tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4120436908940605742024-02-06T19:12:39.042-08:00The Just Price - World Economy as Social OrganicsAn introduction in the form of three lectures given in Switzerland in 1973 by Herbert Witzenmann to the Course on World Economy given by Rudolf Steiner in Switzerland in 1922. Translated and introduced by Robert Jan Kelder and first presented in bookform in 1998 during the annual meeting of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum, Free School for Spiritual Science in North America.Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-91880633934419415942012-08-30T10:11:00.000-07:002012-09-29T05:51:23.721-07:00Introduction to This Blog - Just Prices are the Virtues of the World Economy <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Power to the Virtues!</span></div>
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This blog is being launched on the specific occasion of a guest lecture in English with the title of this introduction "<a href="http://willehalminstitute.blogspot.nl/2011/08/just-prices-are-virtues-of-world.html">Just Prices Are the Virtues of the World Economy</a>" initiated by Philip van der Linden, <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Bart Kuijpers en Jeroen van
der Drift </span> 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 "<a href="http://power-to-the-virtues.blogspot.com/">The Virtues - Seasons of the Soul</a>" 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 <a href="http://roos.nl/over-de-roos/">De Roos</a> in Amsterdam until September 11, 2012).<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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The other source material is the publication <i>The Virtues</i>, 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 "<a href="http://power-to-the-virtues.blogspot.nl/2012/08/july-21-toaugust-21-such.html">Compassion becomes Freedom</a>" followed on September 1 "<a href="http://power-to-the-virtues.blogspot.nl/2012/08/september-courtesy-becomes-tact-of-heart.html">Courtesy becomes Tact of the Heart</a>". 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 "<a href="http://socialorganics.blogspot.nl/">Social Organics - A New Principle of Civilization</a>" 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.<br />
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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 "<a href="http://911-theaccusation.blogspot.com/">911: The Accusation - Bringing the Guilty to Justice</a>" as part of his trilogy <a href="http://www.willehalm.nl/operationtwins.htm">Operation Twins</a> 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 <i><a href="http://willehalm.nl/thegoldentip.htm">The Golden Tip</a></i>). What has now come to the fore from this source since my controversial appearance on the <a href="http://www.123video.nl/playvideos.asp?MovieID=1030533&q=911">Kevin Smith Show</a> 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.)<br />
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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 <a href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3838901406171&set=a.1104985619985.2017348.1087091937&type=1&theater">readers on his Facebook site </a>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.<br />
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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 <i>Movement for Social Organics - A New Principle of Civilization</i> 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 <i>Currency as a Question of Consciousness - A New Financial System Requires a New Principle of Civilization</i> (already available in Dutch as <i><a href="http://www.boekenroute.nl/gasten/gtn1Boek.aspx?BoekID=17859">Geldordening als bewustzijnskwestie</a></i> and <i>Social Organics - Ideas for the Reformation of the Economy</i> (partly available <a href="http://willehalminstituut.blogspot.nl/2011/03/sociale-oragnica-ideeen-voor-een-nieuwe.html">in Dutch on internet</a>). <br />
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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!".<br />
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Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-21785438894308196902012-08-30T05:15:00.002-07:002020-04-30T02:47:50.288-07:00The Author Herbert Witzenmann and His Work<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div>
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<span lang="DE" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: DE;">These three lectures are translated from <i>Der gerechte Preis – Eine
Grundfrage des sozialen Lebens</i> (Gideon Spicker Verlag, Dornach 1993). </span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is being made available as private
study material for members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society and the
Herbert Witzenmann Foundation<i> </i>by the <i>Willehalm Institute for Anthroposophy as
Grail Research, Royal Art and Social Organics</i> in Amsterdam. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Donations are more than welcome and can be made via PayPal to <a href="mailto:rjkelder@willehalm.nl">rjkelder@willehalm.nl</a></span></u></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574" name="_Toc522629609"><span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;">Willehalm Institute</span></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574" name="_Toc522629610"></a><span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;"> Press Foundation <o:p></o:p></span></h4>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574" name="_Toc522629611"><span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;">Kerkstraat 386A, 1017 JB Amsterdam</span></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574" name="_Toc522629612"></a><span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;">,<o:p></o:p></span></h4>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Netherlands</span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></h4>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="mailto:info@willehalm.nl">info@willehalm.nl</a>;
<a href="http://willehalminstitute.blogspot.com/">http://willehalminstitute.blogspot.com</a>
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Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-65506687506729077072012-08-30T04:56:00.000-07:002012-08-30T10:22:19.962-07:00Introduction to the First Edition (July 6, 1999)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This working translation of<i> The Just Price </i>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 <i>The Principles of the
Anthroposophical Society as a Basis of Life and a Path of Training</i> 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 <i>Social
Esthetic Study </i>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: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></i><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;" title="">[1]</a></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Dr Steiner: <i>On the whole the imprint will apply only to the lecture cycles and
those publications which are equal to the cycles</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Herr Werbeck: <i>What about the National Economy Course given here. Does that count as a
