Thursday, August 30, 2012

Introduction to This Blog - Just Prices are the Virtues of the World Economy

Power to the Virtues!


This blog is being launched on the specific occasion of a guest lecture in English with the title of this introduction  "Just Prices Are the Virtues of the World Economy" initiated by Philip van der Linden, Bart Kuijpers en Jeroen van der Drift  for their fellow architecture students to be held at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands on September 10. The title itself refers to a lecture held by yours truly at the Novaglobe Symposium at the artist colony Ruigoord on the outskirts of Amsterdam organized by Iwanjka Geerding in the summer of 2011. During this Land Jewel Festival the Dutch translation of the book "The Virtues - Seasons of the Soul" by the German philosopher /anthroposophist Herbert Witzenmann was presented in conjunction with photocopies of the 12 monthly meditations and the corresponding 12 illustrations and title page painted by the Dutch artist Jan de Kok (Now to be seen with the real paintings in Cultural Center De Roos in Amsterdam until September 11, 2012).

The underlying idea for this title is the application of the ancient Hermetic principle "what is as above, is as what is below" to the inner soul of man and the outer physical world, i.e. that the Aristotelian concept of ethics as virtue being the struggle to maintain the golden mean between two extremes can be compared in function to the social economic question of the creation of just price as being the effort to maintain a balance between the two opposing value-creating processes that arise out of the interaction between the three production factors nature, labor and capital of the social organism understood as the whole earth. How exactly this all can be fathomed can be gathered by studying the two sources for this new paradigm.

This is on the one hand the three lectures here on Just Price as the cardinal issue of the world economy. They are introduced by lenghty prefaces for the various editions presented in the US that do not shy away from giving an insight into the various parties and developments that unfortunately prevented this valuable and topical issue from possibly becoming more widely known and even implemented much earlier. Readers not interested in what they may consider superfluous "internal strife" can then turn directly to the three main lectures.

The other source material is the publication The Virtues, which or for that matter who can be consulted on the blog "Power to the Virtues!", the title being a sort "battle cry" with which the Willehalm Institute in Amsterdam on August 12 started, in view of the coming national elections in this country, a non-political, spiritual party consisting of the 12 virtues as moving members with each a governing period of one month, e.g. for the month of August "Compassion becomes Freedom" followed on September 1 "Courtesy becomes Tact of the Heart". In that supplementary manner the twofold cause for the present economic crisis, which is in effect a civilizational crisis, can be met: on the one hand by a structural transformation through social organics of the world economy from one based on egoïsm to one based on altruïsm and on the other hand by a change of hearts and mind. A supplementary blog in this respect entitled "Social Organics - A New Principle of Civilization" was started at the end of last year by Paula Deiro, a Brazilian lawyer residing in the Netherlands, but unfortunately soon thereafter discountinued; perhaps the appearance of this blog will now be an incentive to continue the blog, or if not, to pass it on to a successor.

I end this intro with a short reference to 911 and the close relation between world economy and world peace. The last edition of this study was presented in Montreal to members of the Anthroposophical Society on September 10, 2001 while, as mentioned at the beginning, this blog has been set up as study material for a lecture on September 10, 2012 one day before the 11th  anniversary of this tragedy, which is still, as far as the general public is concerned, shouded in mystery as to the identity and underlying motives of the real culprits. This black-out would not be there however, if the reception accorded to the true crime "911: The Accusation - Bringing the Guilty to Justice" as part of his trilogy Operation Twins written by former top counterespionage agent Dr. Slobodan Mitric (known as Karate Bob) based on inside information and presented at BookExpo America in New York 2011 had been more favorable, and if on the basis of this advance publication the necessary means could have been provided to him to tell the whole inside story as to what really happened.  More so, if his graphic forewarnings since the eighties as Director of Reserve Police International (RPI) and World Atomic Counter Espionage (WACE), who had manged to infiltrated the guilty party had been taken seriously by the appropriate authorities, this tragedy would not have had to happen (see his CV from the appendix of his book The Golden Tip). What has now come to the fore from this source since my controversial appearance on the Kevin Smith Show in the US in June of last year is that the main motive for 911 was a financial and economic one: the militiary-industrial complex, about which President Eisenhower warned so explicitly when he left office, had to devise a satanic scheme to keep the armament industry rolling by providing a pretext for going to war, no matter what the human cost in lives and misery (my appearance was in that sense controversial, because after Slobodan Mitric put the audio part of my interview with the permission of the host on his YouTube channel, Kevin Smith entered a protest to YouTube which then removed all segments and in spite of our protests did not give in.)

If these same latent but all-powerful forces are behind the recent developments, which prompted the Russian Prime Minister Medvedev to warn the US against any illegal military adventures against sovereign states at the risk of starting a Third World thermonuclear War and about which Slobodan Mitric has been alarming his readers on his Facebook site is very well possible. What is absolutely certain however is that the last thing that this powerful conglomerate wants to see is a transformation of the world economy in the above sense, which would destroy their structural power-base for war-mongering and could pave the way to a lasting world peace.

With this in mind, I close this intro with an appeal to the readers to please take these matters to heart and to feel free to post suggestions and/or (immanent) criticism in the hope that another step towards an international Movement for Social Organics - A New Principle of Civilization can be taken.  To this end I plan in the near future to translate and publish the two other social organic studies by Herbert Witzenmann Currency as a Question of Consciousness - A New Financial System Requires a New Principle of Civilization (already available in Dutch as Geldordening als bewustzijnskwestie and  Social Organics - Ideas for the Reformation of the Economy (partly available in Dutch on internet).    

May the "battle cry" of the Woodstock movement in the US and the free spirits of 1968 in Europe "Power to the Imagination" be enhanced on all fronts by the slogan "Power to the Virtues!".
   

The Author Herbert Witzenmann and His Work


Herbert Witzenmann (February 16, 1905 - September 24, 1988) had in his youth a decisive meeting with Rudolf Steiner, which determined the course of the rest of his life. In 1963 he became a member of the Executive-Council of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, and two years later head of the Section for Social Science at the Goetheanum, Free School of Spiritual Science, until around 1970 this latter position was in effect taken away from him by a majority decision of the Council and in 1979 occupied by the late Manfred Schmidt-Brabant, who in 1984 also became president of this Society. 
These three lectures are translated from Der gerechte Preis – Eine Grundfrage des sozialen Lebens (Gideon Spicker Verlag, Dornach 1993). It is being made available as private study material for members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society and the Herbert Witzenmann Foundation by the Willehalm Institute for Anthroposophy as Grail Research, Royal Art and Social Organics in Amsterdam.

