Steiner's term for the false sale of human labour-power as a market good, which his threefold order seeks to end.
Labour as Commodity in Anthroposophy names the arrangement Rudolf Steiner judged unworthy of the human being: the worker carries his labour-power to market and the employer buys it with a wage, as though a living capacity were a thing among things. Steiner held that labour-power can never honestly be priced, because only what human hands have made or moved is a commodity at all.
In Steiner's Own Words
The employee stands today in a quite definite relation to the employer, a relation that, as a human being, he finds unworthy, although in a conscious description he might sometimes put it quite differently. In his soul he experiences it as unworthy because it leads to the sale to the employer of his labour power as a commodity. In the secret depths of his soul he feels that nothing human should be for sale. When a man sells his labour power the whole man is sold.
What it Means Today
Steiner's demand surfaced again, in almost his own words, a quarter-century after Dornach. When the International Labour Organisation met in Philadelphia in May 1944 and adopted the Declaration of Philadelphia, it set down as its first principle that "labour is not a commodity." The phrase was not new even then; it had passed through American antitrust debate and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. What the 1944 text did was lift it into the founding charter of a world body, so that the sale of human work would be measured against a standard the market alone could not set. Steiner had reached the same conclusion from the inside, asking not how labour should be priced but whether it can be priced honestly at all.
Read together, the two readings part company on the remedy. The ILO works through conventions on hours, safety, and a minimum wage, raising the floor under the bargain without dissolving it. Steiner went further: he wanted the worker-employer relation taken out of buying and selling entirely and re-set in the rights-life, where the two parties agree how to share what their work produces rather than fixing a price on the person. Call this the dignity-before-wage reading of labour. The contract would no longer ask what an hour of a human being is worth, a question Steiner thought masked a quiet untruth, but how partners divide a common result. That distinction, between pricing a person and apportioning a yield, is what keeps this 1919 idea sharp for any economy that still meets its workers chiefly at the till.
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