cycle?</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Dr Steiner: <i>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…”</i>
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Munsalvaesche
in America – Towards the New Grail Community </i>and other relevant literature
listed at the end of this publication (not included here, will eb put online soon)<i>. </i>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.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Be that as it may, the concept of
social organics <i>has</i> 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 <i>From Grail Christianity to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy </i>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: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 22.5pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 22.5pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"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 <i>Deepening our Understanding of
Threefolding,</i> followed by a public conference <i>The Threefold Social Order and the Challenge of Elite Globalization</i>
from July 7-11, in a Shaker village, New Lebanon, NY, and finally <i>The Other America Convocation</i> 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 20<sup>th</sup>
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 <i>Temple and Grail</i> (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.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 22.5pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>social organism</i> 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 <i>Walden</i> and Walt Whitman would plant in
his <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 22.5pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A
most enlightening introduction to these green economic matters are three
lectures from the year 1974 entitled <i>The
Just Price - World Economy as Social Organics </i>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 (<i>Im Bemühen um Klärung</i> p. 4, see also <i>Munsalvaesche in America</i>), 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! <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 22.5pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 22.5pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The actual translation of <i>The
Just Price</i> was begun on my laptop on June 21 in David and Laura Lee
Tresemer’s <i>Morning Star House</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The synopsis here was translated from a summary made for a Dutch working
translation of <i>The Just Price</i> 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 <i>The Just Price</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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: <i>Currency
as Consciousness</i> and <i>Social Organics
– Ideas for the Reorganization of the Economy. </i><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><i> </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">New York City, July 6, 1999 </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><i>Robert J. Kelder<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
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<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Rudolf Steiner, <i>The
Christmas Conference For The Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society
1923/1924</i>, Anthroposophic Press 1990, p. 115 ff. In this translation, the
last part of the last sentence reads “what it (i.e. the Council) <i>is</i> doing”, which weakens this statement
considerably, for the German word <i>jemals</i>, meaning <i>ever</i> or <i>at
any time</i>, 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 <i>The Principles of the Anthroposophical Society</i>, 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 <i>Anthroposophical
Society</i>. 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 <i>Kardeiz Saga</i>. See also the coming, revised
edition of <i>Munsalvaesche in America – Towards the New Grail Community.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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 <i>these</i> 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."<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Rudolf Steiner, <i>The
Christmas Conference</i>…, p. 153 f.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See the foreword to this third edition for a response
to criticism of the editors of the American journal <i>The Threefold Review</i>
that Herbert Witzenmann misinterprets and misrepresents Rudolf Steiner’s Course
on World Economy.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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 20<sup>th </sup>and 21<sup>st</sup> 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 <i>How The Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram von Eschenbach and
the Reality of the Grail</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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 <i>The
Principles of the Anthroposophical Society</i> and <i>Munsalvaesche in America </i>by
the author. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><span lang="DE"> German titles: <i>Geldordnung als Bewusstseinsfrage</i>,
Gideon Spicker Verlag, 1995 and <i>Sozialorganik
– Ideen zu einer Neugestaltung der Wirtschaft</i>, G. Spicker, 1998.<span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-65611052215685150512012-08-30T04:48:00.006-07:002012-08-30T04:59:57.173-07:00Introduction to the Second Edition (July 22, 1999)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">The first edition of 50 copies of </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">The Just Price</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;"> 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 </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">Deepening our Understanding of Threefolding</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
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.</span><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
Practically all the participants spoke of threefolding in the manner that
Rudolf Steiner presented in his book </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">Towards
Social Renewal</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;"> from 1919, which was updated, and – thereby, as regards the
form – outdated in 1922 by the World Economy Course.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>The Threefold Review</i>, 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Robert J. Kelder</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">, Ithaca, July 22, 1999</span></div>
<div>
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<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See my report <i>Threefoldness
and the Anthroposophical Society</i> on last year’s Social Science meetings <i>Munsalvaesche in America</i>, p. 21, 4<sup>th</sup>
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.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See the statement by the British economist Richard Jolly in <i>Globalization Widens Rich-Poor Gap, U.N.