Donations are more than welcome and can be made via PayPal to rjkelder@willehalm.nl

Willehalm Institute Press Foundation

Kerkstraat 386A, 1017 JB Amsterdam,

The Netherlands


Introduction to the First Edition (July 6, 1999)


This working translation of The Just Price is a second attempt to bring the concept of social organics as developed by Herbert Witzenmann on the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s idea of the threefold nature of the social organism to these American shores. The first attempt in this campaign took place last summer (1998) when Herbert Witzenmann’s profound contemplation on the social-organic nature of the principles of the Anthroposophical Society entitled The Principles of the Anthroposophical Society as a Basis of Life and a Path of Training was for the first time translated in full for the occasion of the annual meeting of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum, Free School for Spiritual Science in North America. In this first Social Esthetic Study the emphasis is on social organics related to the principles as a universal charter of humanity embodying the archetype of a living society of free spirits. As such it makes manifest why Rudolf Steiner attached such great importance to the realization by the leadership of the Goetheanum of these all-encompassing principles of freedom, which were originally called statutes, when he said:

The central Council will have to consider its task to be solely whatever lies in the direction of fulfilling the Statutes. It will have to do everything that lies in the direction of fulfilling the Statutes. This gives it great freedom. But at the same time we shall all know what this central Council represents, since from the statutes we can gain a complete picture of what at any time it will be doing.[1]

The task of realizing the principles also includes furthering Rudolf Steiner’s Course on World Economy, originally called Course on National (or Political) Economy. This course expresses, as will be shown in these three lectures, the new form for the exposition of the idea of the threefold social organism, to which this working translation is an introduction. This task follows from the explicit mentioning of the World Economy Course by Rudolf Steiner during the discussion of the central paragraph nr 8 of the principles [2] at the Christmas Conference 1923/24, in which the question arose whether the imprint of the Goetheanum, Free School for Spiritual Science should also be printed in this lecture course as a manuscript for members of this School. The relevant part of this discussion went as follows:

Dr Steiner: On the whole the imprint will apply only to the lecture cycles and those publications which are equal to the cycles.
Herr Werbeck: What about the National Economy Course given here. Does that count as a cycle?
Dr Steiner: The matter is somewhat different regarding the few works which have not been published by me or the Anthroposophical Publishing Company…. In one way I am quite grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to speak about this rather vexed question. In the case of these papers it should be a matter of course that they are only to be used by those who have been permitted to do so. This National Economy Course is one, and the medical course is another, and so on. If they were to be published more widely, the author’s rights would have to be returned to me. If we were planning to transform these papers into the form given to the cycles bearing this note, they would have to be returned to me, and they would only be brought out by the Philosophical – Anthroposophical Verlag as cycles published bearing this note…” [3]

In so many words, Rudolf Steiner therefore states that his World Economy Course too is to be nurtured, further developed and spiritually protected by the Anthroposophical Society and the Goetheanum. In effect, this means nothing less than that since the Christmas Conference the Goetheanum School also has the task of realizing the new form of the idea of the threefold social organism, here called social organics, in the world. This is something Herbert Witzenmann has constantly endeavored to do from the time that he became leader of the Social Science Section at the Goetheanum in 1965 until his – as he himself writes – removal under coercion from this position by a majority decision of the Executive-Council (Vorstand) of the General Anthroposophical Society in 1972. Afterwards he continued this task, so to speak, in the shadow of the Goetheanum until his death in 1988. To what extent he succeeded in that task may be left up to the judgment of the reader.[4]

The foregoing serves to explain to those anthroposophical readers who were perhaps inclined to ask why these three lectures by Herbert Witzenmann on Just Price were not given in Dornach, but in the nearby village of Arlesheim. Those readers interested in the related question why it has taken 25 years for these three lectures to reach American shores, I refer to my booklet Munsalvaesche in America – Towards the New Grail Community and other relevant literature listed at the end of this publication (not included here, will eb put online soon). Suffice it to say, that after the removal of Herbert Witzenmann from his chair at the Social Science Section, the threefold social idea in this crucial new form was unfortunately all but neglected by the new occupant of this chair in the person of the late President of the General Anthroposophical Society, Manfred Schmidt-Brabant.[5]

Be that as it may, the concept of social organics has reached American shores in the form of these two booklets on social organics by Herbert Witzenmann and my introductions and talks on this subject. In the introduction to my translation of Werner Greub’s third volume From Grail Christianity to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy of his Grail trilogy for the occasion of the recently held astrosophy conference on the Grail Astronomy at the StarHouse in Boulder, Colorado, I wrote the following:

"What brings me back to these United States for the third time now are invitations from friends and some welcome financial backing from both sides of the Atlantic to participate in three summer conferences: the one in Boulder already mentioned, then a conference for members of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum in America on Deepening our Understanding of Threefolding, followed by a public conference The Threefold Social Order and the Challenge of Elite Globalization from July 7-11, in a Shaker village, New Lebanon, NY, and finally The Other America Convocation in Concord, MA, from July 11-14 by keen followers and kindred souls of  Emerson, the American Goethe,  and his friend Thoreau. What connects all these three endeavors is indeed the Grail, for the Grail impulse of the 20th century – and no doubt also for the coming one – lies in transforming the driving force of the world economy from egoism to altruism. This is the mission of inner spiritualization of John. Based on indications by Rudolf Steiner and Walter Johannes Stein, the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Veltman expounds in his book Temple and Grail (not translated) on the three grades of chivalry. The first one is the grade of Faith (Peter), the second one of Hope (James) both lying in the past, while the current and future one is the grade of Charity or Love (John). Veltman writes: ‘This Grade of John can only be realized today and has to do with a world economy based on a truly Christian love. But for the time being, the world economy as a world power is still developing in an opposite direction.’
How this can be done has been shown by Rudolf Steiner in his course on World Economy in Dornach 1922. In the first of these 14 lectures he states that what he is about to deliver is the new language, even the new way of thinking with which to present the threefold social order in the near future, and that it is above all necessary to come to an understanding of the concept social organism as consisting of humanity and the earth as a whole. This unity was already seen in the spirit by Casper Hauser, who is a vital link in the historic Grail line. The social organism is thus essentially the body of Christ; but He can only wholly incarnate into this earth, if we as humanity practice the threefold order in the sense of Rudolf Steiner’s World Economy by creating the right balance among the production factors of the social organism: nature, labor and capital (spirit). This is the Christian justification for taking up the threefold social order or social organics, a term I think that Thoreau would welcome into his Walden and Walt Whitman would plant in his Leaves of Grass.
A most enlightening introduction to these green economic matters are three lectures from the year 1974 entitled The Just Price - World Economy as Social Organics by Herbert Witzenmann, the late leader of the Social Section at the Goetheanum. From 1972, however, he was unable to continue his work there, because as he himself writes (Im Bemühen um Klärung p. 4, see also Munsalvaesche in America), he was “forced out” in connection with the “book question”: the living spirit and creative work of this genial human being exchanged for the dead letter of the book, be it even a book by Rudolf Steiner! [6]
Again, this veiled ‘internal’ opposition to the true proponents of Rudolf Steiner’s impulse is one of the main reasons that it has taken so long for these vital matters to reach American shores, but come they must and come they will. I am therefore grateful for the support of the organizers of the second and third conferences, namely Bernard Wolf (Social Science Section) and Stuart B. Weeks (Concord Convocation), and others such as the New York City economist David Gilmartin given to my proposal to translate these three lectures during the two weeks between the first and second conference, and present them afterwards as study material. This as a further step in introducing the concept of social organics to America."

