The universal medium of exchange that, for Steiner, the economic body should administer on its own basis rather than the state stamping its value.
Money in the economy, in Rudolf Steiner's social thinking, is the great medium of exchange that lets goods wait until someone needs them. A carpenter no longer barters chairs for bread directly; he takes money and buys what he wants later. Steiner held that money behaves soundly only when the economic sphere itself administers it, freed from political control, so that the measure between wages and prices stays honest.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now it appears as if money were only there as a medium for the exchange of commodities. Thus many national economists hold the view that money is a commodity. Paper money is looked upon as a substitute for this commodity. For the commodity on which it depends is really gold and States have been obliged to introduce the gold-standard, having had today to follow the leading economic State, England, because it chose gold as its medium of adjustment and its sole standard of value. Thus the medium of exchange is there and the carpenter has no need to take his chairs to market, but sells his wares to those who want them, and gets money with which he can then, on his part, buy his vegetables and cheese.
What it Means Today
Steiner's stubborn point was that money is not neutral plumbing. When a state stamps a value on the coin and then assesses it through taxation, he argued, the link between wages and prices buckles: pay rises, the currency slips, and the worker buys no more bread than before. His remedy was to hand the administration of money back to the economic body, where its worth could find a real measure against goods. Three years later, in the 1922 World Economy course, he sharpened this into a reading of money as the bookkeeping of the whole economic process, distinguishing purchase money, loan money, and gift money by the work each kind performs.
That distinction is not merely theoretical. When Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff and Gisela Reuther founded GLS Bank in Bochum in 1974, they named it the Gemeinschaftsbank fur Leihen und Schenken, the community bank for lending and giving, encoding loan-money and gift-money directly into the institution. The bank publishes who borrows its deposits and channels roughly twelve percent of new lending toward cultural and ecological initiatives, treating savings as a deliberate social gesture rather than an anonymous yield. It is one concrete answer to the carpenter's question Steiner posed in 1919: what, after the gold has gone, is money actually for?
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