Report Says</i>, 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.” <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-70923710495400421012012-08-30T04:43:00.001-07:002012-09-18T04:32:20.263-07:00Introduction to the Third Edition (August 23, 2001) - An International Council for Responsible Globalization instead of Global Economic Association?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">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 </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">and</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">
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:</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"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 <i>International
Council for Responsible Globalization</i>. I see support for this idea. So let
us discuss this possibility together and hope that it works. I am, as always,
optimistic." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When I read a report by Ulrich Morgenthaler on this and
events surrounding the UN Millennium Summit at that time<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>,
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”, <i>The
Just Price</i> 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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> "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."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Shaping Globalization – Civil Society,
Cultural Power and Threefolding</i>, 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” (<i>Das Goetheanum</i>, 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?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="EmailStijl112"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"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
<i>The Just Price – World Economy as Social
organics</i>. 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 <i>The
Principles of the Anthroposophical Society as a Basis of Life and Path of
Training</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span class="EmailStijl112"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> In a report about this conference that the <i>Willehalm Institute</i> in Amsterdam
published in a booklet <i>Munsalvaesche in
America – Towards the New Grail Community </i></span></span><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 11pt;">[2]</span></b></span><!--[endif]--></span></i></span></a><span class="EmailStijl112"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I wrote (on. p. 23 ff.) the following remarks, which have
in essence not been outdated by the march of time: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span class="EmailStijl112"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> ‘</span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">The first one recalled to mind that Rudolf Steiner, to my
knowledge, never once spoke or wrote of the threefold <i>society</i> as such, but always of the threefold <i>social organism. </i>This is of fundamental importance, because the
concept of the social organism includes the whole earth, while the concept of
society does not.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Secondly, this social organism is the
functional counterpart of the threefold <i>physical
human organism</i>, and in the first instance <i>not</i> 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 <i>Threefold
Social Renewal</i>). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Thirdly and most important of all, if we are speaking of the
threefold <i>social organism</i>, it is
important to realize the weight of Rudolf Steiner's indication in his lectures
on <i>World Economy</i>, 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." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Lastly, if we are speaking of a threefold <i>society</i>, we can, nay must look at the <i>Anthroposophical Society</i> 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 <i>The
Principles of the Anthroposophical Society</i>).<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Center for
Alternative Development Initiatives</i> (CADI) and author of the <i>Philippine Agenda 21 Handbook</i> (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 <i>Shaping The Future: Globalization, Anthroposophy
And The Threefold Social Order</i> 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.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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,<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
and, more important: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> 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 (<i>Towards
Social Renewal</i>) in 1919 as he himself has stated, is outdated, and
therefore, as experience has shown, doomed to failure? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent3" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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: <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 59.2pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 59.2pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -27.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">1.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></b><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Realize and implement the lectures on world economy as the
new conception and language of global threefolding, and <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 59.2pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 59.2pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -27.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">2.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></b><!--[endif]--><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Realize and implement the 'principles' of the Anthroposophical
Society as the universal charter for a truly civil society of free spirits. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: -9.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>The Threefold Review</i>. 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."<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Now Lamb’s criticism on this point is shared by
his co-editor of <i>The Threefold Review</i>, 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”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">The critics make several points:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Threefolding – A Social Alternative</i> (London,
1980), in which he spoke in the “usual” manner of the book <i>Towards Social
Renewal</i> and did not mention the Course at all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Commentary: It is true that Rudolf Steiner does not mention
the Course by <i>name</i>, but he certainly does so judged by its <i>contents</i>.