The actual translation of The Just Price was begun on my laptop on June 21 in David and Laura Lee Tresemer’s Morning Star House just outside of Boulder, Colorado, and continued three days later in the great New York Public Library, whose marble walls provided a welcome albeit temporary relief from a blistering heat wave. Over the 4th of July holiday the proofreading was done with the help of David Gilmartin, who was also so kind as to put me up during most of this time and who also helped finance the printing. Without his help, this working translation would have hardly made it.

The synopsis here was translated from a summary made for a Dutch working trans­lation of The Just Price that was presented in Amsterdam in 1994 by the translator as study material for the Willehalm Institute for Social Organics. The foreword to the German edition of The Just Price by Dr Götz Rehn was not included here, because of lack of time. In this foreword, credit is given to Hans Mrazek who wrote in shorthand the lectures on which the German text is based. The quotations from the World Economy Course are taken from the version by A. O. Barfield and T. Gordon Jones published by the Rudolf Steiner Press in 1972, but here and there I have made what I consider some improvements. I have not made the English pronouns gender neutral, with my apologies to the feminists.

May this working translation be followed soon by an official one, where of course this introduction would have to be revised in order to address a more general public. This official publication could perhaps include, or be followed by, two further booklets by Herbert Witzenmann with his enlightening approach to social organics: Currency as Consciousness and Social Organics – Ideas for the Reorganization of the Economy. [7]

New York City, July 6, 1999                                                                           
Robert J. Kelder



[1] Rudolf Steiner, The Christmas Conference For The Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society 1923/1924, Anthroposophic Press 1990, p. 115 ff. In this translation, the last part of the last sentence reads “what it (i.e. the Council) is doing”, which weakens this statement considerably, for the German word jemals, meaning ever or at any time, has been omitted. Another, more fundamental problem is the question of the title of this book, which refers to The Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society. As pointed out in the forewords and footnotes to the statutes in my working translation of Herbert Witzenmann’s social esthetic study The Principles of the Anthroposophical Society, which is appearing simultaneously in an updated edition with this present booklet, it was not the General (note the G written as a capital letter) that was founded, but the general Anthroposophical Society (i.e. general as opposed to the national or particular Anthroposophical Societies that were founded as groups of the general society) . During the Christmas Conference, Rudolf Steiner uses both terms interchangeably, but he emphasized that there is in effect only the Anthroposophical Society, the rest are local groups. Moreover, the statutes that were endorsed as well as the membership cards that were issued both read Anthroposophical Society. The General Anthroposophical Society as such derived its name and identity from the Goetheanum Building Association that on February 8, 1925 changed its name accordingly and added to it three sub-divisions, namely the administration of the Anthroposophical Society, the administration of the Goetheanum building itself, the Anthroposophic-Philosophical Publishing Co. and the Clinic. See the foreword to the fifth edition of above-mentioned booklet on the principles for further background information to and insight into this thorny constitutional issue and a solution in the form of a three-act real life mystery play entitled the Kardeiz Saga. See also the coming, revised edition of Munsalvaesche in America – Towards the New Grail Community.
[2] This paragraph reads (in my translation):  “All publications of the Society shall be open to the public as is the case in other public societies. The publications of the Free School of Spiritual Science will not be exempt from this public availability; however, the leadership of the School reserves the right from the outset to challenge the validity of every judgment on these works, that is not based on the schooling of which the works themselves are the outcome. In this sense the leadership, as is altogether customary in the recognized scientific world, will not acknowledge the validity of any judgment that is not based on the appropriate preliminary studies. Therefore the publications of the Free School of Spiritual Science will contain the following imprint: "Printed in manuscript for the members of the Free School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, Class ... No person is held qualified to form a judgment on these works who has not, through the School itself or in an equivalent manner recognized by it, acquired the preliminary knowledge advanced by the School. Other opinions will in so far be rejected, as the authors of the works in question do not enter into any type of discussion concerning them."
[3] Rudolf Steiner, The Christmas Conference…, p. 153 f.
[4] See the foreword to this third edition for a response to criticism of the editors of the American journal The Threefold Review that Herbert Witzenmann misinterprets and misrepresents Rudolf Steiner’s Course on World Economy.
[5] M. Schmidt-Brabant, who passed away earlier this year, was a brilliant speaker and did much to somehow improve the (outward) appearance of things. However, next to his discontinuation and glaring neglect of the new, actual form of the idea of the threefold nature of the social organism as developed by Rudolf Steiner and expounded by Herbert Witzenmann – a form which later in this foreword is referred to as a, or even, the Grail impulse of the 20th and 21st century – he withdrew the attention from Arlesheim Hermitage to Santiago de Compostella in northern Spain (formerly Portugal) as the central Grail area. See also my introductions to Werner Greub’s How The Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Reality of the Grail that was recently published by the Willehalm Institute Press in Amsterdam and presented in Montreal and various libraries in New England including the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent NY. 
[6] On the vitally important but still relatively unknown, so-called, book question, which in fact is a question concerning the proper representation of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, the nature of the Anthroposophical Society and its research and development center, the Goetheanum, Free School of Spiritual Science, see H. Witzenmann The Principles of the Anthroposophical Society and Munsalvaesche in America by the author.
[7] German titles: Geldordnung als Bewusstseinsfrage, Gideon Spicker Verlag, 1995 and Sozialorganik – Ideen zu einer Neugestaltung der Wirtschaft, G. Spicker, 1998.

