Twenty Articles From
The Newspaper:
The Threefold Social Order
Marxism and the Threefold Social Order
It
will be impossible to free ourselves
from the snares of social confusion in which Europe is caught if particular
social demands continue to be advocated with the lack of clarity that
currently distorts them. Such a demand, one that exists in wide circles,
is expressed by Friedrich Engels in his book
The Evolution of Socialism from Utopia to Science:
“The management of goods and control of
the means of production takes the place of the governing of persons.”
The view in which this sentence originates forms the creed of many leaders
of the proletariat and the mass of the working classes themselves. From
a certain perspective, this is correct. The human relationships that
gave rise to the modern national state have formed administrative bodies
that regulated not only things and modes of production, but also the
human beings engaged in them. The management of things and modes of
production constitutes economics. In modern times, the economic life
has assumed forms such that it has become imperative that its administration
no longer govern persons. Marx and Engels perceived this. They directed
their attention to the way in which capital and labor power work within
the economic cycle. They felt that modern humanity was striving to outgrow
the form these workings had assumed, for it is a form in which capital
has become a means of exerting power over human labor. Capital not only
serves as a means for the management of things and the control of production;
it lays down the guidelines for the governing of human beings. Thus
Marx and Engels concluded that this governance of persons must be removed
from the cycle of economic processes. They were right: modern life does
not permit people to be regarded merely as appendages of things and
processes of production, or to be managed as part of their management.
However,
Marx and Engels believed that the matter could be settled simply by
eliminating governance of persons from the economic process and allowing
the new, purified economic management, having disentangled itself from
the state, to carry on. They did not see that in the old governing there
resided something that regulated human relations — relations that
cannot remain unregulated and that also do not regulate themselves when
they no longer are regulated by the demands of economic life in
the old fashion. Neither did they see that within capital was the source
of the forces that managed goods and controlled branches of production.
It is by way of capital that the human spirit directs economic life.
Yet in managing goods and controlling branches of production one still
does nothing to nurture the human spirit, which is created ever anew,
and must continually bring new impulses to the economy if economic life
is not to dry up and degenerate completely.
What Marx
and Engels saw was right — the control of the economy must contain
nothing that implies rule over persons themselves, and that the capital
that serves the economy must never rule the human spirit directing its
course. However, the fatal flaw was that Marx and Engels believed both
the human relations previously governed and the direction of the economy
by the human spirit would still be able to go on of themselves when
they no longer proceeded from the administration of the economy.
The purification
of economic life — its restriction to the management of goods
and control of the processes of production — is possible only
if there exists besides this economic life something that replaces the
previous form of administratration and something else again that
makes the human spirit the actual controller of the economy. This demand
is met by the idea of the threefold social order. The administration
of the spiritual and cultural life, placed on its own footing, will
supply the economic life with the human spiritual impulses that can
fructify it ever and again, so long as this administration keeps within
its own province and controls only goods and lines of production. The
sphere of rights, separated from the cultural and economic systems of
the social organism, will govern human relations to the extent that
democracy allows one mature human being to govern another, while the
power that one man gets over another through force of greater individual
abilities or through economic means will have no say whatever in this
governance.
Marx and
Engels were right to demand a new economic order — right, but
one-sided. They did not perceive that economic life can only become
free when a free sphere of rights and free cultivation of the spirit
are allowed to arise along-side it. The forms future economic life must
assume can be seen only by those who are clear in their minds that the
capitalist-economic orientation must give way to a distinctly spiritual
one, and that the governance of human relations through economic power
gives way to one that is distinctly human. The demand for an economic
life that controls only goods and production can never be fulfilled
if advocated only by itself. Anyone who persists in such advocacy is
claiming to be able to create an economic life that has cast off what
was until now a necessity of its existence, yet is nevertheless supposed
to continue to exist.
Living
in quite different circumstances (but out of a profound experience of
life) Goethe wrote two thoughts that are fully applicable to many modern
social demands. The first is: “An inadequate truth works for some
time; then, instead of complete enlightenment, suddenly a dazzling falsity
steps in. The world is satisfied and centuries are duped.” The
second is: “Generalizations and enormous arrogance are ever paving
the way to horrible disasters.” Indeed, Marxism untutored by recent
events is an “inadequate truth” that nevertheless works on
in the proletarian world view. Since the catastrophe of the Great War, in
the face of the true demands of the times, it has become a “dazzling
falsity” that must be prevented from “duping centuries.”
The attempt to prevent it will find favor with anyone who perceives what
disaster the proletarian classes are rushing into with their
“inadequate truth.” This “inadequate truth” has
indeed yielded “generalizations” whose supporters show no
small amount of arrogance in rejecting as utopian everything that
attempts to replace their utopian generalizations with realities of
life.
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