Steiner's method of running economic life through associations where producers, traders and consumers meet to set fair prices by agreement rather than by the market.
Associative economics is Rudolf Steiner's proposal that the economy be guided by associations: standing circles in which the people of one trade, together with the merchants who move its goods and the consumers who use them, read the actual flow of production and agree what each thing should cost. The aim is a price that lets a maker keep going, reached by conscious negotiation instead of by impersonal supply and demand.
In Steiner's Own Words
The remodeling of the market, which to-day operates in this way, will follow as soon as a real principle of Association finds a place in our social life. Then it will no longer be the impersonal supply and demand having nothing to do with the human being, which will determine whether a commodity shall be produced or not. Then, from those Associations, by the will of those working in them, other persons will be brought in, whose business it will be to find out the relation between the value of a manufactured commodity and its price.
What it Means Today
The association is not a board that commands production. Steiner is careful that it never tells a maker what to make; it only watches the moving picture of goods and reads the signals price gives off. When a product grows dear, he notes, that shows too few hands are working at it; when it grows cheap, too many. People drawn from the producing circles, together with traders and consumers, study those movements and shift effort accordingly, so that the price settles near the value the community actually places on the thing. This is the practical companion to the just price, and it is why associative economics sits within economic life rather than the rights sphere.
A living instance stands in Wilton, New Hampshire. In 1986 Trauger Groh, who had farmed at the biodynamic Buschberghof in Germany, joined Lincoln Geiger and Anthony Graham to begin the Temple-Wilton Community Farm, the oldest continuously running community-supported agriculture farm in the United States. Rather than price each vegetable, the farmers present an annual budget and the member households pledge freely to meet it, so that the cost of the food and the cost of running the land are agreed face to face. That covenant between growers and eaters is Steiner's association working in miniature: a price reached by people who know one another, not handed down by a distant market.
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