Class consciousness, for Steiner, is the proletarian's awakened sense of his place in the economic order, a mask worn over the deeper question of human dignity.
Class Consciousness in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reinterpretation of the Marxist watchword: the awareness by which the modern worker knows his own placement in the social structure, employee set against employer, and knows nothing more of himself than that. Steiner set this out in the lecture cycle published as The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge (GA 336), speaking at Basel on 13 February 1919, three months after the collapse of the old European order. He had taught at the Berlin Workers' Education School from 1899 to 1904 and drew the description from those years rather than from theory. His claim is that class consciousness is a mask. Behind the word stands an emerging consciousness of human dignity, the question of what a person is within the whole of humanity, put by people whose work at the machine gave them nothing personal to hold. Read today, it reframes labour unrest as a spiritual hunger wearing economic clothing.
Class consciousness is the name the modern labour movement gave to the worker's awareness of his own class position. Steiner accepted the observation and rejected the explanation. What the proletarian had actually woken to, he said, was not his wage bracket but himself: a person offered no living spiritual content by the culture around him, asking what a human being is worth.
In Steiner's Own Words
And so we are confronted with something peculiar. The modern proletarian calls it class consciousness. But behind this class consciousness stands the emerging consciousness of human dignity in general, the question: What am I as a human being in the context of the whole of humanity? Not the machine, not capitalism has brought this about; they were only the cause of this most modern impulse of human life coming to light precisely in those who have been driven by the necessities of life into modern technology and modern materialistic economic life. We must not overlook the fact that the class-conscious proletariat is actually the truly human-conscious part of the modern world.
What it Means Today
The sharpest modern confirmation of what Steiner described came from someone who tested it with her body. Simone Weil, a philosophy teacher in the French lycée system, took leave in December 1934 and hired herself out as a machine operator, first at the Alsthom electrical works in Paris, later at Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt, staying on the line until August 1935. She kept a factory journal throughout. What she recorded was not chiefly a complaint about pay. It was the sensation of ceasing to count: thinking suppressed by the rhythm of the piece rate, and a humiliation so complete that she wrote to friends of carrying the brand of slavery afterwards. Those notebooks were collected after her death as La Condition ouvrière (Gallimard, 1951), and the argument returns in L'Enracinement, written in London in 1943 and published in 1949, where she lists honour and dignity among the needs of the soul beside food and warmth, and treats their starvation as an injury rather than a sentiment.
Thalira synthesis: Weil arrived by descent at the finding Steiner reached by observation in 1919, that the labour question is a question about spirit conducted in the vocabulary of wages, which is why settlements that raise the wage while leaving spiritual life administered by the state and the economy keep failing to settle anything.
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