Introduction to the Second Edition (July 22, 1999)


The first edition of 50 copies of The Just Price was printed in New York City overnight on the eve of July 6 and picked up the next morning – the day that the internal part of the Social Science Section Conference Deepening our Understanding of Threefolding in New Lebanon NY, was to begin. During the three days of lectures, research reports and deliberation on the conference theme, I was able to refer, among other things, to the new and actual form of threefolding as propounded in this working translation. Unfortunately, I cannot report that the indications given by Rudolf Steiner in 1922 to think and talk about Threefolding in a new way – indications which are taken up by Herbert Witzenmann in this volume, and to which I referred at last year’s annual meeting of the Social Section – have as yet had any noticeable effect.[1] Practically all the participants spoke of threefolding in the manner that Rudolf Steiner presented in his book Towards Social Renewal from 1919, which was updated, and – thereby, as regards the form – outdated in 1922 by the World Economy Course.

The one who most closely approached this fundamental new approach (for particulars I refer to the following three lectures) was the last speaker of the public part of the conference on the theme of elite globalization, Joel Kobran, one of the co-editors of the American journal The Threefold Review, who – not being a member of the Social Section, and thus not having attended its annual meeting – was therefore not in a position to react to my critical remarks. Another newly found ‘comrade in arms’ strongly tending towards this new approach advocated by Rudolf Steiner to present the threefold idea, was the international numismatist and monetary speaker, Hank Passafero from Oregon.

From this conference site – a former Shaker Village in New Lebanon, where in 1787 the first celibate Shaker Order in America devoted to “Hands to work – Hearts to God” was established – two other participants and myself were given a ride by John Moses to the “Other America Convocation” in Concord MA, organized by Stuart Weeks of the “Center for American Studies”. It turned out to be a ride of some three hours filled mainly with conversations on how to counteract Mammon and his cronies who – through their control of international capital and the central banks – are, next to our own spiritual indolence, the most formidable opponents to the realization of a world economy that is not only efficient, but also just.[2]

After this eventful Convocation on some of the historic sites in and around Concord – during which I was given ample time to present this booklet – I spent a few days assisting Stuart Weeks in an effort to lay the social organic groundwork for a series of public summits in New Hampshire with presidential candidates this coming fall. More about this later. Stay tuned!

Robert J. Kelder, Ithaca, July 22, 1999


[1] See my report Threefoldness and the Anthroposophical Society on last year’s Social Science meetings Munsalvaesche in America, p. 21, 4th edition Amsterdam, which was to be presented at the Rudolf Steiner Library on September 2, 2001, but which will appear later this fall (2001). A slightly revised version of the report on this conference itself is given in the following foreword.
[2] See the statement by the British economist Richard Jolly in Globalization Widens Rich-Poor Gap, U.N. Report Says, The New York Times, July 13, 1999: “The international community has yet to figure out how to deal with global market concentrations of economic power.” 

Introduction to the Third Edition (August 23, 2001) - An International Council for Responsible Globalization instead of Global Economic Association?


Since the last foreword to this booklet on social organics was written (July,1999), humanity has managed to enter the third millennium - and certainly one of the most striking developments that has since come to the fore is the increasing vehemence and fervor with which the issue of globalization, the world economy is not only being addressed in all sorts of United Nations and World Forums and academic – including anthroposophic – conferences, position papers and books, but is also being fought out violently by extremists of all shades and colors in the streets. Who has not heard and been struck by the violence of the “Battle of Seattle” during the World Trade (WTO) Summit in the fall of 1999, the subsequent skirmishes and clashes at similar high-profile events in Prague and Quebec and the most recent tragic shooting of a violent demonstrator by police in the streets of Genoa during a meeting this summer of the G-8, the political leaders of the eight leading industrialized nations in the world? It is indeed difficult to imagine a more pressing and explosive issue facing humanity on earth than this question of addressing hunger, poverty, ill health, poor housing in the third and fourth worlds and the preservation of the global environment in the face of a rich and prosperous first world consisting of the three current world power centers: North America (Canada and the USA), Western Europe and the industrialized nations in the Pacific (mainly Japan, Korea and Singapore). To put it in a nutshell: globalization is in. An example:
           
"When we focus on globalization, we are focusing on the number one problem. Globalization must remain constantly in view. Our Forum makes it clear that we need a permanent network structure allowing civil society to interact with the UN and the media. I suggest an International Council for Responsible Globalization. I see support for this idea. So let us discuss this possibility together and hope that it works. I am, as always, optimistic."

With this message, Mikhael Gorbachev opened the State of the World Forum 2000, “Shaping Globalization: Convening the Community of Stakeholders” that took place from September 4-10 in New York.

When I read a report by Ulrich Morgenthaler on this and events surrounding the UN Millennium Summit at that time[1], my immediate reaction was to try to draw attention again to the contents of this little but remarkable booklet of three introductory lectures on Rudolf Steiner’s Course on World Economy. For much more than the scarce allusions that Gorbachev makes to “a permanent network structure allowing civil society to interact with the UN and the media” and then already expressing the hope “that it works”, The Just Price develops after all a much more detailed as well as intrinsic and all-encompassing guideline for the justification, constitution and task of such an International Globalization Council: economic associations consisting of consumers, traders and producers to establish through the new royal art and science of social organics the so badly needed just prices for the commodities and services that humanity requires in order to live and progress comfortably and safely on this earth. Or to put it in words of the last paragraph of these three lectures:

 "The working world economy and the social community will not be rescued by a world computer (internet), but by a network of associations covering the whole earth, a network in which community consciousness and consciousness of productive and creative freedom can meet and confer in human beings, because they have become capable of speech."


