Surplus Value in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 3 min read
Surplus Value n.

Surplus value is Marx's name for income withdrawn from physical labour; Steiner showed it is the economic room in which all spiritual production lives.

What is Surplus Value in Anthroposophy?

Surplus Value in Anthroposophy is the Marxist concept (German: Mehrwert) that Rudolf Steiner examined and dissolved in his seventh lecture at Stuttgart on 15 February 1921, published as How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order? (GA 338). Karl Marx had defined surplus value as the portion of a worker's product withdrawn from him and consumed by someone who does no physical labour, the figure Marx illustrated with the Indian bookkeeper. Steiner accepted the economic description and rejected the moral verdict attached to it. Purely economically, he argued, the schoolteacher, the doctor, the researcher and even the pensioner cutting coupons all draw their maintenance the same way, and the tax burden performs the identical function. His conclusion: surplus value carries no reasonable meaning inside economics alone, and only a free spiritual life can decide whether it is spent productively or idled away.

Surplus value entered social debate as an accusation: someone eats what someone else made. Steiner took the accusation into pure economics and found it would not stay there. The teacher who trains skilled cobblers goes on producing boots long after his death. The rentier who founds a research institute produces more than the one who plays whist. Economics cannot tell those two apart; only a free spiritual life can.

In Steiner's Own Words

Rather, it is a matter of focusing attention on the fact that such resting points are necessary for switching, for turnover in economic life. For there is an added value that corresponds exactly to all of Karl Marx's definitions of added value, and which, in all its functions, corresponds to the functions of Marx's added value, insofar as one thinks only economically: that is the tax burden. In terms of its nature and function, the tax is exactly the same as Karl Marx's surplus value. And the various socialist governments have not exactly proved, where they have appeared, that they have become particularly combative against surplus value in the form of tax payments! But it is precisely in such things that the absurdity of theories is revealed.

Rudolf Steiner, How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order? (GA 338, Stuttgart, 15 February 1921)

What it Means Today

Mariana Mazzucato reopened Steiner's exact question in The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018), written as she was founding the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in London. Her subject is the production boundary, the line national accounts draw between activity counted as making value and activity that merely moves it. That line has never held still. The Physiocrats put farming inside it and all else outside; Adam Smith, in the second book of The Wealth of Nations, put the menial servant, the lawyer and the churchman outside it; later accounting brought financial services inside. Her charge is that once an activity sits inside the boundary, rent extraction can present itself as value creation and no ledger can audit the claim.

Steiner reached that boundary in 1921 and refused to let economics own the verdict. The Indian bookkeeper, the schoolteacher and the coupon-cutter are economically indistinguishable, each a switching point through which other people's product passes, and the tax collector is the largest such point in any nation. Thalira synthesis: where Mazzucato asks the accounts to redraw the boundary honestly, Steiner asks them to admit they have no authority to draw it, and hands the judgement to a free spiritual life that no ledger can invoice. A redrawn boundary yields better statistics; a free spiritual life yields the skilled teacher and the founded institute.

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