Steiner's shift from asking whether class struggle is necessary to asking how it is ended, by separating the spiritual, legal, and economic spheres.
The Overcoming of Class Struggle in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's answer to the third of the three Marxist doctrines he examined in his Bern lecture of 17 March 1919, published in The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization (GA 329). The doctrine holds that modern history is not shared work arising from common purpose but a contest between groups, one of which holds the advantage. Steiner accepted that description as accurate for the capitalist centuries. What he refused was the conclusion that the contest must be permanent. He argued the proletarian movement had already passed its critical stage, so the live question was no longer whether class struggles were necessary but how they were to be ended. His answer was structural rather than moral: dissolve the fusion by which the modern state had absorbed spiritual life, legal life, and economic life into one apparatus, since a single apparatus can only be captured, never shared.
The overcoming of class struggle is the point where Steiner stopped describing the social question and started prescribing. He had granted Marx the diagnosis. What he would not grant was that the remedy lay in one class winning. The struggle ends, in his account, when the three spheres of social life stop being run from a single centre, and each is governed on its own terms.
In Steiner's Own Words
And the third question is: how can what has developed as class struggle continue to develop in other forms? The proletarian has felt very well that what must happen in life can only develop in this mutual struggle. But he perceives the struggles that have taken place in the course of modern history as those that must be overcome. And so the question of the necessity of class struggles will now, at the present stage of development, be transformed into the question: How do we overcome class struggles?
What it Means Today
Steiner's question found its most disciplined modern test in the Basque town of Mondragón. A young priest, José María Arizmendiarrieta, was posted there in 1941 to a town still raw from the Spanish Civil War, and instead of preaching reconciliation between the sides he opened a technical school. Five of his graduates founded the cooperative ULGOR in 1956, making paraffin stoves. A cooperative bank, Caja Laboral Popular, followed in 1959. Workers owned the firms, elected the governing councils, and capped the pay ratio between the lowest and highest paid. The design was not to win the contest between owners and workers but to remove the seam along which that contest runs.
The results carry Steiner's own warning inside them. In the same Bern lecture he noted the appeal of common ownership and doubted it, because a cooperative still trades inside an economic sphere organised by conflict and still borrows the old state's legal framework. In October 2013 Fagor Electrodomésticos, Mondragón's flagship appliance cooperative and direct descendant of ULGOR, filed for creditor protection and then bankruptcy, the largest collapse in the group's history. Worker ownership had changed who held the shares. It had not changed the terms on which the market judged the firm.
Thalira synthesis: Mondragón suggests ownership is the wrong lever, and that Steiner was pointing one layer further down, at the fusion of legal right with economic activity, which no redistribution of shares can undo.
Where to Read More
- The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization, GA 329
- Find Steiner's social writings at SteinerBooks
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Divine Aura: Unlocking the Science of the Halo