So I sent an e-mail the next day under the heading “Real Alternatives to Current Globalization” to various friends and colleagues including Bernard Wolf and Claus Sproll from the Social Science Section in America, Nicanor Perlas, author of the book Shaping Globalization – Civil Society, Cultural Power and Threefolding, the Working Group Global Threefolding (GlobeNet3) and the Anthroposophical Society (Forum 3) in Germany, who together had issued an invitation the “people all over the world all over the world to work with spiritual substance and explore practical ways to engage in the social movements of our time” (Das Goetheanum, nr 8/2001) during their conference “Building a New Global Culture of Spirit” from June 20-24 in Stuttgart, Germany and other friends and colleagues. I referred in this email to the news in the said report by U. Morgenthaler that the IFG (International Forum on Globalization) is planning a position paper “Beyond the WTO: Alternatives to Economic Globalization” to answer the question often put to them: “If you are an opponent of the current global regulation inclusive the WTO, what are you for?”

I now quote from an updated, and here slightly revised version of this e-mail done in Hillsdale, NY on July 31, 2001 that was sent to, among others, Stuart Weeks of the Center for American Studies in Concord, MA and John Friede  from the Worldview Institute and Lisa Beaudoin, who is campaigning for environmental justice in the New Hampshire area. Why I am repeating this here will hopefully become clear in due course:

"Now, as some of you may know, in the summer of 1999 I translated and published with the help of among others economist David Gilmartin in New York a working translation of Herbert Witzenmann's introduction to Rudolf Steiner's course on World Economy, entitled The Just Price – World Economy as Social organics.  This project grew out of my experiences of the first meeting of the Social Science section of the Goetheanum in North America that I attended in the summer of 1998 in Kimberton Hills, Pennsylvania and where I presented a working translation of Herbert Witzenmann's social-esthetic study The Principles of the Anthroposophical Society as a Basis of Life and Path of Training.
In a report about this conference that the Willehalm Institute in Amsterdam published in a booklet Munsalvaesche in America – Towards the New Grail Community [2] I wrote (on. p. 23 ff.) the following remarks, which have in essence not been outdated by the march of time:
Having hopefully made the point that mutual brotherly criticism, if it is immanent, can be constructive and even uplifting, let me now proceed to some fundamental observations I felt called upon to make during the conference, and concerning which it is necessary to gain clarity in our ranks, if the goals set by the conference are to be properly realized.
The first one recalled to mind that Rudolf Steiner, to my knowledge, never once spoke or wrote of the threefold society as such, but always of the threefold social organism. This is of fundamental importance, because the concept of the social organism includes the whole earth, while the concept of society does not.[3] Secondly, this social organism is the functional counterpart of the threefold physical human organism, and in the first instance not of the human being as body, soul and spirit as was maintained during the conference. (Why the economic life for example is functionally related to the nervous and sense system, the rights sphere to the rhythmic system and spiritual life to the metabolism of man cannot be dealt with here. See Rudolf Steiner’s book Threefold Social Renewal).   
Thirdly and most important of all, if we are speaking of the threefold social organism, it is important to realize the weight of Rudolf Steiner's indication in his lectures on World Economy, already referred to here, that the form in which the idea of the threefold nature of the social organism is presented must, from now on, be based on these very same lectures. Concerning this point, I allowed myself the sad but true observation that, apart from a few true and hardy souls, this crucial change of form has not (yet) been taken to heart within our movement, including the Social Science Section under the current leadership, with all the dire consequences for humanity and the earth. This point seems especially important for the following conferences that the Social Science Section in America as a three-year plan has in mind, namely, as the conference text further stated "to support the developing of threefold concepts and recognizing their emergence. Future conferences concerning threefoldness on a world-scale and threefoldness in the individual are planned."
Lastly, if we are speaking of a threefold society, we can, nay must look at the Anthroposophical Society as the universal prototype for such a society, i.e. regard the 'principles' as the archetypal charter for a general human society on earth (see Herbert  Witzenmann’s booklet on The Principles of the Anthroposophical Society).[4]

Grasping this distinction may be especially relevant to someone who not only spoke with great enthusiasm about the threefold society, but also has written and acted on it, namely Nicanor Perlas from the Center for Alternative Development Initiatives (CADI) and author of the Philippine Agenda 21 Handbook (PA21). What is striking about this Agenda, which is fully endorsed by the current government of Philippine President Ramos, is the implicit similarity between the central objective of this official document, which sees a threefold society in terms of Civil Society, Polity and Economy (Business), and the first (central) paragraph of the 'principles' (originally called statutes) of the Anthroposophical Society! For the central tenet of PA 21 is sustainable human, spiritually liberating development. Is this not another way of saying that the Philippine people are striving to be "a union of people who wish to cultivate the life of soul in the individual as well as in human society on the basis of a true knowledge of the spiritual world" – the first statute of the Anthroposophical Society? This striving could be a fruitful basis for further dialogue and deliberation during the proposed international conference on Shaping The Future: Globalization, Anthroposophy And The Threefold Social Order form October 26 to 30, 1998 in Metro Manila, Philippines on, among other things, the all important question on how to realize the objectives of this PA 21 in the light of the research already done on the 'principles' of the Anthroposophical Society and the experiences (and mistakes) made in the attempt to implement them.[5]
Having translated this booklet by Herbert Witzenmann on World economy as social organics during two sizzling hot summer weeks in the cool marble halls of the New York Public Library, I was able to refer to it during the social science meeting in Upstate New York later that summer of 1999 and provide some copies to friends and the bookstore of the New York branch of the Society.
But the point I want to make, or rather the question I want to raise is this: Why has this booklet – apart from criticism by Gary Lamb, co-editor of the American journal "The Threefold Review", in a (private) letter, which we will deal with shortly – been largely, if not completely ignored (as far as I can see) in the subsequent world-wide discussions about Globalization and World Economy,[6] and, more important:

      Is it not finally time to start considering, and if found to be valid to start acting on the main point of this booklet, namely that the World economy lectures by Rudolf Steiner still form today the new exposition of the idea of the threefold social organism and that the presentation (not the contents) of his earlier book on Threefolding (Towards Social Renewal) in 1919 as he himself has stated, is outdated, and therefore, as experience has shown, doomed to failure?

As I see it, the world asks of us a twofold task that proceeds from the common spiritual font of social organics as the new Royal Art:
1.     Realize and implement the lectures on world economy as the new conception and language of global threefolding, and
2.            Realize and implement the 'principles' of the Anthroposophical Society as the universal charter for a truly civil society of free spirits.

