GA 337: Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice

Themes and Structure

The evening of 15 September 1920 opens with a target: the belief that economic phases follow one another the way chemical reactions do, so that a boom must produce a slump as fire follows a struck match. Steiner takes the crisis of 1907 as his test case. The economists of the day read it backwards from the favourable year that preceded it. He reads it instead as a piece of deliberate action, tracing it to an American financial combine that quietly bought up stock traded on European exchanges, drew European houses into forward purchases, and then drove the price up so that the obligation to deliver drained the European money market. The bank rate climbing in London and Berlin was the symptom, not the cause. The cause was a decision taken by a small number of named people.

From that case he draws the volume's central instrument: the difference between a fact and a theory. Spiritual science, on his account, is not valuable here because it supplies occult information about markets. It is valuable because it trains a person to look at what actually happened rather than at a scheme that explains what must have happened. He is unusually sharp about the alternative, calling the deduction of social life from a single economic form a product of the study table.

The second theme follows from the first. Why was such an operation possible in 1907 and not a century and a half earlier? Steiner points to the separation of the money market from the goods market, which he dates to roughly 1810 to 1815, when banking became the governing factor in economic life. Once money detaches from the specific thing produced, it behaves like a general principle: applicable to anything, indifferent to what it is applied to. He gives the Budapest barber who cared about the haircut rather than the fee as the vanishing type, and states the result plainly.

Money is the actual Real Abstraction, just as general principles are abstract; and, like them, it can be applied to every sort of thing.Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart, 15 September 1920

Third comes the theme that gives the evening its practical edge: consumption. Conventional economics, Steiner argues, examines only the returns side of an enterprise and lets consumption look after itself. Yet what people consume works back on their moral and psychic condition, in the opposite direction from production, where disposition is the cause rather than the effect. This is the setting for his treatment of unnecessary labour. His example is the cri-cri, a strip of steel in a metal case that made an excruciating noise, sold in enormous numbers in the Paris of the 1870s and made its inventor rich. He adds the annual flood of unsold poetry volumes, borrowing a remark from Lichtenberg about how much literature the happiness of mankind actually requires. The labour poured into such things is real labour, paid out of real returns, and it is subtracted from the work a society needs. Steiner connects unnecessary work to human suffering directly, and treats the connection as something a purely returns-based calculation cannot see.

Fourth, and woven through the rest, is the question of statistics. Insurance tables predict how many twenty year olds will be alive at fifty, and the numbers hold. Suicide figures hold too, over a wide enough area and a long enough span. Steiner refuses the inference that regularity proves compulsion. Laws of that kind describe an aggregate; they say nothing about whether the individual acts freely. He goes further with a hard formulation: when a person's behaviour becomes as calculable as a dog's response to a piece of meat, this reveals not a law of nature but a lowered condition of soul. Predictability in social life is a measurement of what people have become, not a limit on what they could choose.

The evening closes with his positive proposal, the associations. If economic life is going to depend on human will, the question is whether it depends on it honestly or dishonestly. Associations of producers, traders, and consumers make the dependence honest, because transactions then run between living people who can see collectively what is needed, rather than between balance sheets responding to a conjuncture. He is careful to add that this needs no government regulation, which would only produce red tape, but the practical knowledge of those actually working in each branch.

The evening of 9 June 1920 turns to the movement's own difficulties. Steiner declines to give a formal lecture, opens the floor, and takes up the question put to him: how should the threefold idea be propagated? His answer begins with the record. Plans had failed, the wider campaign had not reached the souls it needed to reach, and the movement had concentrated on Der Kommende Tag as a substitute he calls unsatisfying. Nothing can be accomplished by small measures. What matters is that a sufficient number of people genuinely understand the threefold idea, and understanding is exactly what the propaganda had failed to produce.

Two further strands belong to this evening. On syndicalism, Steiner grants what he thinks is sound in it, that combining the various branches of business could yield real economic results, and that it is less deferential to the state than Marxian socialism. He then sets it aside as belonging to a phase already past, along with the habit of announcing oneself by a party name. On moral exhortation, he is blunter still. Advising people in different social positions merely to stop looking askance at one another savours, in his phrase, of moralic acid. The urgent thing is not improved attitudes but an understanding reached above and beyond class, from which different arrangements can actually be made. Spengler's Decline of the West stands in the background of both evenings as the alternative outcome: a barbarism that arrives unless something is actively willed against it.