|
|
|
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
|
|
World Economy
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
|
|
World Economy
Schmidt Number: S-4911
On-line since: 13th November, 2000
Dornach, 27th July, 1922.
Yesterday I chose from the economic life a somewhat crude example as
an illustration. It appears that this drastic illustration has caused
some of you a good deal of brain-racking. I refer to the
example of the tailor, who, I said, works less cheaply if he makes his
own suit of clothes for himself than he would be doing if, while
making clothes for other people, he bought his own from a tradesman in
the ordinary way, like the rest of us. Now it is only too easy to miss
the point of such a crude example. For it is quite natural to work it
out in this way: The tradesman, since he must make some profit,
will buy the suit of clothes from the tailor more cheaply than he will
sell it. Hence it goes without saying that if the tailor buys his suit
of clothes, he will pay more for it than he would if he made it for
himself. He will, in fact, have to pay the tradesman's profit in
addition. This objection is so obvious that it is bound to
occur'; nevertheless I purposely chose the above rather crude example
because I wished to illustrate how necessary it is, for present-day
economic life, to think not in terms of domestic economy, but in terms
of community or national economy'. We must, in fact, reckon with all
that arises from the division of labour.
You see, the important thing is not to consider how the tailor
will stand directly after he has finished making the suit of clothes.
It is true enough that if he proceeds to sell the suit to a tradesman,
and then buys another suit back again for himself, he will have made a
loss. But that is not the point; the point is, how will he stand when
he makes up his accounts after a certain lapse of time? Will he be in
a better position if he made his own suit for himself, or will he be
in a better position if he refrained from doing so?
In effect when the division of labour works, it makes products
cheaper in the right way; they become cheaper, through the
division of labour, precisely in the whole system of economic
relationships. Whereas, if we work against the division of
labour, we force down the price of one particular class of
products; but this forcing down of prices will itself go
against the main stream of the economic process. In other words,
though the tailor may save something on that particular suit, he will
by a very small figure to begin with force down the
price of clothes; if many tailors do the same, the effect will be
multiplied; clothes will become cheaper and the result will be that
the tailor will have to supply other suits also at a lower
price. It will only be a question of time. After a certain time, he
will observe in his balance-sheet how much less income he has derived
from the other suits than he would have derived if he had not thus
forced the prices down.
We must not confuse the issue by thinking in the narrow spirit of
domestic economy. I did not mean that the tailor has not a perfect
right to make his own clothes for himself, or that he might not quite
properly have a taste for doing so. Only he must not imagine that it
will save him anything in the long run; on the contrary, it will be
more expensive. Taking his total balance after a certain lapse of
time, he will find that it is more expensive. I admit that in this
crude example the effect will be comparatively slight, for the amount
by which the price is forced down will only become evident after a
considerable lapse of time. The tailor will have to make a large
number of other suits before the very small fraction by which they are
cheapened becomes effective. Nevertheless, sooner or later it will
appear in his total balance.
(* See Appendix.)
The economic process does indeed consist in an infinite number of
interdependent factors. The single phenomenon is the outcome of an
untold number of factors, all of which work into one another. To
understand it, it simply will not do to think if I may put it
so so very near at hand. All your thinking on Economics will
lead to disaster if you let your thoughts be guided only by what lies
in the immediate neighbourhood of the single persons who are engaged
in it. You will never get to grips with the economic process in this
way. You must learn to envisage the social organism in its totality.
If you do so, you will also feel impelled to illustrate the facts by'
such extreme examples, where the effect, though it does not become
apparent in a day, may make itself felt very strongly, say, in the
course of a decade.
We must indeed take our start from such if I may say so
half-absurd examples, so as to detach our thinking from the familiar
habits and lead it into a mode that comprehends wide issues and,
losing its hard and fast outlines in the process, gains power to grasp
what is for ever fluctuating. What lies close to us we can grasp in
sharp outline, but our task is to achieve a real insight, an
insight that gives us always mobile ideas, which never correspond to
those we can gather in our immediate neighbour-hood.