This was my motivation for translating and presenting the two above mentioned working translations by Herbert Witzenmann (1905-1988), former member of the executive of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach and head of the Social Science Section at the Goetheanum." (End of the quotation from the email)

The foregoing may serve to make it quite evident that the most pressing issue occupying the minds (and bodies) of so many of our contemporaries is the globalization issue and that exactly this issue was already addressed through the new way conception and language that Rudolf Steiner developed in 1922 in his Course on World Economy. But the notion that this Course also inaugurated a new, universally valid, form for the representation of the idea of the threefold idea of the social organism has not totally convinced the editors of The Threefold Review. As mentioned, the only criticism of the argument presented in this booklet that I received was from Gary Lamb in a letter in which he maintained – after admittedly only having read the first of the three lectures presented – that “Herbert Witzenmann erred in his conclusion that in the World Economy lectures Steiner was presenting a new conception or metamorphosis of threefolding in which the economy is no longer to be viewed as a component of a threefold organism."[7] He conceded that Rudolf Steiner presented the threefold idea a new form in his World Economy Course – he could hardly deny this, as Rudolf Steiner states this quite clearly himself in the first lecture – but did not indicate what exactly this new form consists of. He then furthermore strongly urged me to reconsider my attempt to introduce this conception of social organics to America.

Now Lamb’s criticism on this point is shared by his co-editor of The Threefold Review, Joel Kobran, with whom I recently spent a congenial afternoon in the company of John Root Sr. and Famke Zonneveld in North Egremont (MA) discussing it at some length. We parted company, however, without coming to any real consensus. Since I consider the issue at stake absolutely fundamental and vital to the development of the royal art and science of social organics, I will attempt to present both sides of the argument here and then draw some conclusions. Hereby I will denote the two editors as “the critics”, Rudolf Steiners course on World Economy as “the Course”, the idea of the threefold nature of the social organism as “social organics”.

The critics make several points:
1. The Course does not represent the new way for the presentation of social organics, or at least not in the West, because immediately after its conclusion, Rudolf Steiner gave three lectures on social organics in Oxford, England on August 27, 28 and 29, 1922, the last two of which are published under the title Threefolding – A Social Alternative (London, 1980), in which he spoke in the “usual” manner of the book Towards Social Renewal and did not mention the Course at all.

Commentary: It is true that Rudolf Steiner does not mention the Course by name, but he certainly does so judged by its contents. In the lecture on August 18 e.g. he compares among other things the rate of industrial development between England and Germany in the course of the 19th century and then states that precisely because his book Towards Social Renewal was not understood and as such acted upon the horrendous inflation that was scourging in Germany at that time came about. Therefore “it is quite natural that in Germany my book Towards Social Renewal is almost forgotten today…, while in 1919 it was soon read far and wide. The moment in time when the contents of the book should have been realized is now past as far as Central Europe is concerned. The moment was past when that strong decline of the German currency began which now completely fetters the German Economy.”[8] Here is the point where Rudolf Steiner could have said something like the following: “An just because of this abominable situation in Central Europe, which made it impossible for my book to be read anymore, I took pains to present the threefold idea in a new way in my Course on World Economy.” As pointed out and developed by Herbert Witzenmann in the second lecture of his booklet, the social organism as a social organic work of art originated in its cultural-symptomatic mode of appearance, on the one hand, by the emerging economic contrast between England and France in the 19th century and on the other hand by its conceptual structure: this forms the introduction and fundament of the Course. Thus looked at contextually, Rudolf Steiner certainly does mention elements of the Course in his lectures in Oxford.

But what about the question of the new form? After all, he states in the same lecture on August 28: “So I believe that in future my book should be read more in the West and in Russia, but that it has no chance of becoming effective in Germany. The West, for instance, can learn much from this book, for in a non-utopian manner it simply states how the three spheres co-exist and should interact. For the West the moment in time does not matter, for much is still to be done for the right interaction of the three currents, the spiritual life, the economic life, the politic-legal life.”[9]

Here my answer would be that Rudolf Steiner probably believed that for some time to come his book from 1919 could be read in the West and Russia. The question however is: for how long? Perhaps it was read for some time, but the fact of the matter is: social organics was not understood and implemented in the West, let alone Russia. And it is my contention that after the economic crisis and crash in 1929, a second world war as a continuation of the first, brought on largely by economic causes, the establishment of central banks as the (partly hidden) real centers of world-wide power and control, rampant inflation and huge debts in third world countries and the so-called victory of capitalism (the West) over communism (the East), in which economic forces predominate over anything else, we must now turn to the Course as the most viable way to present social organics  as a real alternative to the current form of globalization to the world.

Update for this edition: We include here  the words that  Rudolf Steiner spoke during the Christmas Conference 1923 concerning the effects that the march of time has on the presentation form of the social threefold idea. This reference was inserted as an addendum to the previous edition; they are, to our knowledge, the last words with which Rudolf Steiner addressed this theme. They are not given here as proof that our viewpoint is necessarily correct, since there is after all a time span of some 78 years separating us from them. They do serve to show however that the way of representing social organics from 1919 is out of date; they can be read in the lecture “The Idea Of Future Building in Dornach” on 31 December 1923, in the volume entitled The Christmas Conference For The Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society 1923/24 (Anthroposophic Press, 1990, 214 ff.):

"I have often stressed amongst ourselves that if you want to live in reality and not in ideas, then the realities of time must be given particular recognition. The time in which one lives is a reality. But it is difficult to generate an understanding for this time as being something real. There are still people today who represent the threefolding of the social organism with the very sentences I used to use with regard to the conditions prevailing at the time, in 1919. History is indeed advancing so rapidly just now that if someone describes things in the way they were described in 1919 this seems to be hundreds of years out of date."

I did quote these words in my presentation of The Just Price in the Rudolf Steiner Library on Sunday, August 26, 2001 and expressed the hope that our critics will include them in their (hopefully) forthcoming response to our response, which was done in the spirit of a brotherly competition for the truth (update 2012: no response was made. Joel Kobran in the meantime has passed away.). 

2. “Herbert Witzenmann erred in his conclusion that in the World Economy lectures Steiner was presenting a new conception or metamorphosis of threefolding in which the economy is no longer to be viewed as a component of a threefold organism."