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 19<sup>th</sup>
century and then states that precisely because his book <i>Towards Social
Renewal</i> 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 <i>Towards Social Renewal</i> 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.”<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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 19<sup>th</sup> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.”<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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: <i>social organics was not understood and
implemented in the West, let alone Russia</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Update for this edition</b>: 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 <i>The Christmas Conference For The
Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society 1923/24</i> (Anthroposophic
Press, 1990, 214 ff.): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 36.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"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."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I did quote these words in my presentation of <i>The Just
Price</i> 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.). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText3" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Towards Social Renewal</i>. 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: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“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)<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>:
‘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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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: <i>The economy is not a component within the
threefold social organism, but the threefold organism is a component within the
economic life. </i>That is the interesting new situation that is characterized
by this Course.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The sentence that made our critics stumble is put in italics
here, but it can obviously only be understood when it is realized <i>that in
this booklet Herbert Witzenmann is talking about two forms of the economic life</i>:
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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Commentary: The first
thing to note here is that Herbert Witzenmann calls this a Course on <i>Social
Organics</i>, a term which – it must be admitted – rolls much better of the
tongue than the <i>Threefold Social Order</i>, the <i>Threefold Commonwealth</i>
(smacks of the British, no offense meant), <i>Triformation</i> etc. all of
which do not convey the real meaning of the German word <i>Dreigliederung</i>,
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 <i>environment</i>, than the term <i>society</i>. 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).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This brings to mind another aspect of the change in form
initiated by the Course, showing how it differed qualitatively from the book <i>Towards
Social Renewal</i>. In a footnote to his “Preliminary Remarks Concerning The
Purpose This Book” Rudolf Steiner wrote (on p. 27) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.”<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>nature</i>,
<i>labor</i> and <i>capital</i> <i>(spirit)</i> 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 <i>nature</i> as their prime concern, the Democrats in
the US and the social-democrats in Europe are concerned with <i>labor</i> and
have historical connections to the unions, while the Republicans here and the
Liberals and Conservatives in Europe see <i>capital</i> 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 21<sup>st</sup> century could. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: center;">
<b>Acknowledgments<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>How The Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram von
Eschenbach And The Reality Of The Grail</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Robert J. Kelder,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">August 23, 2001<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Rudolf Steiner Library, Ghent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I read this report on October 8, 2000 in the German
Weekly <i>Das Goetheanum</i>, 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 <i>News
for Members</i> (Winter 2001) the organ of the Anthroposophical Society in
America, Ann Arbor, MI.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Munsalvaesche is the name given by Wolfram von
Eschenbach in his poem <i>Parzival</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> “The whole Earth, considered as an economic organism,
is the social organism.” Rudolf Steiner, World Economy (London, 1977), p.23.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> This conference was organized by the Anthroposophical
Group in the Philippines, 110 Scout Rallos Street, Timog, Quezon City,
PHILIPPINES, tel. <span lang="PT-BR">No. (63-2) 928-3986 fax (63-2) 928-7608; Email:
nperlas@info.com.phNicanor Perlas. </span>In the
conference text <i>Rationale and Need for
the Conference</i> another striking similarity is the observation made on the
failure of what here has been called the social organic counter principle.
Under the heading <i>Internal Crisis and
Loss of Moral Authority</i> 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 20<sup>th</sup> 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 <i>The Spiritual and Social Significance of The
Principles of Rudolf Steiner</i> and <i>To
Create or Administrate/ Rudolf Steiner’s Social Organics - A New Principle of
Civilization</i>. 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).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In the preface to his book <i>Shaping Globalization</i>
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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 <i>The Threefold Review</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<div class="MsoBodyText3">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Rudolf Steiner, <i>Threefolding</i>, p. 18.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Rudolf Steiner,
<i>Threefolding</i>, p. 19.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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). <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/The%20JUST%20PRICE%20Blog%20Edition.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> For further
information and background see Herbert Witzenmann’s social esthetic study on
the Principles of the Anthroposophical Society (Willehalm Institute, 5<sup>th</sup>
ed. Ghent, NY, 2001). <span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-43518591025669759882012-08-30T04:24:00.000-07:002012-08-30T05:01:23.586-07:00Foreword to the Fourth Edition (October 23, 2001) - "Leviathan – Society As An Organism"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">This edition is being made on the eve of a visit to London to
present the fourth, British edition of </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">How The Grail Sites Were Found</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"> in
the Rudolf Steiner House on October 26. In my various introductions to editions
of Werner Greub's work, I have referred to this booklet </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">The Just Price</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"> –
and also to the one on </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">The Principles of The Anthroposophical Society</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"> –
by Herbert Witzenmann as being examples of publications that are written out of
the Grail impulse of the 20</span><sup style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">th</sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"> century: Rudolf Steiner's
anthroposophy or science of the Grail, more particularly: transforming the
driving force on which the present world economy is based, namely egotism, to a
world economy based on altruism. It therefore seemed appropriate to also make
new editions of these two booklets available for the launching of Werner
Greub's book in London, since the editions made in America on half letter-size
(in contrast to the European A-5 format) were sold out. This meant redoing the
whole layout since the original manuscripts were left in Montreal in the hands
of publisher Jacques Racine with a view to supplying possible demands in North
America.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Considering the lack of time, I will restrict myself to two
items that I hope to work out further in a future edition of this booklet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The first one consists of the observation that the concept of
the social organism seems to be enjoying a comeback in North America, albeit in
a sort of neo social-Darwinist fashion. I am referring to the book <i>The
Lucifer Principle – A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces Of History </i>by
Howard Bloom (published by The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York in 1995). In
the foreword, David Sloan Wilson writes: "The bone of contention is the
organismic nature of human society. Thomas Hobbes and many others of his time
regarded individuals as the cells and organs of a giant social organism – a
Leviathan – 'which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength
than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended.' Today this
idea is regarded as no more than a fanciful metaphor. Evolution is thought to
produce individuals who are designed to relentlessly pursue their own
reproductive success. Society is merely the by-product of individual striving
and should not be regarded as an organism in its own right. Even individuals
can be decomposed into selfish genes whose only purpose is to replicate themselves.
