The movement to organise economic life through combinations of trades and callings, which Steiner credited with a real instinct and judged a survival of a past epoch.
Syndicalism in Anthroposophy is the labour movement that sought to order economic life through combinations of trades and callings rather than through parties or parliaments, assessed by Rudolf Steiner at the Stuttgart study-evening of 9 June 1920 printed in The Threefold Order of the Body Social, Study Series II (GA 337a). Asked outright what the Threefold idea's attitude to it was, Steiner granted syndicalism two merits. It carried a real consciousness of what could be achieved by linking the various business-callings and branches of business, and it stood in a less slavish position towards the idea of the State than Marxian Socialism did. He withheld everything beyond that. Syndicalism belonged, in his reading, to a past epoch, and projected itself into 1920 only because those who had taken the name had not learned new conceptions. The working distinction for anthroposophical social thought: association between branches of business is the living element, the class bloc and the party label are the residue.
Syndicalism was a living force when Steiner spoke of it, carried by the French Confédération Générale du Travail of 1895 and by the Industrial Workers of the World, founded at Chicago in 1905. Members of the League for the Threefold Social Order wanted to know whether the movement was an ally. Steiner's reply at Stuttgart separated the economic instinct inside syndicalism from the party name wrapped around it.
In Steiner's Own Words
Well, as you know, we have endeavoured, really, to find an attitude towards a great many movements of all kinds. I myself could only say the same about Syndicalism to-day, as I have often said about it before: that in certain circles of syndicalist tendencies one undoubtedly finds a consciousness of how much might be done by means of combining the various business-callings, the various branches of business, and that this, the ‘syndicalist’ idea, might lead in a way to certain fruitful results, at any rate in economic life.
What it Means Today
The question handed to Steiner at Stuttgart, whether economic life can govern itself through the associations of those who do the work, was answered with field evidence seventy years later by Elinor Ostrom. In Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Ostrom set out cases from the alpine pasture association at Törbel in the Valais, the irrigation huertas of Valencia, and Japanese village commons, showing that groups of users repeatedly build durable rules for a shared resource without either state ownership or private enclosure. Her eight design principles, worked out with Vincent Ostrom at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in Bloomington, name what makes such self-governance hold: boundaries the members can see, rules fitted to local conditions, graduated sanctions, and nested layers of decision-making. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences came to her in 2009.
Read back against 1920, Ostrom confirms the half of syndicalism Steiner acknowledged and shows why he set the other half down. Linking branches of business does yield results, as he granted. What Ostrom supplies is the missing structure: the associations that last are nested and polycentric, answerable to the people in one specific trade, never fused into a single bloc speaking for labour as such. Thalira synthesis: Steiner's objection was not that workers should refrain from associating, it was that a movement organised around a name inherited from before 1914 cannot perform the fine-grained, occupation-by-occupation reading of needs and capacities that an association of branches actually asks for.
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