Commentary: Implicit in this critique is that Herbert Witzenmann would somehow negate or even destroy the usual image of the social organism as consisting of the spiritual-cultural, politico-legal and economic sphere as given in Towards Social Renewal. For, so it is further argued, just as the spiritual sphere is threefold, so the economic sphere is threefold. This is a serious but unfounded charge and results from a lack of conceptual discrimination, from not adopting or understanding the view that Herbert Witzenmann, in line with Rudolf Steiner, is taking in the Course in order to develop the new threefold language. And in order to adopt this novel view, which requires mobility in thinking, it is certainly necessary to read beyond the first lecture from this booklet, because it is really in the second and third lectures that Herbert Witzenmann further presents and rounds of his argument. The above sentence must furthermore be place in the right context. We quote from the end of the first lecture of this booklet, at the place where Herbert Witzenmann comments on Rudolf Steiner’s announcement calling for a new language and way of thinking:
           
“That only means: Today one cannot speak anymore about the threefold idea in the way that one did when it was inaugurated. With that the threefold idea is not suspended; on the contrary, it is a matter of becoming aware of the way it can become active among people in a new form and be understood.  The decisive sentence here is the following one (p.102)[10]: ‘We have found, within the economic process itself, a division that is threefold. Only, it is necessary that we begin to think of this threefold order in the right way.’ That is the decisive sentence: The threefold idea was inaugurated in a period of extreme economic, political and cultural turmoil. It was the period of complete collapse after the First World War. That would have been the moment to make the three members of the social organism mutually independent and in their independence bring them into a proper working relationship with each other. That would therefore have been a point in time to find the proper place and function for the economic life etc. within and out of this threefold social organism. Unfortunately this fruitful moment was lost; it was not recognized and seized. Time moved on and Rudolf Steiner says: We cannot speak anymore as we did then, because the economic, political and monetary straitjackets and automatisms have gotten much, much worse; and because the situation is no longer so open as it was then, we cannot make any headway directly in threefolding the social organism. Instead we must see how these three components, i.e. the economic proper, the rights and the spiritual, are latent within the economic life; we must see how actually all economic and social problems arise because these three components do not function together properly. We must develop the threefold idea out of the economic life, so that we recognize: These three components function together within the economic life, but we cannot come to a proper conscious awareness of their significance and function; here lies the cause for all economic and social problems. The transformation of the threefold idea therefore means that the economic life can no longer bring itself to bear as a component within the three independent components of the social organism, but that the threefold idea must be recognized as consisting of the three economic archetypal forces and be taken up within this economic life, if this economic life is to be saved from destruction.
  
This is directly and indirectly expressed by Rudolf Steiner in many passages. At one point, he says (p. 134): ‘And you can see it also from the other side. I pointed out how in the simple case of exchange, where money becomes more and more important, or indeed where exchange is recognized at all, the economic life enters directly into the sphere of rights.’ One person gives and the other one takes in the economic life. By becoming aware of this, we realize that these rights components and this rights sphere cannot be omitted in any way, for in giving and taking it is the just balance that matters. To this can be added the following: ‘The moment that reason is to enter the economic life, we must once again let that which prevails in the free spiritual life flow into the economic sphere.’ The organizing in the spiritual life, the justice in giving and taking, and the actual economic activity of enhancing products of nature: in this sense you therefore have in this course a continuation and at the same time a re-inauguration of the threefold idea. To say it once more: The economy is not a component within the threefold social organism, but the threefold organism is a component within the economic life. That is the interesting new situation that is characterized by this Course.”

The sentence that made our critics stumble is put in italics here, but it can obviously only be understood when it is realized that in this booklet Herbert Witzenmann is talking about two forms of the economic life: the economic life (proper) in a narrow and in a larger, extended sense.  In the above sense the word economy must be taken in the latter, extended sense as containing the (half free) spiritual life, the rights sphere (exemplified through just price) and the economic life proper (work applied to nature). Thus the economic life in a larger sense assumes the position of the social organism as a whole in which all three subsystems, including the economic life proper – the transformation (transubstantiation) of nature – can be found. Only seen in this way does the above sentence make sense and can the new social organic paradigm be understood.

3. Our critics further maintain the following: When Rudolf Steiner at the end of his first lecture in the Course (p. 16) said: “And now the position is such that if we are to speak once more today to people such as you, we can no longer speak in the same terms as we did then; today another language is necessary, and that is what I now want to give you in these lectures. I want to show you how today one must think once more about these questions, especially if one is still young and can participate in what has to take shape in the near future.” he was addressing students of economy, hence the Course is meant only for economists and therefore deals exclusively with the organization of the economic life.

Commentary:  The first thing to note here is that Herbert Witzenmann calls this a Course on Social Organics, a term which – it must be admitted – rolls much better of the tongue than the Threefold Social Order, the Threefold Commonwealth (smacks of the British, no offense meant), Triformation etc. all of which do not convey the real meaning of the German word Dreigliederung, which is not so much a folding than an organic “membering” process. The term furthermore directs the attention to the main concept at hand, namely that of the social organism a term which, as we have seen, goes much more in the direction of the green concept of environment, than the term society.  At the end of the first lecture of the Course, Rudolf Steiner says that above all else the social organism has to be understood: “The first thing needful is to describe the economic process.” (p. 22). But even before this can be done, the social organism must be understood: “The old State frontiers and limitations are interfering with the economic process. The latter (i.e. the economic process) must indeed be understood, but we must first gain an understanding of the social organism.”(p. 22).

That this Course is not exclusively the domain of economists, but for all those who are concerned with the proper production, care and management of humanity’s needs on earth is one of the many contributions that Herbert Witzenmann makes in this booklet to understanding the Course. As he develops in the second lecture, far from being only a course for economic experts, it is “a practical book, purely by the fact that by serving as a sort of social scientific meditation, it elevates the mind and develops a worldview.”

This brings to mind another aspect of the change in form initiated by the Course, showing how it differed qualitatively from the book Towards Social Renewal. In a footnote to his “Preliminary Remarks Concerning The Purpose This Book” Rudolf Steiner wrote (on p. 27)

“The author has purposely avoided confining himself to the customary political economic terminology. He knows exactly which are the passages a ‘specialist ’will call amateurish. His form of expression was determined not only by his desire to address himself also to people who are not familiar with political and social scientific literature, but primarily because of his view that a new age will judge most of what is specialized in this literature, including its terminology, to be one-sided and inadequate.”

