The Social Future

“Even in a society, where the development of individual ability is tied up with the administration of the political state, or to the forces of economic life, even there, real productivity, in everything requiring the expenditure of capital, depends on as much of free individual power as can find its way through the shackles imposed upon it. Only, under such conditions, the development is an unhealthy one. It is not the free development of individual ability, exercised on a basis of capital, that has brought about conditions under which human labor-power can be nothing but a commodity; it is the shackling of these powers through the political life, of the state or in the circuit of economic processes. An unprejudiced recognition of this fact is at the present day a necessary first step to everything that has to be done in the field of social organization. For the superstition has grown up in modern times that the measures needed for the welfare of society must come from either the political state or the economic system. And if we pursue any further the road along which this superstition has started us, we shall set up all manner of institutions that, far from leading man to the goal towards which he is striving, will increasingly aggravate the oppressive conditions from which he is seeking to escape.”

RUDOLF STEINER in The Threefold Commonwealth