It is a mark Howard Bloom's independence of thought that he resisted the
extreme reductionism that pervades modern evolutionary biology. He believes
that Leviathan, or society as an organism, is not a fanciful metaphor but an
actual product of evolution. The Darwinian struggle for existence has taken
place among societies, as well as among individuals within societies. We do
strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves,
with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.
That is the vision of evolution and human behavior found in <i>The Lucifer
Principle</i>, and at the moment it can be found nowhere else."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The anthroposophical concept of the idea of the threefold
nature of the social organism and – more important – the way that this idea, as
developed in this booklet on "Just Price" based on Rudolf Steiner's
lectures on the world economy, ought to be presented and implemented, is not
found in <i>The Lucifer Principle</i>, not even the slightest reference to it.
This is, indeed, not surprising, considering the present state of affairs in
the world, which has after all come to be what it is because of the steady
refusal of the scientific and religious elite to consider the helping hand
offered to them in solving the ills facing mankind. Herbert Witzenmann refers
in these following pages to the bitter complaint lodged by Rudolf Steiner to
this effect. But this present radically polarizing world situation is no less
due, conceptually speaking, to the steady refusal of many, if not all,
well-meaning representatives of the idea of the threefold nature of the social
organism to consider and act on the words of Rudolf Steiner in his first
lecture of the course on world economy that a new language and way of thought
for this social organic impulse to rescue mankind on earth from complete
inhumanity was necessary. This far-reaching consequence can admittedly only
become evident, when this new approach has been understood; without that basis,
this charged statement will appear absurd and far-fetched.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This brings me to my second observation, which I had to make
after reading through the German language newsletter <i>Dreigliederung des
Sozialen Organismus</i> (Threefolding of the Social Organism) nr. 1, March 2001
published by the <i>Initiative Network Threefolding</i> in Stuttgart, Germany.
This issue of some 44 pages deals with "Trisectoral Partnership, Civil
Society and Threefolding" and is a long-drawn debate between, among
others, Harrie Salman, Christoph Strawe and Nicanor Perlas. And again, the same
utter silence, implicit denial and non-recognition of the actual form of the
threefold idea, so strongly emphasized and clearly developed by Rudolf Steiner,
that we encountered in North America is met with in this journal. The closest
to acknowledging the form as demanded by the spirit of the time, albeit
implicitly and in some sort of pluralistic manner, comes the editor Strawe in
his contribution "On The Search For the Forms of Implementation of the
Threefold Idea". This is when he presents in a chapter "About the
Manifold Forms of Implementing the Threefold Idea" a short history of the
threefold movement from 1917 until 1922, but then leaves out the course on
world economy that year and the founding anew of the Anthroposophical Society
in 1924 as social organic modes of appearance, and only writes (p. 18):
"there is not the smallest indication that Rudolf Steiner did not
considers other ways and means of implementing the threefold idea.", after
which he gives a few more recent examples, all from the political-rights
sphere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">These two observation may suffice to illustrate the present
bankruptcy and impotence of the spiritual life of mankind, which I tried to
diagnose in my foreword to the fourth British edition of <i>How The Grail Sites
Were Found</i>, but this only as a prelude, a backdrop to a possible
therapeutic course of action: <i>A Union of People – The Kardeiz Saga To Recall
the Anthroposophical Society. <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In a forthcoming book with this title I hope to enlarge on
this; those interested in reading more on the Kardeiz Saga, I refer to my introduction
to Herbert Witzenmann's social-esthetic study on <i>The Principles of The
Anthroposophical Society </i>that is coming out in a sixth edition. (Update
2012: This publication will soon appear as a blog). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<i><span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;">Robert
Jan Kelder</span></i><span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;">,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<span lang="NL" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: NL;">Willehalm
Institute,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Amsterdam, October 23, 2001<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-62230490253161928282012-08-30T04:17:00.003-07:002012-08-30T04:17:40.959-07:00First Lecture on December 14, 1974<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><br />Ladies and Gentleman, Dear Friends,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The task of this weekend conference will be the study of our
theme “the just price.” With that is meant, in all humility, a sort of
introduction to the so-called <i>National
Economy Course</i> by Rudolf Steiner. I say “so-called” because we are dealing
here with lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave in Dornach in July and August of
1922 mainly at the request of students of economics. He himself, however, would
