currency in the Central and Eastern European states may emerge—all will be useless and lead nowhere; only the transfer of currency authority from the state to the economy will resolve the currency issue in these Central and Eastern European states. Certainly, as long as the gold standard is maintained, economic organizations in the Central and Eastern European states will have to operate with gold. But that will be nothing more than window dressing. Once trade with the Western states resumes, the gold reserves will have to be available. But true prosperity—the true backing for the currency—must lie in the circulating means of production.

[ 29 ] It is precisely at this very specific point that this threefold division begins to become an international matter. People are so quick to believe that this threefold division, which I keep referring to, is merely a domestic matter. And that is why I argued in the “Appeal” that healthy negotiations between the middle states and the Western states—should they ever take place—can only be based on the middle states electing their delegates independently from the economic body, the legal body, and the spiritual body. After all, it makes no difference to the Western states whom they have to negotiate with; they can say: They are all the same to us; that is not what matters. — But these Central States can only achieve true recovery on their own by establishing a genuine threefold social order. For the time being, the Western nations can still cling to the illusion that they can bypass this threefold social order. But the world will not function any other way than by people embracing this threefold social order in order to live in accordance with the forces of development that are set to manifest themselves in the civilized world over the next twenty to thirty years. It could well be that precisely those countries where things are still going relatively well—such as Switzerland—would take the initiative to adopt such a threefold social order before everything goes haywire. The others, however—the Central and Eastern European countries—should realize even now that they must either continue on their destructive path or move toward this threefold social order. We will discuss this further tomorrow.