View source for Towards Social Renewal Through Threefolding Society

'''* Book: Towards Social Renewal. Rethinking the Basis of Society. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1919'''

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=Review=

By Bobby Matherne [http://www.doyletics.com/arj/towardss.shtml]:

"In this book first written in 1919, we find Steiner rethinking the basis of society. He advocates freedom at all levels of society, in particular, in the three components or subsystems of society that must operate autonomously: the political, the economic, and the cultural parts. This is the basis of what has been called "The Threefold Society". Steiner makes it clear that unless these three subsystems operate autonomously, all manners of mis-allocation of human and capital resources will occur with their attendant ills. Since no nationwide application of Steiner's suggestions for the three-folding of society has arisen in the intervening century, we can look around at those selfsame ills — they are with us yet today.

Human beings are still mostly treated as hourly slaves where they are paid for the time worked instead of the product created for their work. Those who are not slaves to the time-clock tend to be in the managerial arena where they control the hourly slaves. The political system mostly controls the economy. Many cultural or spiritual aspects are also under the control and funding of the political system. The political system operates coercively which means that anyone defying a man-made law is subject to fine, imprisonment, or execution. It is indeed difficult to find any genuine three-folding or separation of the three subsystems of society on a national basis in any country.

The problem can be directly attributed to the prevalence of the abstract tenets of Roman law as the basis for political systems on a global scale. While claiming to be democracies, most governments are controlled by absolute power of the bureaucracy once elected. Take taxation as one example. Taxation with representation is just as onerous as taxation without representation, often more so. For example, look at the United States: has the amount of taxation been reduced since the Boston Tea Party? Yes, that revolt began the throwing off of the British monarchical rule, but over the past 200 plus years, the burgeoning bureaucratic rule has created more oppressive taxation than that which was overthrown.

But, as Steiner carefully explains, the problem goes deeper than mere taxation. Human-made laws can also turn a free human being into an hourly slave by defining an hourly minimum wage and creating conditions under which one's production is divorced completely from one's hourly activity and one's work becomes a soul-less activity with all its attendant social discontent.

Consider these prefatory paragraphs as a mere taste of the problem to which Steiner offers his three-fold solution. Imagine a three-legged stool. It has three legs because one leg will create instability — some sports seats have been designed with one leg, but no one would imagine replacing every stool with such a device. Two legged-stool do not exist at all, so far as I know. The addition of a second leg adds no advantage. But add a third leg and suddenly the stool can stand alone — no human being leaning against it is necessary for it to remain erect and ready to provide a stable seating accommodation. I have drawn such a three-legged stool in Figure 1 in which each of the limbs or legs of the stool are labeled as Political Life, Economic Life, and Human Culture. Each limb of the stool is independent of the other in the sense that the subsystem of society it represents operates autonomously without interference or coercion from the other two subsystems. The horizontal linking legs are indicative of associations between each of the three subsystems on a volitional basis which supports the other subsystems without reducing in any way the range of intra-subsystem actions which may occur. Steiner describes the three limbs, legs, or subsystems thusly:


[page 41, 42] ''One of these limbs is economic life. I will start with this since it has quite clearly come to dominate all of our lives via technology and modern capitalism. This economic life must be a relatively autonomous limb within the social organism — as the nerve and sense system is relatively autonomous within the human organism. This economic life has to do with production, distribution and consumption of goods and commodities''.

By "relatively autonomous" I interpret Steiner to be averring that the operations within a subsystem such as economic life operates best without interference from outside the subsystem. The units within each subsystem are free to determine the best way for each unit to operate and adjust to changes outside the subsystem by freely making changes within the subsystem — simply put: without control imposed from an outside subsystem. Like the nervous system of our body, the economic subsystem operates best if it remains autonomous within itself. Just as the nervous system is clearly dependent on cooperation with the rhythmic (respiration, circulation etal) system and the limbic (legs, arms, metabolism) system to survive, so also is the economic life subsystem dependent on the two other subsystems of the social system on to survive.

[page 42] ''The second limb or system of the social organism is that of civil rights, of political life as such. This encompasses what one can call the state, particularly in the sense of the legal regulation of human affairs. Whereas economic life is connected with all that we need to draw from nature and from our own production, with goods and their circulation and consumption, this second limb of the social organism can only be concerned with all aspects of the way people interact and relate to each other, which arises from purely human factors. It is essential to recognize this difference between the system of rights and legal regulation on the one hand, which is connected only with relationships between people based on human factors, and the economic system that only has to do with the production, circulation and consumption of goods. We need to develop a real sense for this distinction, so that economic life and the life of rights can really be differentiated in consequence, just as the function of the lungs and their effect on the air we breathe can be differentiated from nerve-sense processes''.

