Steiner's economic test: work that answers a real requirement of life is necessary, work spent on superfluous articles is not, however well it pays.
Necessary and Unnecessary Labour in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's economic criterion for judging work by what it costs the whole community rather than by what it returns to its owner. He stated it on 15 September 1920 in Stuttgart, in the lecture that opens The Threefold Order of the Body Social, Study Series II (GA 337a). Necessary labour answers an actual requirement of life. Unnecessary labour is expended on superfluous articles, and it burdens the body economic even when the returns are excellent: the Paris inventor of the cri-cri noise-maker became a multi-millionaire while every worker in his factories drew consumption out of returns that met no requirement at all. Steiner's companion examples are picture postcards, which send a postman up extra flights of stairs, and the labour spent since 1914 on the means of shooting men dead. The distinction belongs to the economic member of the threefold social organism, where associations of producers, traders and consumers are meant to recognise it without any decree.
Necessary and unnecessary labour is the question Steiner put to economics in place of the question of returns. He asked what a piece of work costs the whole community on the consumption side, not what it earns the person who owns it. Work that meets an actual requirement of life carries the economy. Work poured into articles nobody needs draws on the common pool without adding to it.
In Steiner's Own Words
It was last century, somewhere in the 'seventies: the streets were made downright intolerable by these cri-cris. But the ‘returns’ which the inventor of cri-cris got from them were enormous: he became a multi-millionaire. But he didn't in the least take into account the cost on the consumers' side. For of course, as regards human existence, the manufacture of cri-cris might quite well have been dispensed with. And now, just calculate how many people were employed in these cri-cri factories, who all paid their costs of consumption out of these returns. The consumption, that is, of so and so many cri-cri workers, arose out of unnecessary human labour. These things have their effect in social life. Unnecessary human labour has immense significance in social life.
What it Means Today
The nearest living continuation of this criterion is the work of the anthropologist David Graeber, who published the essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in Strike! magazine in August 2013 and expanded it into Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon and Schuster, 2018) while teaching at the London School of Economics. The essay prompted a YouGov survey of British workers in 2015 in which 37 per cent said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. Graeber's argument runs close to Steiner's: market discipline does not weed out pointless work, because the returns look healthy from the owner's side of the ledger.
They part company on the measuring instrument. Graeber takes the worker's own testimony as evidence, so a job counts as pointless when the person doing it says so. Steiner looks at price instead, at what a population of postmen, printers and noise-maker assemblers withdraws from consumption while producing nothing anybody required. He also refuses the obvious remedy: unnecessary work cannot be forbidden without making the reformer a tyrant, it falls away only once associations produce from an understanding of requirements rather than an estimate of returns. Thalira synthesis: Graeber asks whether the worker believes in the work, Steiner asks what the work does to the price of bread, and Steiner's version is the more uncomfortable one because it convicts work that is interesting, well paid and sincerely enjoyed.
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