Steiner's social law: humanity sold first the whole person, then labour power as a commodity, and now moves toward giving only place and time.
The Three Stages of Human Labour in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's evolutionary law of social history, set out in his Basel lecture of 11 December 1918 and published in Freedom, Immortality and Social Life (GA 72). Steiner reads three successive forms in which one person's work passes to another. In the first, visible in Greek antiquity and in later serfdom, the whole human being was transferred, and Plato could still regard slavery as necessary. In the second, the modern order, only labour power leaves the person, carried to market and bought as a commodity in Karl Marx's sense, priced at whatever keeps the worker and the worker's family alive. The third stage, which Steiner saw beginning in his own time, detaches labour from payment altogether: a person gives society place and time, a position within the social whole, and is provided for on separate grounds. The Camphill common purse is one working test of that third form.
The Three Stages of Human Labour is Steiner's answer to the labour question of 1918, offered not as a policy but as a reading of direction. Slavery gave the whole person. Wage work gives a detachable part, sold and priced. What comes next, he argued, cannot be a better price for that part, because the selling itself is what history is dissolving.
In Steiner's Own Words
And this feeling that this is so, that it will be overcome, is expressed in the proletarian's understanding of the Marxist theory of labor power as a commodity and so on, which is, of course, very erroneous and one-sided. But what is true is that first the whole human being, then this part of the human being, human labor power, and now, thirdly, what development is striving for, only something else can pass from one human being to another. Social life will not be abolished, but something else will take its place. Once we talk about this something else, once we understand social reality in such a way that we can talk about this something else, then we will find understanding by having new ideas that are in tune with social life.
What it Means Today
The third stage is easiest to judge where someone has tried it. Karl Koenig, a Viennese paediatrician who left Austria after the Anschluss of 1938, founded the first Camphill community near Aberdeen in 1940 with a small circle of refugees, taking in children with developmental disabilities. The arrangement he built was not a wage. Co-workers lived alongside residents in the houses and drew what they and their families needed from a common purse, while the work itself, farming, weaving, teaching, care, was given rather than sold. The movement now runs communities in more than twenty countries on that inherited structure.
It has also spent decades in argument with tax and employment authorities, because a legal system built for the second stage has no ready category for labour given while livelihood is provided separately. That friction is the interesting part. Steiner's claim was not that payment should be more generous but that payment and work should stop being one transaction, so that what a person contributes is a position and a span of hours rather than a priced quantity of effort. The common purse answers the question of what a household needs. A wage answers what an hour is worth. They are different questions, and Camphill keeps them in different rooms.
Thalira synthesis: the common purse is the third stage rehearsed at village scale, which is why it collides so regularly with minimum-wage law, and the collision is diagnostic rather than accidental.
Where to Read More
- Freedom, Immortality and Social Life, GA 72
- Find Steiner's social writings at SteinerBooks
- Labour power (Wikidata Q3748888), the concept Steiner reframes
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