I want to mention this especially today, for, while we take our start
from comparatively simple matters, we shall have to realise
nevertheless how the economic process is built up little by little of
the most manifold factors. We must come nearer and nearer to the
possibility of grasping the problem of Price. With this end in view,
we shall today once more consider the economic process as such
from a particular aspect.
Let us begin today with Nature. In the first place, human Labour must
set to work on Nature, transforming Nature's products. The product of
Nature thus receives the stamp of human Labour; as transformed by
human Labour, it receives an economic value. In Economics we are
not dealing with the substance; the substance, as such, has no
economic value. The coal, the substantial coal, lying in mines under
the earth, has no economic value; nor would it gain an economic value
if it walked of its own accord from the mine into the house of the man
who uses it to stoke his fires. What is it that turns the substance
into a value? It is the Labour that has been impressed upon it, that
is to say, all that had to be done to bring it to the light of day, to
prepare the mines themselves, to transport the coal and so forth. It
is only the human Labour impressed upon the substance of the coal
which gives it economic value; and this is all we have to do with in
Economic Science.
You cannot grasp any phenomenon of economic life if you do not start
from such ideas as these. But now, in the application of human Labour
to Nature, we come with the further evolution of the economic life to
the division of Labour. The division of Labour arises whenever men
work together in any task that has significance for economic life.
Let us take a perfectly simple example. In a certain district, a
number of men have been doing a certain piece of work. From the
various places where they live, they have walked to the common scene
of their Labour to a place where some particular Nature-product
is exploited. Suppose we are still in a very primitive period. The
workers have no other means of arriving at the place where they' do
this work upon Nature; they' must walk there. But now someone
conceives the idea of making a cart and using horses to draw it.
Henceforth what formerly had to be done by each one alone will be done
by each individual in conjunction with the man who provides the cart.
A certain piece of work is now divided; that which is done, which is
Labour in the economic sense, is now divided. It will, of course,
happen in this way, that everyone who makes use of the cart will have
to pay a certain quota to the enterprising individual who provided it.
The inventor of the cart, however, thereby' enters the category of the
capitalist. For him, the cart is now genuine Capital. Whereever you
look, you will always see that this is so: The point of origin of
Capital always lies in the division, the qualitative division of
Labour. But now, how was the cart invented? It was invented by Mind
or Spirit. And indeed, every such process consists in the
application of Spirit to Labour. In one respect or another human
Labour is permeated by the Spirit. It is Labour permeated by the
Spirit which arises in the process of the division of Labour.
Where we see Capital arise in the course of division of Labour, we
have, in the first place, nothing else than this: it is Labour
penetrated by the Spirit. The first phase of Capital always consists
in this: Where human Labour hitherto was determined only by Nature, it
is now organised, divided and so forth by the Spirit.
It is indeed necessary to see Capital and its formation very clearly
from this point of view. Only from this point of view can we
understand the function of Capital in the economic process. The
forming of Capital is always a concomitant of the division that
is to say, the qualitative, organic division of Labour.
But in this process something of the direct, immediate intercourse,
which man has with Nature when he works upon her, is always loosened.
You see, so long as the economic life merely consists in the
elaboration of Nature, all that we have to do with is the
Nature-products which, being transformed by human Labour, acquire an
economic value. But the moment the human Spirit organises Labour
organises, that is to say, Labour as such (for, after
all, to the man who creates Capital in the shape of his cart, it will
matter nothing to what end or for what purpose he transports the
workers from one place to another) an emancipation from Nature
begins to take place.
Here,
(* The lecturer referred to diagram 2, left-hand side.)
if I may put it so, we still see Nature shining through human
Labour at all points. Although the value is constituted not by' the
coal as a substance but by that human Labour which is stamped upon it,
nevertheless the Nature-product still shines through the human Labour.
This is one side from which economic values originate.
The other side is this. Whatever in human Labour is organised by
the Spirit emancipates itself from Nature, is lifted away from
Nature, until at length we have the capitalist, to whom the relation
of the Labour which he organises to Nature may be a matter of complete
indifference. This, after all, may happen in a very simple way.