Steiner likens the political life subsystem to the rhythmic system of the human body, which must remain autonomous within itself while adjusting to conditions arising in the other two subsystems it is connected to. The rights subsystem is the crucial concept that Steiner adds to our understanding of how society can best operate. Can we find anywhere in the world in all of history when a legal, political or rights system operated completely independently of the economic life of the society in which it found itself? If we could find such times in history and then were to examine the conditions of the economy, if Steiner is correct in his supposition of the salubriousness of such independence, we could expect to find a flourishing economy during such times, could we not? Think on this point as we examine the third leg of the stool of society.

[page 42] ''The third limb, which must be autonomous in the same way as the other two, is everything in the social organism relating to human culture, to the spirit and the life of the mind. More precisely, since the term 'culture' is somewhat vague, one could say: everything arising from the natural gifts of each human individual, all that must enter into the social organism as a result of such natural, individual talent, whether of a physical or spiritual kind''.

Here we are clearly dealing with both physical and spiritual issues of the individual human being, a human being in relationship to other humans and to every manner of spiritual activity one can imagine. No abstract laws can apply to human beings because the moment one is promulgated the next human being may perform an act which appears to violate the law but which actually supports a deeper law that no one had ever considered before. The most famous example of this behavior was when Christ Jesus openly violated the laws of Moses while giving us examples of a deeper law(1).

[page 43] ''The first system, therefore, is connected with all that we need in order to manage our material relationship with the outer world. The second has to do with what needs to be present in the social organism as a consequence of the human interactions between people. And the third system is connected with all that must arise from each separate human individual, and has to be integrated into the social organism''.

The first system is the one we encounter when we enter a market to buy food and goods to sustain our life — thus the first leg of the stool is named Market. The second system is the one we encounter when we must handle the interactions between human beings — the system of rights, regulating, and governing principles to which one has recourse when an interaction with other human beings is at issue. One seeks then that place of final refuge which was the castle of a king in ancient times, and so we may name the modern equivalent of the king's fortress, the Citadel, as the second leg of the stool of society. The third system encompasses all that can arise from an individual human being — thoughts, ideas as found in art, science, and philosophy, i.e, spiritual activity as found in art, science, worship and recreation, among other things. This third system is called the Altar and provides the third leg of the stool of society."

...


Next we will examine in detail how Steiner describes the economic life as it is mirrored in the processes of the head subsystem. This subsystem, while it is dependent upon the subsystem of respiration and circulation, cannot regulate it from the outside. Neither must the economic life regulate the processes of human labor. He makes the point that treating labor as a commodity is to mix metaphors — that human labor is a different logical type altogether — and that only the results or products of human labor are economic commodities, and thus, rightly understood, only these can come under regulation by the economic life subsystem. To treat human labor as a commodity, such as is done when one gives a worker an hourly wage, is to dehumanize the worker and bring on all sorts of ills and dissatisfaction to the worker and, through workers collectively, to society in general. 

[page 44, 45] ''This whole realm consists of processes which begin with man's relationship to nature, and then involves all that people need to do to transform natural products and prepare them for consumption. All these processes — and only these — compose the economic limb of a healthy social organism, occupying a position within it similar to the head system in the human organism, which determines individual gifts and capacities. Now just as this head system is dependent on the system of heart and lung, so is the economic system dependent on human labour. But the head cannot regulate the breath by itself, and neither should the forces active in economic life regulate the system of human labor''.
       
We partake of economic life in our own interests, which have their basis in our soul and spiritual needs. How these interests can best be served within a social organism, so that the individual can satisfy his needs through this organism in the best possible way, and also take his place within the economy to greatest advantage, is a question that has to be solved practically through the actual organization of the economic system. That can only happen when interests are able to assert themselves in complete freedom, and when the will and possibility arise to do whatever is necessary to fulfil them. But the interests themselves arise outside of the economic sphere. They form as the soul and body of each human being develops. The task of economic life is to establish practical arrangements which can satisfy and fulfil such interests — arrangements which can only have to do with the production and exchange of goods — goods, that is to say, which acquire their value through human needs. A particular commodity acquires its value through the person who uses it. By acquiring value through the consumer's need of it, the commodity occupies a quite different place within the social organism than other things which human beings, as members of this organism, value.

This different place within the social organism is the rights sphere which is best addressed as part of the Citadel subsystem otherwise known as the political arena or limb of the stool of society shown in Figure 1 above.