In his Course on World Economy this was different; there he addressed himself to the scientific world in order to develop out of the terminology and concepts of the traditional, national or political economy a science of world economy, a new form of the threefold idea to meet the needs of the time. This is why, like all the other professional courses he gave, he emphasized – as I have shown in the introduction to the first edition to this booklet – that the annotation of the Free School for Spiritual Science should be inserted in it, stating among other things that these manuscripts are, as it were, text books, study-material of the School for Spiritual Science – something which unfortunately was broken with in the course of the dramatic history of the Anthroposophical Society, a tragic and still unresolved chapter known as the “book question.”[11]

By now it may be obvious that the Course far extends beyond the usual scope of the (academic) economist, for by taking as a starting point for the genesis of the social organism the three production factors nature, labor and capital (spirit) and showing how through the interaction between these three factors, economic values arise that ultimately need to be balanced by economic associations in order to establish just prices, it touches on the three major issues that all have their particular lobbies and political parties vying more or less against each other for political power and clout: the Greens have nature as their prime concern, the Democrats in the US and the social-democrats in Europe are concerned with labor and have historical connections to the unions, while the Republicans here and the Liberals and Conservatives in Europe see capital as their mainstay of power. There is at present no real world-wide alternative movement with the foresight and vista to help bring about economic associations, internationals councils for responsible globalization, that alone are capable of harmonizing these three productive components of the social organism: a movement for social organics as a Grail impulse of the 21st century could.

Acknowledgments

This third edition with the above foreword was written, and is also to be presented, in the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent NY. I am extremely grateful to Fred Paddock, the librarian here and John Root Sr. from the Berkeshire-Taconic Branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America for providing me with the facilities to complete this work and for making it possible to send out a newsletter announcing these talks to the members and friends of the Society in this area. I also want to warmly thank newly found friends such as Dennis Evenson for his (late night) editing work and his help in getting this booklet to Pro Printers in nearby Hudson, and Richard Roe who, while away on holidays these last few weeks in August, let me stay in his snug little cottage just a couple of houses up from Fern Hill where the Library stands. Lastly, I thank all those who attended my first talk and presentation at the library of Werner Greub’s book How The Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram von Eschenbach And The Reality Of The Grail and all those who bought copies of it. This enabled me to find and partly finance my way over here and made my stay, on the whole, a fruitful and even joyous occasion. Perhaps it can lead to the establishment here of an American branch of the Willehalm Institute for the advancement of anthroposophy as grail research, royal art and social organics.

Robert J. Kelder,
August 23, 2001
Rudolf Steiner Library, Ghent



[1] I read this report on October 8, 2000 in the German Weekly Das Goetheanum, the organ for the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland, a report that later appeared in translation under the title “An International Council for Responsible Globalization” in News for Members (Winter 2001) the organ of the Anthroposophical Society in America, Ann Arbor, MI.
[2] Munsalvaesche is the name given by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his poem Parzival to the Grail Castle. The Goetheanum as the physical and spiritual center of anthroposophy – the science as distinct to the poetry of the Grail – could be seen as a modern Grail Castle, the idea with respect to America being that as a necessary supplement to the idea of a modern Camelot that John F. Kennedy’s administration seemed to embody in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, America needs a Goetheanum, a modern Munsalvaesche in order to search and find its bearings.
[3] “The whole Earth, considered as an economic organism, is the social organism.” Rudolf Steiner, World Economy (London, 1977), p.23.
[4] A new edition of this working translation is to be presented during the third of three talks at the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, NY this summer. See the poster in the appendices for further details.
[5] This conference was organized by the Anthroposophical Group in the Philippines, 110 Scout Rallos Street, Timog, Quezon City, PHILIPPINES, tel. No. (63-2) 928-3986 fax (63-2) 928-7608; Email: nperlas@info.com.phNicanor Perlas. In the conference text Rationale and Need for the Conference another striking similarity is the observation made on the failure of what here has been called the social organic counter principle. Under the heading Internal Crisis and Loss of Moral Authority it is written: "Of equal concern, the global anthroposophical movement is minimally prepared internally to deal with the challenge of elite globalization. It has not threefolded many of its key institutions around the world. As such, it does not have the moral authority to advocate threefolding since it does not do what it champions. The global anthroposophical movement is also embroiled in internal disputes, losing sight of the great task ahead at the end of the 20th century." The text then goes on to quote the late Hagen Biesantz, former member of the Council in Dornach: "He refers to the importance of the organic working and mutual strengthening of the Center (Dornach and Central Europe) and the Periphery (all other national societies, groups and individuals) of the global anthroposophical movement. Problems arise in the anthroposophical movement, if this healthy working of Center and Periphery is interrupted or is not functional." Biesantz could well have referred here to the writings of his former colleague on the Council, Herbert Witzenmann, such as The Spiritual and Social Significance of The Principles of Rudolf Steiner and To Create or Administrate/ Rudolf Steiner’s Social Organics - A New Principle of Civilization. During the conference in Kimberton Hills I mentioned the possibility of translating these studies as study material for the next conference, as well as for the coming Manila gathering. (Update: this proposal was not accepted and so still awaits realization).
[6] In the preface to his book Shaping Globalization N. Perlas writes on page xxiii: “I would deeply appreciate comments of any kind, positive or negative.” I do not know if he regards my comments as positive or negative, since I have not (yet) received any response from him.
[7]  I do not have the complete letter in my possession during this stay in America, but hope to give the complete gist of his critique here, complemented by the discussion I had with his co-editor Joel Kobran. I have not been able to ask Gary Lamb for permission to make a quotation from his letter semi-public, semi-public because this booklet is not publicly for sale but meant as private study-material. In any case, I thank Gary Lamb for taking the trouble to make his critique and sincerely hope that the editors of The Threefold Review will now finally proceed to raise this argument on fundamental Threefold strategy in the pages of their magazine, so that more interested parties can take note of, and possibly join in, the discussion. 
[8] Rudolf Steiner, Threefolding, p. 18.
[9]  Rudolf Steiner, Threefolding, p. 19.
[10]  All page numbers from quotations of the World Economy Course in the three lectures refer to the translation by A.O Barfield and T. Gordon-Jones (Third edition, paperback, London,1977).
[11]  For further information and background see Herbert Witzenmann’s social esthetic study on the Principles of the Anthroposophical Society (Willehalm Institute, 5th ed. Ghent, NY, 2001).