Suppose the man has hitherto been driving people from many places,
say, to some piece of agricultural work in the fields. He may suddenly
prefer to take his cart away and drive people to quite a different
place and quite another kind of work. Wherever the Spirit is applied,
you will inevitably find the organised division of human Labour
becoming emancipated from the Nature-foundation. Here, then, you
have the emancipation of Capital from the Nature-foundation of
economic life.
From various points of view the idea has been expressed in Economics
that Capital is stored-up Labour-power. But this is no more than a
definition, which will only fit the facts at a certain stage, because
things are always fluctuating. So long as the organisation due to the
Spirit is narrowly bound to a certain kind of Labour, Nature will
still shine through. But the moment we emancipate ourselves, thinking
only of how to make fruitful what we gain by application of the Spirit
the moment we do this, the more we shall observe the Labour
becoming indistinct within the total mass of Capital. In its peculiar
and specific character, it vanishes.
Suppose you have been amassing Capital for a considerable time and
this Capital continues to work in the economic process. The man who,
to begin with, had only a single cart can extend his economic
activity' by acquiring a second cart, and so on. His Capital is
working in the economic process; but there is really nothing left in
it of the nature of the Labour. Look at a miner, for example; in him
you still see very much of the nature of the Labour. But in Capital
you see less and less of it. And we may go still farther. Suppose the
man hands the whole business over to another man. The transfer will
very likely mean that the new-comer will only be concerned in
fructifying what has thus been brought about by the Spirit. The nature
of the Labour which is thus organised will be a matter of indifference
to him. He is only concerned in organising, no matter what kind of
Labour.
In other words, we have here a real process of abstraction.
Precisely the same thing that we do inwardly in our logical thinking,
in the process of abstraction, is here accomplished outwardly. The
specific quality disappears. The specific qualities, both of the
substance of Nature and of the different kinds of Labour, gradually
disappear in the masses of Capital. And as you will presently see, if
we follow the economic process still farther, nothing whatever is left
of the human Labour which was originally organised. The further
development of the economic process will be somewhat as follows: The
man who built the cart did at least stamp his own Spirit upon the
whole invention; but now he earns more values than he can cope with by
himself. Are these values to remain unused in the whole economic life?
Of course not. Another man must come along, able to cope with them by
means of a different kind of Spirit. He will then turn the values to
good account he will make them valuable in quite a
different way.
After a time, for instance, the values created by the inventor of the
cart the fructification which has thus resulted may pass
over to a skilled smith. The smith has the Spirit, the intelligence,
to erect a workshop; but with his Spirit alone he can do nothing. The
other man has already created certain economic values; these he must
now transfer to his fellow-man, the smith. Here you have indeed, in
the outer world of reality, the completest imaginable process of
abstraction. Moreover, it is essential if the thing is to go on at all
(for how else could the cartwright transmit his values to the smith?)
it is essential for something to be there which is related as
an abstract element to all the specific elements that
are contained in the economic process. What is this something? It is,
of course, in the first place, Money. Money is nothing but the
externally expressed value which is gained in the economic process
through the division of Labour and transmitted from one man to
another.
Thus we see arise, in the process of division of Labour,
Capitalism, and in the process of Capitalism (at a pretty early
stage) Finance [die Geldwirtschaft]. In relation to all the
particular economic processes, Money is the thing completely abstract.
If you have five francs in your pocket, you can buy a midday meal and
a supper for it just as well as an article of clothing. To the Money
itself it is irrelevant what you acquire for it, or what it is
exchanged for in the economic process. Money is the thing absolutely
indifferent to the single factors in the economic life, in so far as
they are still influenced by Nature. For this very reason Money
becomes the means of expression, the instrument, the medium for the
Spirit to enter into the economic organism in the division of Labour.
Without Money being created, it is absolutely impossible for the
Spirit to enter in and play its part in the economic organism which
depends on the division of Labour. We may say then: What in a
primitive economic condition is originally all together what
every single human being in his egoism does for himself is now
divided up among the whole community. Such is the division of
Labour, and in Capital the single parts are gathered up again into a
total process. The forming of Capital is essentially a synthesis. And
now the man who first emerges as a creator of Capital, being able to
change it into Money Capital (since Money must necessarily appear at
this stage) becomes a lender to another man, who possesses
nothing but his Spirit. The latter now receives the Money, which is
the true and proper representative of economic values created by the
Spirit.
