Twenty Articles From
The Newspaper:
The Threefold Social Order
Socialist Stumbling-Blocks
Ideas
which take account of the realities
that gave rise to the demands now agitating humanity, and are in harmony
with the conditions under which it is possible for men to live together
culturally, politically and economically — such ideas are drowned
out by the clamor of others that are remote from life in both regards.
People who long for something other than the traditional forms of life,
or who have in fact already been torn out of these older forms by events,
are people who until now have stood at such a remove from the forces
that brought these circumstances to the surface of history that they lack
any insight whatever into how they act and what they signify. Within the
mass of the working classes, there is a dull consciousness that demands a
change in their form of life, which they see as a result of capitalist
forces dominating the economy. Yet the manner of their participation
in economic life hitherto has not made them aware of the way these forces
operate. Thus they are unable to conceive any fruitful way of transforming
these forces. The intellectual leaders and agitators of the proletarian
masses are blinded by utopian ideas and theories which derive from a
social science still based on the old economic concepts that so urgently
need changing. These agitators have not even the faintest idea that
their notions about politics, economics and cultural life are in
no way different from the “bourgeois notions” they are fighting,
and that at bot-tom all they are striving for is to see the old notions
realized by a new group. However, nothing really new ever comes about
when different people do the same old thing in a slightly different
way.
One of
these “old ideas” is the attempt to control economics
by political and legal means. It is an “old idea” because
it has brought a large part of humanity into an untenable position,
as the catastrophe of World War I has shown. The new idea that must
replace this old one is to liberate the administration of the economy
from any kind of interference by political or national power, and to
conduct the management of the economy along lines that are based entirely
on economic principles and economic interests.
But surely
it is impossible to imagine a form of economic life that is not managed
by businessmen using political and legal means! Such is the objection
raised by those who believe the proponents of the threefold social order
have no insight into what is socially self-evident. But actually those
who make this objection refuse to see what a far-reaching transformation
it would bring about in economic life if the political and legal views
and institutions at work within the economy were not ruled from within
the economic system itself according to its interests, but rather guided
by something external to the economy, and subject only to considerations
that lie within the competence of every adult. Why do so many people,
even those of a socialist turn of mind, refuse to see this? The reason
is that through their participation in political life they have learned
to think about the way a political state governs, but not about the
peculiar nature of the forces inherent in economic life. Thus they are
able to conceive an economic process managed according to the principles
on which a political state is governed; but they are unable to conceive
of one structured according to its own economic principles and needs,
one that takes its legal regulations from a different quarter altogether.
This is true for most of the agitators and leaders of the proletariat.
If the mass of workers themselves, from the circumstances previously
dis-cussed, have insufficient insight into ways that economic life might
possibly be transformed, their leaders are no better off. They
exclude themselves from all such insight by confining their thinking
wholly within the political arena.
A consequence
of this one-sided confinement to politics are the attempts being made
in various quarters to establish Workers' Councils [Betriebsräte].
The current attempt to create such institutions must be consistent with
the afore-mentioned “new idea,” if all labor expended on it
is not to be wasted. This “new idea” requires, however, that
Workers' Councils should be the first institutions with which the state
has no concern, but which are free to form according to the purely economic
considerations of those engaged in economic life. It should be left
to the emerging corporation to promote associations that will create
through economic cooperation what has been brought about hitherto by
the egotistical competition of individuals. It is a question of free
social coordination between the various complexes of production and
consumption, and not one of centralized control according to political
policies. The point is to promote the economic initiatives of the workers
through such an association, not to submit them to the tutelage of a
bureaucratic hierarchy. Whether economic life has a political ad-ministration
imposed on it by state law, or whether a “system of industrial
council boards” [Rätesystem] is planned by people who are
able to think and organize only along political lines, the outcome is
the same. Among these people there may perhaps be some who, in theory,
demand a certain independence of the economic life; in practice, however,
their demands can only result in an economy straight-jacketed by a
political system because their scheme is the result of political thinking.
Before one can conceive such institutions in a way required by the actual
conditions of present-day life, one must have a clear idea of the way
in which both the governmental and legal system and the spiritual-cultural
sphere of the threefold social order should develop in their own manner
apart from the economic system. It is possible to form a clear picture
of an independent economic life only when one sees other things in their
proper place within the whole structure of the social organism—those
things that should not fall within the orbit of the economy. If one
does not see clearly the proper place for the unfolding of cultural
and legal impulses, one will always be tempted to fuse them somehow
with economics.
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