Twenty Articles From
The Newspaper:
The Threefold Social Order
Social Spirit and Socialist Superstition
In
discussing the causes of the modern
social movement, people commonly refer to the fact that neither the
owner of the means of production nor the worker is in a position to give
the product anything based on a direct personal interest in it. The owner
has goods produced because they bring him profits; the worker produces
them because he is obliged to earn a living. A personal satisfaction
in the finished product itself is felt by neither. In fact, one
touches a very essential part of the social question when pointing to
the lack of any personal relationship between the producers and the goods
produced in the modern industrial system. However, one must also be clear
that this lack of a personal relation-ship is a necessary consequence
of modern technology and the attendant mechanization of labor. It cannot
be removed from the economic life itself. Goods produced by extensive
division of labor in large industries cannot possibly be as closely
associated with the producer as were the products of the medieval craftsman.
One will have to accept the fact that, regarding a large part of human
labor, the kind of interest that previously existed is past and
gone. However, one should also be clear that without interest, a man
cannot work; if life compels him to do so, he feels his whole existence
to be dreary and unsatisfying.
Whoever
is honestly disposed toward the social movement must think of finding
some other interest to replace the one that is gone. He will not be
in a position to do so, however, if he insists on making the economic
process the single main substance of the social organism, and on making
the legal system and the cultural life a sort of appendage of the economy.
An enormous economic conglomerate regulated according to the Marxist
plan with the political and cultural orders as “ideological superstructure,”
would make human life a torment because of the ensuing lack of interest
in any sort of work. Those who want to introduce an enormous conglomerate
of this kind do not reflect on the fact that, while one can arouse a
certain amount of enthusiasm for such an aim through the excitement
of the struggle to attain it, the excitement ends as soon as this aim
is realized, and people thus fitted into the wheels of an impersonal
social machine are inevitably drained of everything resembling a will
to live. That such an aim is able to arouse enthusiasm in wide
masses of the populace is merely a result of the waning interest in
the products of labor that has not been replaced by the growth of any
other interest.
To arouse such an interest should be the special business of those
who presently, through their inherited share in spiritual culture, remain
in a position to think beyond merely economic interests to those
things that constitute the social good. These people must teach themselves
to see that there are two spheres of interest that must take the place
of the old interest in the actual work. In a social order based on division
of labor, the work one performs, while affording no satisfaction for
its own sake, may nevertheless satisfy through the interest one takes
in those for whom one per-forms it. Such an interest must, however,
be developed in living community. A legal system in which every individual
stands as an equal among equals arouses one's interest in one's fellows.
One works in such a system for the others because one gives to this
relationship between oneself and others a Iiving foundation. From the
economic order one learns only what others demand of one. Within a vital
legal and political life, the value one man has for the other springs
from the depths of human nature itself, and goes beyond our merely needing
each other in order to produce commodities meeting various needs.
This is
one sphere of interest that arises from a legal system independent
of economic life. To this must be added a second. A human existence
that must derive the substance of its cultural life from the economic
system will prove unsatisfying when there is insufficient interest in
the products of the work — even though people's interest in one
another is suitably fostered within the sphere of rights. For in the
end it must dawn upon people that they commerce with one another only
for the sake of commerce. Commerce acquires a meaning only when it is
seen to serve something in human life that extends beyond economics,
something quite independent of all commerce. Work that gives no
intrinsic satisfaction will acquire worth if performed by one of
whom it can be said, when viewed from a higher spiritual standpoint,
that he is striving toward ends of which his economic activity is only
the means. This view of life from a spiritual stand-point can be acquired
only within a self-subsistent spiritual-cultural branch of the social
organism. A spiritual-cultural life that is a “superstructure”
erected upon the economy, manifests itself merely as a means to economic
ends.
The
complicated form of modern industry, with its mechanization of human
labor, requires a free, self-subsistent spiritual-cultural life as a
necessary counterbalance. Earlier epochs in human history could bear
the fusion of economic interests and cultural impulses because industry
had not yet fallen prey to mechanization. If human nature is not to
succumb to this mechanization, whenever human beings stand within the
mechanized system of labor, their souls must always be able to rise
freely into communion with the higher worlds into which they
feel themselves transported by a free spiritual-cultural life.
It would be
short-sighted to reply to the proposal of a free spiritual-cultural life
and the independent sphere of rights demanded by human equality that
neither would over-come economic inequalities, which are the most
oppressive of all. For the modern economic system has led to these
in-equalities because it has never, as yet, allowed to develop apart from
it the legal system and the cultivation of the spirit that it requires.
The Marxist mind believes that each form of economic production prepares
the way for the next and higher one, and that when this preparatory process
is concluded, then through “evolution” the higher form must
necessarily replace the lower one. Actually, the modern form of production
did not evolve from old economic methods, but rather from the legal
forms and the cultural perspectives of an earlier age. However, while
giving a new form to economic life, these latter have themselves grown
old and need to be rejuvenated. Of all forms of superstition the worst
is to declare that rights and culture can be conjured out of the forms
of economic production. Such a superstition darkens not only the human
mind, but life itself. It diverts our spirit from its own source
by offering an illusory source in the nonspiritual. We are all too ready
to be deluded by those who tell us that spirit arises of itself out
of nonspirit; for we fancy by this delusion to save ourselves the exertions
we must acknowledge to be necessary when we perceive that the spirit
is only to he won by toil of spirit.
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