We must really consider this from the point of view of pure Economics.
However evil money may be from a religious or ethical point of view,
in the economic sense Money is the Spirit at work in the economic
organism. It is so indeed. Once more then: Money must be created in
the economic process, if the Spirit is to progress at all from the
initial point where it applies itself merely to Nature. Spirit would
remain in an altogether primitive condition if it could do no more
than this. To pour back again into the economic process what has been
gained by spiritual application, it must be realised as Money.
Money is the Spirit realised. But the concrete quality comes back into
it again. In the first place, Money is an abstract thing, for, as we
said before, to the Money it is a matter of indifference whether, for
the 5 francs in my pocket, I buy an article of clothing or get my hair
cut (several times, if you like). But the moment Money returns to the
individual human being, i.e., to the individual human Spirit, it
becomes economically active once more as a concrete and specific fact.
For the Spirit is economically active in the Money.
Now at this point a very special relationship arises. He who acquired
the Money to begin with becomes the lender, the creditor. The other,
who receives the Money the man, we will suppose, who only has
the Spirit, becomes the debtor. You have here a relationship between
two human beings. The same relationship will also come about if the
lenders are a whole number of people who hand over their superfluous
Capital to the individual, so that a higher synthesis is brought about
by his intelligence, his Spirit. He is then the debtor, and works on a
foundation entirely emancipated from the Nature basis. For what he
actually receives from the original capitalists themselves is in his
hands a nonentity. He will have to give it back again after a time
it does not really belong to him. In effect, it is only from
one side that he works economically as a debtor. From the other side
he is economically responsible as a spiritual creator. Truth to tell,
this is perhaps one of the healthiest relationships (this point is
especially important in relation to the social question) for a
spiritual worker to work for the community, being enabled to do so by
the community giving him the necessary money. (So far as he is
concerned, it is the community.) How property, possession and the like
enter into the matter is a question we shall have to consider another
time; our present object is only to trace the economic process as
such. Here it is a matter of indifference whether or not you conceive
the lender as the real owner and whether or not you conceive the
debtor as jurisprudence does. For the moment we are only concerned
with this question: How does the economic process take its
course?
Here then we have a part of the economic process where the work is
founded purely on what has already been spiritually achieved and
acquired. That is to say, the very foundation of the work is already
emancipated from the Nature-basis. True, it originated in the
organisation of Labour; but we are now at a second stage, and if at
this second stage where a spiritual worker works as a debtor
you were still to describe the borrowed Capital which he
receives as crystallised Labour or the like, you would
be talking economically sheer nonsense. It is immaterial
to the economic process how the Capital which he owes originated. The
important thing now is: What is the Spirit, what is the intelligence,
of the man who receives the Money? Will he be able to lead it over
into fruitful economic processes? The original Labour through which
the Capital arose no longer has an economic value. The Spirit which
the man applies in turning the Money to good account (giving it value)
this alone will have economic value at this stage. For, however
much Labour you conceive as being stored up in the Capital, if a fool
gets hold of it and scatters it all to the winds, it is
an altogether different thing than if a clever man gets hold of it and
starts a fruitful economic process with it. At this second stage,
therefore, where we have to do with lender and debtor, we are dealing
with Capital from which the Labour has already disappeared. What then
is the economic significance of this Capital from which the
Labour has disappeared ? It is twofold: In the first place it
has been possible to raise and collect the Capital for lending
purposes, and in the second place the Capital thus raised can be given
value by spiritual means. Therein lies its true economic significance.
The reality which emerges from the process is the relation between the
debtor and his creditors. In the economic process to which he now
gives rise, the debtor stands in the middle. On the one hand we have
him as a debtor; on the other hand we have that which proceeds from
him as a spiritually productive man. What on the one hand is
lent or invested Capital through
the very fact that it becomes owed or
borrowed Capital passes over into the second
stage of the economic process.
