PREFACE
TO THE NEW EDITION OF 1920
Anyone approaching the social problems confronting us, with
Utopian ideas, is by that very fact rendered incapable of
understanding these problems. Personal views and feelings
as to the value of particular solutions are likely to lead a
person astray. This would be true even with a perfect
theoretical solution that someone might try to press upon his
fellow men. It is simply because public life can no longer be
affected in such a way. Men today are so constituted that they
could never say, “Here is somebody who understands the
social institutions that are needed. We will take his opinion
and act on it.”
Ideas about social life cannot be brought home to people in
such a fashion. That fact is fully recognized in this book,
already known to a fairly large public. Those who have set it
down as Utopian have missed its aim and intention altogether.
Such judgments have come especially from people who personally
cling to a Utopian form of thought. There are many of that
sort, particularly in the field of economics, and their
prevalence points to an important fact, namely, the remoteness
of people's thoughts from real life. This is a grave matter
because with such a mode of thought one cannot hope to master
the intricacies of the social problem.
Modern man has evolved a spiritual-cultural life that is to a
great degree dependent on state institutions and on economic
forces. While still a child, the human being is brought under
the education of the state. Furthermore, he can be educated
only in the way permitted by the industrial and economic
conditions of his environment.
One
might easily think that this would result in a person's being
well qualified for present-day conditions. One could believe
that the state can arrange education (the essence of the
spiritual-cultural side of public life) in the best interests
of the human community. Further, one might suppose that to
educate people to fill available jobs in their environment was
the best thing that could be done both for them and for
society.
It
devolves upon this book, an unpopular task, to show that the
chaotic condition of our public life comes from the dependence
of the spiritual-cultural life on the state and on industrial
economy, and further, that the setting free of spiritual life
from this dependence is one part of the burning social
question.
This involves attacking wide-spread errors. For a long time
people have thought of State Education as benefiting
human progress, and socialistically-minded people find it hard
to conceive of society not educating the individual to its
service, according to its own standards. It is hard to
recognize that a thing that was all right at an earlier period
of history may later become all wrong. After the Middle Ages it
had been necessary for the state to take over the control
of education from those circles which had had exclusive
possession of it. But to continue this arrangement is a
grave social mistake.
This is the content of the first part of the book. The
spiritual life did mature to freedom within the framework of
the state. But it cannot now rightly enjoy and exercise this
freedom unless it is granted self-government. It must become a
completely independent branch of the body social, with the
educational system under the management of those who are
actually engaged in the teaching. There should be no
interference from the state or industry.
The
objection will be raised that even under such a
self-governing spiritual life things will not be perfect.
But in real life such a thing as perfection is not to be
expected. All one can aim for is the best that is possible.
The
new abilities that children bring with them will really pass
into the life of the community when their care rests entirely
with people who can judge and decide educational questions on
spiritual-cultural grounds alone. From such a system the state
and the economic life can receive the forces they need,
forces they cannot receive when they themselves shape
spiritual life from their own points of view. Thus the
directors of a free spiritual life should also have the
responsibility for such things as law schools, trade schools
and technical colleges.
The
principles expressed in this book are bound to arouse many
prejudices. But basically these come from the unconscious
conviction that people connected with education must
necessarily be impractical and remote from life. People who
think in this way do not see that it is just when educators
cannot arrange their lines of work themselves that they become
impractical. Our anti-social conditions are brought about
because people are turned out into social life without having
been educated to fed socially. They have been brought up and
trained by persons who themselves have been made strangers to
real life by having their work laid down from outside.
This book will also rouse all sorts of questions in Utopian
minds. Artists and other spiritual workers will anxiously ask
whether genius will find itself better off in the free
spiritual life than in the one that the state and the economic
powers are providing at present. They should remember that this
book is not intended to be Utopian; it never lays down a
hard-and-fast theory. It never says this or that must be done
this way or that. It aims to promote forms of social life that,
from their joint working, will lead to desirable conditions.
Anyone judging life from experience rather than prejudices
based on theory will say, “When there is a free spiritual
community that provides its own guidance, anyone who is
creating out of his own genius will have a prospect of his work
being duly appreciated.”
The
“social question” is not something that has just
cropped up, nor can it be solved by any handful of people or a
parliament — and stay solved. It is a part of our recent
civilization and it has come to stay. It will have to be solved
over again for each moment of the world's historical evolution.
This is because man's life has entered on a phase in which
something that starts by being a social institution turns
again and again into something anti-social, and has in turn to
be reconstructed.
A
human or animal body, having been fed and satisfied, passes
again into a state of hunger. Likewise does the body social go
from a state of order again into disorder. There is no
universal remedy for social conditions any more than there is a
food that will permanently satisfy the body. But men can
enter into forms of social community which, through their joint
action will bring man's existence constantly back into
the social path. One of these is the self-governing
spiritual-cultural branch of the body social.
Everything going on at the present time makes two social needs
obvious: free self-administration for the spiritual-cultural
life, and for the economic life, associative labor. The modern
industrial
economy is made up of the production, circulation and
consumption of commodities. These are the processes for
satisfying human wants, and in these processes human beings and
their activities are involved.
