Capital, for Steiner, is human ability piled up in the means of production, neither enemy nor master, but a working power that must be guided by competence.
The Nature of Capital in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of capital as organised spirit: the means of production read as crystallised human ability rather than as the natural enemy of labour. In The Social Question as a Question of Consciousness (GA 189, 1919), Steiner argues that capital piles up wherever individual capacities direct production, that this accumulation is a healthy by-product of social life and cannot be abolished without killing the economy, and that the question is therefore not whether capital forms but who guides it. His answer is that capital is rightly steered by ability and that, once it exceeds what a person needs, it should pass out of private hands toward the rights sphere and the free spiritual life. The contemporary application is anthroposophical associative banking, where deposits are guided to enterprises by competence rather than by yield.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the course of the economic life capital will always be accumulated. If just left there it will simply pile up to an unlimited extent. Capital piled up through the capacities of human individuals cannot be left in the economic sphere, it must be transferred to the sphere of rights. For the moment man acquires more than he needs of what is produced by him alone or in association with his fellows, the moment capital is accumulated, what he possesses is no more a commodity than is human labour. Possession is a right.
What it Means Today
Steiner refused the slogan of his day that capital is a scourge to be abolished. Strip capital away, he held, and the social organism stops breathing, because every machine, every factory, every store of means is the deposited work of particular human capacities. The trouble is not that capital exists but that, once it forms, it tends to detach from the ability that made it and to govern through ownership alone. His remedy is unusual: let capital be built, let the one who built it administer it for a time, then let it move on, since a possession is a right and not a commodity, and rights belong to a different sphere than the marketplace.
That principle found an institution in 1974, when the lawyer Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff and his colleagues founded the GLS Bank in Bochum, the first anthroposophical social bank in Germany. Its name, Gemeinschaftsbank fur Leihen und Schenken, means a community bank for lending and giving, and it treats deposits the way Steiner treated capital: as ability seeking ability. Savers see which farms, free schools and care homes their money funds; loan officers weigh the competence and intention of the borrower above the return. Capital here is steered by judgement rather than left to compound blindly, which is exactly the transfer of stewardship Steiner described. What an investor practising this does, concretely, is ask not only what a sum will yield but which human capacity it will set free.
Where to Read More