This is simply the circulation of Capital nothing else. But
this circulation is part and parcel of a social organic activity, just
as you have the blood in a human or animal organic activity, when it
flows through the head and is used for what the head produces. I may
put it in this way: What is it that is brought about through this
relationship of lenders and debtors? It is, ladies and gentlemen, very
similar to the difference of level we meet with in
Physics. If you have water up here it will flow down there, simply
through the difference of level. In like manner there is a, social
difference of level between the first position of the Capital and the
second the position of the lender who does not know what to do
with it, and the position of the debtor who can make good use of it.
This difference works as a difference of level.
But you must pause a moment to consider: What is the active driving
force in this difference of level? The active principle is not simply
the Spirit which is at work in the whole process. It is the diversity
of human talents and dispositions. That is the determining factor in
the difference of level. If a dullard possesses Capital, then, in a
healthy economic organisation, he will be up here, while the clever
man will be down there. The result is a drop, or
difference of level and the Capital flows downward to the clever man.
It is through the difference of level between the talents of
individuals that Capital is brought into flow. It is not even the
positive activity of men; it is simply the human qualities of
those who are united together in the social organism which produce
this difference of level and, in doing so, carry forward
the economic process.
Look at this economic process quite concretely, and you will say: We
start from Nature, which has as yet no value. Clearly it has no value,
for the sparrow, satisfying its needs from Nature, pays nothing for
it. This is evident from the contrast of sparrow economy and human, or
political, economy. Economic value begins where human Labour unites
itself with Nature. Next, the economic process is continued through
the division, the differentiation of Labour. Let us take it to begin
with in an absolutely general way: We have human Labour applied to
Nature. I will put it down as follows (though the full economic
meaning of this will only emerge in the further course of these
lectures). Let us designate what arises at this stage by Nl
Nature taken hold of by human Labour. What is it,
economically speaking? It is, as we have already seen, a value. I will
call it: Nature taken hold of by human Labour, and thus made
into a value Nlv. That is one side.
Now comes the division of Labour. What does it signify? It signifies a
dividing up of those processes which were performed in the first place
as single completed Labour-processes applied to Nature and which now
live a separate life. If I make a whole stove, I shall be performing
many, varied Labour-processes; if I now introduce division of Labour,
I peel and part the Labour-processes one from another. I divide. If
Nlv is Nature-product transformed by Labour and made
into a value, then what arises by the division of Labour (of
course, we might denote it in many different ways) will be
Nlv1, Nlv2, and so on.
Now if all this is a real process, how shall we express what happens
when the division of Labour makes its appearance? Clearly, by a
division, by a fraction. When the value which I have here written down
passes over into the division of Labour, the thing that is there in
the reality must in some way be divided. The only question is: By what
is it divided? What is the dividing principle? What is it that divides
up the process? Well, we must now look to the other side. In pure
Mathematics we only have to take what is given as number; but when we
are to seek such arithmetical processes in the world of Reality
itself, we must look for the real divisor, the real dividing
principle. Now, as you will remember, we found, on the other side of
the picture, Labour taken hold of by the Spirit. Over
against this (Nlv) we may, therefore, place Labour taken
hold of by the Spirit. This becomes a value on the other side:
Lsv. But we have today reached a certain conclusion
concerning this Labour taken hold of by the Spirit. We
have seen what must arise if it is to work on beyond a certain point
in the economic process, and if this (Nlv) is divided and
is to work on in the economic process we have seen what enters
the process for this Lsv (Labour organised by the Spirit
and made into a value): It is Money.
