Steiner's 1919 Betriebsraete: factory-born organs of economic self-administration meant to replace the wage relationship with associative partnership, not to parliamentarize the workplace.
Works councils, in Rudolf Steiner's social writings of 1919, are Betriebsraete understood as living organs of economic self-administration that grow from the enterprises themselves. Steiner championed them as the practical seed of associative economic life, where labor manager and worker meet as partners under right rather than as buyer and seller of wage-labor. He set this conception against the government's draft law, which only carried parliamentary forms into the factory.
In Steiner's Own Words
In economic life, only that which is produced and created by labor has any significance; it must be paid for. But there must be an entrepreneur who pays a worker for his labor. How the labor manager and the worker relate to each other must be determined on a completely different basis, namely that of law. In the economic sphere, when true right exists, the laborer and the labor manager can only be partners who distribute the proceeds of the labor among themselves in a just manner. In the future, there must be no more payment for labor, that is to say, the wage relationship must be eliminated.
What it Means Today
Steiner spoke in Stuttgart in May 1919, weeks before the Weimar government drafted its works-council bill. That bill became the Betriebsraetegesetz of 4 February 1920, the first national law in Germany to give elected councils a legal foothold inside the firm. Steiner had already named the flaw: the law carried the parliamentary principle into the factory and left the categories of employer and employee, and with them the wage relationship, untouched. He wanted something the law could not give, councils as organs of an economic life that administers itself, where manager and worker share the proceeds of common work through a contract of goods rather than a contract of employment.
The actual history followed the path Steiner predicted, not the one he hoped for. The 1920 act was superseded by the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, the Works Constitution Act of 1952, reformed substantially in 1972 and 2001, and paired with the Mitbestimmung or codetermination system, including the Coal and Steel Codetermination Act of 1951 that seats worker representatives on supervisory boards. These institutions negotiate within the wage relationship rather than dissolving it. They democratize the company, the very phrase Steiner used to mark what he considered a half measure.
Thalira synthesis: the works council, in Steiner's reading, is the throat center of the social body, the organ through which the silent labor of the limbs is meant to find a just voice, and the German codetermination story shows how readily a voice can be granted while the underlying servitude of bought labor remains intact.
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