Steiner's name for money once it detaches from goods: an abstraction that actually works in the world, making every concrete purpose interchangeable.
What is Money as Real Abstraction?
Money as Real Abstraction in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for money once it has been cut loose from the goods it once stood for, at which point it performs in economic life exactly what abstracting performs in the life of the soul. Steiner set this out on 15 September 1920 in Stuttgart, opening the study series published as GA 337a, The Threefold Order of the Body Social. He dated the break to the years 1810 to 1815, when the money-market emancipated itself from the goods-market and the bank system became the ruling factor in economic life. An abstraction spreads over every particular case, and so does abstracted money, which is why it becomes a matter of indifference whether a person earns by manufacturing shoes or by manufacturing textbooks. “Money is the actual Real Abstraction,” Steiner said. The bank system is that abstraction built into an institution, and the remedy he named was associative economy.
Money as Real Abstraction names the moment when a coin stops standing for a thing and starts standing for anything at all. Steiner treated this not as a metaphor but as an event with a date, a mechanism, and a consequence: the crisis of 1907, which he traced to the Morgan combine in America, was possible only because money had already gone abstract.
In Steiner's Own Words
How has it come about, that such a thing is possible? It has come about through the emancipation of the money-market from the goods-market. This emancipation dates from about the years 1810 to 1815. It was at this period first, that the earlier, purely economic conditions controlling public life, gave place to a control of public life by the money-market. It was the time when the bank-system first really became the dominant factor in economic life. And for economic situations to be created by transactions solely in the money-market, on the grand scale that was possible by 1907, was something which only came about through money having become what I might call an ‘actual abstraction,’ that spreads through our whole economic life and to all other life as well.
What it Means Today
Fifty years after Stuttgart, a German philosopher reached Steiner's word without reaching it through Steiner. Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899 to 1990) published Geistige und körperliche Arbeit with Suhrkamp in 1970, issued in English in 1978 as Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Its governing concept is Realabstraktion, real abstraction. Sohn-Rethel argued that the abstraction in money is not a thought anybody has. It is carried out bodily, every time two people exchange, and thinking only afterwards finds the finished form lying there and calls it a category. He pushed the case back to the arrival of coined money in the Greek world, where the abstract concepts of Greek philosophy surface alongside the mint.
Steiner had described the same structure in 1920 from the other side. For Sohn-Rethel the act of exchange deforms thinking; for Steiner the abstracting soul and the abstracting market are one gesture showing up in two places, which is why he treated a reform of banking and a training of thinking as a single piece of work rather than two.
Thalira synthesis: the two men agree that money thinks, and part company only over which end of the human being to repair first, which is the whole practical distance between a critique of capital and an associative economy.
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