[page 46, 47] ''We can only properly experience the 'rights' relationship that needs to exist between ourselves and others when we encounter this relationship in a realm quite different from the economic one. In the healthy social organism, therefore, alongside the economic system and independent from it, a separate realm must exist in which the life of rights and legal regulation between people unfolds and is catered for. But this life of rights is something intrinsic to the political realm, to government and the state. If people carry the interests which they serve in the economic realm into the legal structure and government of the state, the laws and rights which come about as a result will only express these economic interests. If, therefore, the constitutional function of the state is ruled by economic factors, it will lose the capacity to regulate the 'rights' relationships between people. Its measures and organizational forms will have to serve the need for commodities, and will thus become divorced from the impulses which should sustain rights and legal regulation''.
       

To be healthy, then, the social organism needs a second system alongside its economic 'limb' — the autonomous political state. In the autonomous economic realm, people would create structures and arrangements which best serve the production and exchange of goods. In the political state, in contrast, structures would arise to regulate the mutual relationships between people and groups of people in a way that accords with their awareness of their political and legal rights.

One might say that we currently have an autonomous political state in the USA, but upon reflection as to the effects of monied lobbyists from the economic subsystem, one would note that the political state is not really autonomous, and neither of the other two legs of the stool is autonomous. Thus the US economy, as we all know, wobbles in the breeze like a one-legged stool, which is exactly what it resembles if you attached the bottom of the three legs of the stool together! The political bureaucracy controls the economy through tax hikes and tax cuts, through mandated regulation and controls, through wage and price controls, through every form of regulation imaginable and some unimaginable -- it has the economic life of the nation under such rigid control that the two legs have become one. Later we shall see how the third leg of the stool, the cultural subsystem, is attached to the political leg.

When the economic life encompasses more than the goods and commodities, but also human labor and legal rights, the two legs of the stool, economic and political, are tied together from the economics side. This is the consequence of wrongly treating human labor as a commodity. Another problem comes about if we treat a piece of land as a commodity. A piece of land is not a commodity because no one person created it — since it is not a commodity, it cannot be bought and sold, only the usage of the land can be(4).

Page [48, 49] When someone buys a piece of land, this must be seen as an exchange of the land against goods — which the sum of money paid represents. But the piece of land itself does not have a commodity-function in economic life. Instead it occupies a place in the social organism by virtue of the right which the purchaser has to its use. This right is something quite different from the relationship which a manufacturer has to the goods he has produced. The very nature of this latter relationship is such that it does not infringe on a quite different realm of relationship between people, such as comes about when one person has the sole right to a piece of land. The owner of this land makes other people — whom he employs to work on it, and who thereby earn their living dependent on himself. Such dependency between people does not arise as a result of producing, exchanging and consuming actual goods.

What is wrong about exchanging rights for goods is the making of rights into a commodity which can be bought and sold. When we have a social system in which this can happen, we know we live within this system as if sitting upon a wobbling, one-legged stool which cannot stand on its own and will frequently collapse, fall over, and have to be re-righted, ad infinitum.

[page 49, 50] ''What is wrong is when, by exchanging rights for goods, the rights themselves are made into a commodity when these rights originate within the economic sphere. This can only be prevented by having structures in the social organism whose sole aim is to create the most efficient circulation of goods; and by having other, different structures which regulate the rights, inherent in the process of exchange, of the producers, traders and purchasers. Such rights are no different from any other rights which must exist between people independently of all exchange of commodities. If I injure or help a fellow human being through the sale of goods, this belongs in the same sphere of social interaction as any other kind of help or injury which may, unrelated to an exchange of goods, occur as the result of my action or inaction''.

Look back at the stool in Figure 1. Notice that even though each leg stands on its own, there are braces connecting each of the three legs with the other two legs. In the threefold society, these braces serve to ensure that any of the two legs remain autonomous and equally separated from the other two legs. Only in this way can we be sure that one branch does not interfere with the other two.

[page 50, 51] ''The legislative and rights basis for their activity will be provided by the rights administration sphere. If such associations can realize their economic interests through the representative and administrative channels of economic organization, they will not feel the need to spill over into the legislative or administrative management of the state (as we have seen happen in the Farmer's Union, the Industrialists' lobby, and forms of economically orientated social democracy), in order to try to gain there what they cannot gain in the purely economic realm. And when the legislative state ceases to have its finger in any economic pie, then it will create structures which arise only from the rights-awareness of the people involved in it. Even when, as will naturally happen, representatives of the rights sphere are also active in economic life, the clear division between these two spheres will prevent economic factors having any influence on the regulation of people's legal rights. It is this influence which so undermines the health of the social organism at present: the state itself administers branches of the economy, and economists draw up laws to safeguard their own interests''.

At this point, it will occur to anyone even vaguely familiar with the facts of life in the nascent twenty-first century that keeping the three legs of the stool of society separate is a practical impossibility. Certainly time has proven that Steiner was unable to convince any government to even attempt three-folding or separating its economic, political, and cultural spheres of life. How can we expect any success a mere hundred years later?"

(http://www.doyletics.com/arj/towardss.shtml)

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