But the Money appears at this point not in its fully abstract nature;
it is abstract, to begin with, if I may put it so abstract as
the substance to which the Spirit first applies itself but it
grows highly individualised, highly specific, when the Spirit takes
hold of it and uses it for this or that purpose. In doing so, it is
the Spirit as such which determines the value of the Money. Here, you
see, Money begins to gain a concrete and specific value. For whether
the man is a fool and throws the Money away on a thing that turns out
unfruitful, or whether he applies it in a useful way, this now emerges
as a very real value in the economic process. For your denominator,
therefore, you will here get something that has to do with Money;
while your numerator, I need hardly say, will have to do with the fact
that you have before you that into which the substance of Nature has
been transformed. What is a substance of Nature, transformed by Labour
and present in the economic process? It is a Commodity. This, then, is
the numerator; and for the denominator, corresponding to Labour
organised by the Spirit, you will have Money thus:
Nlv Commodity
=
Lsv Money
New values come to light: the Commodity-value and
the Money-value. In the economic process founded on the
division of Labour, we must recognise this truth: The quotient of the
total commodities present in the economic organism and the Money
present in the economic organism (taking as Money not
what is reckoned up in the cash-books, but what is actually taken hold
of by the Spirit of the human beings) will represent a real
inter-action. The Money is the divisor. This inter-action, which
cannot be represented by a subtraction but only by a division,
represents the real health of the economic process. To
understand wherein this health consists, we must learn to understand
what is at work in the numerator here and in the denominator. We must
understand more and more wherein the essential nature of a Commodity
on the one hand, and of the medium of circulation, the Money, on the
other hand, consists. The most essential economic question cannot be
solved at all unless we proceed in this exact way. But we must not
forget that whatever appears in the economic life will always be
fluctuating. Thus the moment the Commodity is taken from one place to
another, the numerator here will change. Indeed, I can do no other
than point out at every turn, how fluctuating all things are in the
economic process.
There is a great difference between the purse I have in my pocket
which contains 5 francs, and the purse another man has, also
containing 5 francs. It is not a matter of indifference whether the 5
francs are in the one pocket or the other. This too must be taken as a
thing that belongs to the real economic process. Otherwise you will
only get a few rigid, abstract, arbitrary concepts of Price, Value,
Commodity, Production, Consumption and so on; you will get nothing to
lead you to a true understanding of the economic process.
This is the infinitely sad thing in the present day. For many
centuries mankind has grown accustomed to sharply outlined concepts,
such as are inapplicable to a living process. Today we are called upon
by the facts of life to get movement into our concepts, so as to
penetrate the economic processes with conscious understanding; and we
cannot do so. This is what we must attain: mobility of
thinking, so as to be able to think a process through to its end quite
inwardly. True, in ordinary science we also contemplate processes, we
think them through, if you will; but we always see them
from outside and that is of no avail in Economics. To contemplate the
economic process as the chemist contemplates his processes, from
outside, you would have to go far up above the Earth in a balloon. The
economic processes are distinguished by the fact that we ourselves are
in them; therefore we must see them from within. We must feel
ourselves within the economic processes, just as a being would
do who was inside the chemist's retort where, with a great generation
of heat, something is being concocted. The being in the retort, whom I
am now comparing with ourselves, cannot of course be the chemist. It
would have to he a creature taking part in the heat, boiling with it,
as it were. The chemist cannot do this; to him the whole thing is
external. In Natural Science, we stand outside the process. The
chemist could not take part in it, with the temperature in the retort
far above boiling-point. But the economic process is different; we
ourselves partake in it inwardly at every point. Hence too we must
inwardly understand it. A mathematician may well object: You have
written something like a formula, but we are not used to building up
our mathematical formulas in this way. True enough; for as a rule we
only build up a mathematical formula as a result of contemplating
natural processes from without. We must evolve a faculty of insight to
get a numerator and denominator in this way, or to understand that it
must be something like a division that it cannot be a
subtraction in this case. We must try to think our way into the
economic process. For this very reason I chose that crude example
yesterday. I did not introduce to you a tailor and a tradesman from
outside, as a scientist would. The essential could not have been found
in that way. But with our thinking accustomed to see things only as
the natural scientist does from outside, we feel it uncanny to get
inside a thing. Nevertheless, we must conceive inwardly the countless
processes that intervene between the tailor and the effects which
follow in the economic process.
I should not be true to the task you have set me if I described these
things in any different manner. I am well aware that it makes it
somewhat difficult at the outset.
Last Modified: 23-Nov-2024
|
The Rudolf Steiner e.Lib is maintained by:
The e.Librarian:
elibrarian@elib.com
|
|
|
|
|