The 1891 platform of German social democracy that Steiner named as the moment the labour movement traded its human aims for natural-scientific superstition.
The Erfurt Program in Anthroposophy is the 1891 platform of the German Social Democratic Party, read by Rudolf Steiner as the turning point where the modern labour movement went over completely to superstition before natural-scientific thinking. In the Dornach lecture of 31 January 1919, published in Goetheanism as an Impulse for Man's Transformation (GA 188), Steiner contrasts the two aims socialism held before Erfurt, the suppression of the wage system and the elimination of every social and political inequality, with the two that replaced them, collective ownership of the means of production and socialistic production for the community. The older aims still carried something universally human, judgments of instinct and feeling that placed the human being at the centre of social striving. The Erfurt aims apply cause-and-effect nature-concepts to the social organism and so eliminate the human being from social thought. Steiner's threefold social organism answers this loss directly.
When Steiner needed to show his Dornach audience how thinking itself had gone wrong in social life, he pointed to a document: the Erfurt Program, adopted by the German Social Democratic Party in October 1891. Before it, he said, socialist ideals still spoke for the human being. After it, they spoke the language of cause and effect, and the human being disappeared from the movement's own goals.
In Steiner's Own Words
Men who took a more unprejudiced interest in modern life, experienced, one might say, a kind of theoretical surprise in the early nineties of the past century, when the German social democrats, who were the most advanced people in this direction, passed over from their old ideal to that of the so-called “Erfurt Programme” (elaborated in the early nineties at Erfurt, during the Congress of the Social Democratic Party). The old ideal, if I may use this expression for certain propagandistic aims, still contained an unscientific way of thinking, it contained thoughts which had nothing to do with natural science. But the Erfurt Programme led the modern proletarian movement into a superstitious attitude in regard to natural-scientific thought. From that time onwards, the proletarians endeavour to master the whole social question by applying to it scientifically trained thoughts.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not live to see the movement he was describing test his diagnosis, but it did. In November 1959, at an extraordinary party conference in Bad Godesberg, the German Social Democratic Party formally retired the Erfurt inheritance. The Godesberg Program dropped Marxist class analysis as the party's theoretical foundation, gave up collective ownership of the means of production as a defining goal, and grounded itself instead in the basic values of freedom, justice, and solidarity, with the formula of as much competition as possible and as much planning as necessary. Read against the Dornach lecture of 31 January 1919, Godesberg looks like a late admission that the 1891 turn had cost the movement its human centre, and a partial return to the register socialism spoke before Erfurt, where the measure of a programme was the dignity of the person selling his labour, not the mechanics of ownership.
Thalira synthesis: the Erfurt Program marks the moment social feeling stopped speaking for the human being and began imitating the laboratory, and every later correction, Godesberg included, recovers only in values-language what the two pre-Erfurt aims still knew as instinct. The threefold social organism was Steiner's answer to precisely the loss the Erfurt Program made official: an economic life, a rights life, and a spiritual life each ordered by its own law, with the human being restored to the centre of all three.
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