hardly have given this title to this course of lectures, even though the words
“national or political economy” often appear in it. Doubtless, he used this
term only to relate to the outlook, education and situation of the majority of
his audience, as he always did. And with this in mind, one can understand this
title, which was probably not Rudolf Steiner’s. If we look only at the content,
it is quite impossible to speak of this as a “Course on National or Political
Economy,” because it is a course on world economy, or even more precisely, on <i>world economy as social organics</i>. Something
like that would have to be the title of these lectures, for they show that
social and economic life can only develop against the background of the world
economy of our time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps I have been too bold in choosing this title of the
just price, but it arose, if I may be allowed to say something personal, from a
wish I have been nurturing for a long time. For a number of years I have wanted
to hold a seminar about this theme as an attempt to introduce the concept of
social organics. This did not take place, because those who could have assisted
made the obvious objection, as is of course always possible, that before one
tackles the most difficult problems, one should begin with simple ones. Now everyone who knows the course will know
that the main topic of discussion is the problem of just price. One can
understand these problems that are treated within broad contexts only when they
are understood as an elucidation of this one main problem. This objection at
the time was therefore perhaps not quite justified, but by raising it, one can
of course stifle an initiative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now, as every sentence shows, directly or indirectly, this
course deals with the problem of just price, and during our study over these
two days what is meant by this will, I believe, also become clear. I would
like, however, to illustrate this with the words of Rudolf Steiner in order to
remind you or introduce you to them. You probably all know them, but there is
always a reason in our joint effort here to bring these archetypal words to the
fore. To begin, please listen how Rudolf Steiner quite unmistakably expresses
that in these 14 lectures he speaks and will speak about nothing other than
just price.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Right away, you will find in the second lecture - the first
lecture is a grand prelude, but the concrete problems are approached only in
the second one - at the beginning (p. 24): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"In the last resort all the most
important considerations in the national economy really merge in this question
of price” – here the term national economy is used, even though the course
speaks about the latter having moved into world economy – “for all the impulses
and forces that are at work in (national) economies culminate at length in
price."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In other words, everything depends on our being able to come
to a mental picture of just price as it arises in the economic process.
Naturally, nothing more is given at first by such a formula – about the concept
of just price actually a whole number of formulas – than an abstraction, and
our task in these lectures will be, at least roughly, to work the whole of
national economy into this abstraction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Rudolf Steiner always emphasizes the same thing: to become
aware of the processes that lead to price forming. All processes affect price
formation, and in social organics it is a question of creating an awareness of
all these processes as regards their price forming function. At the beginning
of lecture 7, we hear for example the following words (p. 84): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“We have seen now how the whole
economy takes its course; we have seen how purchase or sale, loan and gift act
as impelling factors, motive factors within this system. We have to realize
that there can be no economy without this interplay of loan, gift and
purchase…The important thing is to understand what role these three factors
play in the forming of price. Only by recognizing this, shall we succeed in any
degree in formulating the price problem.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Again and again, Rudolf Steiner attaches great importance to
focusing on the central role of the price problem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Allow me to add a few more short quotations to prove my
point. On page 91 we read: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Altogether the things that happen in
the economy” – allow me to say social organics – “depend far more on the
relative rising and falling of prices than on any other circumstance. It is by
the relative rise and fall in prices that the difficulties of life itself are
introduced into social organics. As to whether the products as a whole rise or
fall – if they all rose or fell uniformly, that would basically be of little
interest to people. What interests them is that the different products rise or
fall to a different extent. This fact is emerging just now in a very tragic way
under the present economic conditions” – this was in the year 1922, but he
could also say it for 1974; we do not have to reformulate it at all – “because
of the rising and falling of the (prices of) products in the most varying ways,
what is rising and falling are the money values themselves,” – that we also