Everyone has a part interest in these processes and must share
in them as far as he is able. It is only the individual himself
who can know and feel what he actually needs. Depending on his
insight into the inter-acting life of the whole, he will judge
as to what he himself should accomplish. This was not always
so, nor is it so all over the world even today, but it is
mainly the case among the civilized portion of
mankind.
Economic evolution has kept enlarging its circles. The once
self-contained household economy developed into a town economy,
and this into a state economy. Today we stand before world
economy. While the old does of course linger on, these
sequences are essentially true.
It
is completely useless to aim at organizing the economic forces
into an abstract world community. Private economic
organizations have, to a very large extent, become merged in
state economic organizations. But the state communities
were created by forces other than the purely economic, and the
effort to transform the state communities into economic
communities is what has brought about the social chaos of these
recent times.
Economic life is struggling to take the form its own peculiar
forces give it, independent of state institutions and of
political lines of thought. The only way this form can be
realized is through the growth of Associations that spring up
out of purely economic considerations. These will include
consumers, traders and producers. Their size and scope will be
regulated by the actual conditions of
life. Those too small would show themselves to be too expensive
to operate. Those too large would get beyond the economic grasp
of management.
Practical needs, as they come up, will show each Association
the best way of establishing connections with the others.
People having to move from one place to another will not
be hampered in any way by Associations of this kind. They will
find it quite easy to move from one group to another when their
management is economic and not political. Also, one can
conceive possible arrangements within such an associative
system that would work with the facility of a
money-circulation.
Within the individual Associations a general harmony of
interests can prevail, provided there is practical sense
and technical knowledge. The regulation of the production,
circulation and consumption of goods will not be done by
laws, but by the persons concerned, out of their own direct
insight and interests. The necessary insight will be
developed through people's own share in the life of the
Associations, and the fact that the various interests are
obliged to arrive at a mutual balance by contract, will
guarantee that the goods circulate at their proper relative
values.
This sort of economic combination by agreement is not the same
as that which exists in the modern labor unions. These are
active in the economic field, but they are based on political
models. They are political bodies where people debate rather
than meet to consider the economic aspects of things and agree
on the services to be reciprocally rendered.
In
these Associations there will not be the “wage
earners” sitting, using their power to get the
highest possible wages out of the employers. There will be the
manual workers, cooperating with the spiritual workers who
direct production, and with those interested as consumers. The
mutual aim will be a balance between one form of service and
another, brought about through an adjustment of prices.
Beware of thinking that this can be done by general debate in
parliamentary assemblies. Who would ever be at work if an
endless number of people had to spend their time negotiating
about the work?
Everything will take place by agreement between people and
between Associations, while production continues. The
necessary requirement is that the joint agreement be in
accordance with the insight of the workers and the
interests of the consumers.
Saying this is not describing any Utopia. For there is no
particular way laid down in which this or that question
must be settled. One is only pointing out how people will
settle matters for themselves, once they start working in
forms of community that are in accordance with their special
insights and interests.
Two
things work to bring men together into such communities. One of
them is human nature, which gives men their wants and needs.
The other is a free spiritual life. This will develop the
necessary insight in people. Anyone who thinks
realistically will admit that associative communities of this
kind can spring up at any time. What hinders this development
is the notion of “organizing” industrial and
economic life from outside. The kind of economic
organization discussed here rests on voluntary, free
association, and derives its pattern from the combined common
sense of each individual.
If
the “haves” and the “have-nots” are
together in one organization, it will be found, if no
non-economic forces intervene, that the “haves” are
obliged to render the “have-nots” service for
service.
While in the free spiritual life only those forces inherent in
this life itself will be at work, the only values that count in
an associative economic life will be the economic ones that
grow up under the Associations. The individual's part in
economic life will become clear to him from living and working
along with his economic associates, and the weight he
carries in the economic system will be in exact proportion to
the service he renders within it.
How
those who are unfitted to render service will find their place
in the general economy, is discussed later in this book.
Thus the body social falls into two independent branches, able
to afford each other mutual support owing to the fact that each
has its own administration and management. Between these two
must come a third. This is the true “state” branch
of the body social. Here all those things find a place that
depend on the combined judgment and feelings of every person of
voting age.
In
the free spiritual-cultural life, everyone is active in line
with his special abilities. In the economic, each person fills
the place that falls to him as a result of his connection with
the rest of the associative network. In the political
state-life of rights, each comes into his own as a human being.
He stands on his simple human value. This has nothing to do
with his abilities in the free spiritual life and is
independent, too, of whatever value the associative
economic system may set on the goods he produces.
Hours of labor and working conditions are shown in this book to
be matters for the political rights life, for the state. Here
everyone meets on an equal footing, because the activities and
functions of control are limited to fields in which all men
alike are competent to form an opinion. This is the branch of
the body social where men's rights and duties are adjusted.
The
unity of the body social will come into being out of the
separate, free expansion of its three functions. In the
course of this book it is shown what form the energies of
capital and of the means of production as well as the use of
land can take under the joint action of these three
functions of the social organism.
The
book was first published in April, 1919. Since then I have
presented a series of explanatory articles, now in a separate
volume. [In Elaboration of the Threefold Commonwealth.]
The
ideas in this book have been won from the observation of life.
It is out of the observation of actual life that they ask to be
understood.
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