notice very clearly – “but in these money values is stored up what were
previously real values. By this fluctuation an entire mingling and confusion is
now being brought about in human society.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One could also say: a complete rearrangement. This is in an
even much greater degree the case today than at that time. We need not change a
single word and can only say: What was true then to a certain extent, is true
today to the greatest possible extent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Another quote (p. 96): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“We have perhaps already seen that
the most important question in economics is that of price. The point therefore
will now be to observe prices in the sense that I have indicated. The rise and
fall, or stability of prices – the fact that the prices of certain products are
too high or low (for one can have a feeling for such things) – indicates
whether or not the economic organism is functioning properly. For that is what
must fall to associations” – i.e. unions of people involved in the social
organic process – “to discover from reading the barometer of the price indices
what needs to be done in the rest of the economic sphere.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And now the last quotation in this context (p. 184): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“It is the forming of prices that
matters, to begin with, and in this respect you do not need to go back to anything
vague or indefinite. For you can always follow things back to the fundamental
relationship of value which is brought about by the very fact of work upon the
land, namely the ratio of the population to the land available for
cultivation.” – This is a far-reaching explanation in which actually everything
is summarized that is said about the price problem in this course and that we
gradually need to become aware of. Rudolf Steiner continues –: “In this ratio
you will find that which originally underlies the formation of values. In
effect, all the labor that can be done must come from the given population and,
on the other hand all that this labor can unite with must come from the given
land. For everyone needs what this labor produces, and as far as those who are
spared from this labor on account of their spiritual work, the others must
perform it for them in addition to their own.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I will have to come back to this in the course during our
joint efforts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Summarizing, Rudolf Steiner therefore says that the main
issue of economy, the forming of prices, is actually a matter of focusing on
the <i>ratio of arable land area to
population</i>. For running the economy, doing business is essentially a matter
of bringing products into exchange among people, and this exchange among people
expresses itself in price formation. The forming of prices – that must to begin
with be the thing that matters. All the efforts devoted to these lectures will
be in vain if they do not lead to an understanding of the function of price
forming processes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In the time available, it is naturally impossible to treat
this problem exhaustively. Yet perhaps it will be possible to show you that
this course by Rudolf Steiner on world economy as social organics is in no way
only a course for experts, even though it came about at their request, but that
it also contains a certain view of totality (holism). Rudolf Steiner always
speaks about the same totality of things, but always from new viewpoints. The
great thing about this course is that he has developed in it a totality
concerning man, world and knowledge from perhaps the most interesting viewpoint
that there is. Therefore, I hope that this small impulse we are creating
together in this weekend could perhaps lead in the coming years to a whole week
in order to go through this course lecture by lecture.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Before turning to our actual work, however, I would like first to characterize
some aspects of this course pertaining to its original contents and tone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The course demands, perhaps more than all other courses, but
in any case at least as much, a certain way of thinking, and the course itself
is meant to be an instrument for the schooling of this mode of thought, namely
of <i>mobility in thinking</i>. But at the
same time this course points in every sentence, sometimes quite bitterly, to
the degree that present-day mankind lacks this mobility in thinking and how
little mankind is prepared to take the necessary steps to develop this
flexibility. And we want to bring to mind the words of warning by Rudolf
Steiner and the really deeply painful tone with which he emphasizes this fact.
There we hear for example the following appeal (p.58): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“This is the infinitely sad thing
today, that for many centuries mankind has grown accustomed to sharply defined
concepts that cannot be applied to living processes. Today we are called upon
to bring our concepts into motion in order to penetrate economic processes with
conscious understanding. This is what we must attain: mobility in thinking so
as to be able to think a process through to its end inwardly.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Instead of the rigid cause-and-effect relation thinking that
looks at the effects from underlying premises, we must attain a process-based
thinking that learns to look at the processes of circulation and metamorphosis.
Such a thinking recognizes that one and the same thing is simultaneously the
same and yet something else. For example, a product is indeed a product
everywhere but, depending upon where it turns up within the economic process,
it has totally different evaluations, and brings about and demands totally
different prices. Naturally, this also depends on its location or on its stage
within the process. Thus, the product is at the same time identical with an
archetype, appearing in many facets. And so the cause and effect relation is
recognized by process-based thinking as just one example of the product’s
archetypal content and nature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here is another passage in the same tone (p. 107): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“It is actually – I would like to say
– extremely tragic that no understanding should be found for something that is
after all so simple and so correct. For, the moment that there is real
understanding, it can be accomplished not even by the day after tomorrow, but
by tomorrow. For it is not a question of radical changes, but of seeking the
associative union in each case.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Rudolf Steiner thought that this detailed solution could in
effect be found not today, but already tomorrow as prompted by the concrete
cases in question, but whereby, as the whole course makes evident, a series of
insights in mobile thinking is necessary: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“You need only to summon the will and
direct the intelligence to do it.” – You see, it comes for the most part down
to understanding. – “This is the thing that in effect touches one so painfully,
for at this point economics does coincide in a certain way with morality and, I
would like to say, religion. For it is completely incomprehensible to me, for
example, how this view on economics could have remained completely unnoticed by
those who – let us say – are officially in charge of responding to the
religious needs of the world.” – That the idea of threefolding could have
remained unnoticed by economists and businessmen, that is perhaps
understandable to some extent, but that it could have remained entirely
unnoticed by those who had to take care of the religious needs of mankind; that
is completely incomprehensible.– “For there is no doubt about it, during recent
times it has clearly emerged that the economic conditions are no longer being
mastered, the facts have gone beyond the control of human beings and so today
we stand above all for the question: How can this be mastered, how shall we
grapple with it? But it must be mastered by human beings and mastered by them
in associations.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As the previous words show, it must be done from a certain
religious-moral aspect. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One more quote (p. 185): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Truth has disappeared from our way
of life” – as is practiced today – “out
of words of truth we have slid into empty phrases; out of the sense of what is
right and wrong into mere conventions, and out of a practical hold on life into
dead routines. And we shall not escape from this threefold untruth of<i> phrase, convention and routine</i>, till we
develop the will to dive down into things as they really are and see how they
are shaped.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Part and parcel of coming to this decision, a decision that
at the same time harbors cognitive and religious-moral dimensions and therefore
strengthens the rights sphere, is consciousness raising. Rudolf Steiner
expresses this in a succinct sentence to the effect that everything that takes
its course instinctively must be elevated into the clear region of reason.
Social organics is a process of developing and raising consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We want to attempt once more to survey and review the
quotations that were just read, because the quotations are chosen with a view
to conveying, according to my conviction and feeling, an initial overview of
the whole social organic course. I want to proceed from this necessity of
developing awareness, since this is connected with living thinking. For we live
consciously in our own cognitive behavior and in our life in general and the
world that surrounds us, only when we become aware of the great lie that
dominates the world today, namely the lie that the origin of everything is
death, that death is the father of life. This is a pertinent lie and a obvious
impossibility, for each instance of soul observation would show us that there
can be nothing in the world, at least nothing in as far as it is present in our
consciousness, that would not appear to us as coming from the realm of the
living. This is therefore the basic truth that we must become aware of when we
want to understand this course; this basic truth is indeed the general
foundation of anthroposophy, i.e. that death is not the father of the living,
but that the living is something that leaves its traces in the non-living.
Anthroposophical life in general and the understanding of this course in
particular are based on the constant practice of observing one’s own behavior
in cognition and life and thereby coming to realize that incoherent perceptual
matter is structured by living, archetypal concepts. The vitality of these
concepts permits them to freeze, to crystallize into various perceptual
situations, similar to a plant as an archetypal being that only appears in
multiple examples of itself in the different metamorphoses and stages of its
course of development, while it is the essence of the plant that underlies
these various modes of appearance as something that cannot be represented and
observed with the ordinary physical senses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This practice is actually the basic prerequisite for the
development of greater awareness, that must be fulfilled everywhere for
understanding even the simplest word of Rudolf Steiner, e.g. understanding that
what in a certain shape becomes present in our conscious cognition of Being and
what can be represented in this particular state is based on mutually forming,
living potencies that freeze into these different metamorphoses, leaving them
as examples of their true vitality. That is what is meant by living thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">That is therefore the basic truth the thinking human being
must become aware of, that he must have the courage, but also the power of
observation, to protest against the universal lie dominating the world today,
that death is the father of life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Yet, we are not only thinking but also speaking human beings.
And everything depends on whether we speak with each other and make ourselves
understood. We can only do this if we come together in advisory bodies in which
the individual participants or members can put their experiences and abilities
at the disposal of the others, from which then an encompassing opinion can be
formed. These bodies in which human beings can come together as speakers in the
fullest sense of the word are called associations by Rudolf Steiner. And just
as the living human being is lifted up into a world of archetypes that weave
and shape a spiritual realm of universal being above his limited personality, a
world wide web of Being floating above him but near enough to be sensed, so the
human beings able to speak with each other experience that they are in a
community in which they can speak. They then speak a common language, actually
only now discovering this language community, and finding themselves once more
lifted up into the spiritual sphere of understanding, in which they are carried
still further beyond themselves than in the experience of the archetypal world
of the truth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And once more they are lifted up higher upon becoming aware
that they are also acting, walking human beings, striding into social reality.
And in this striding together into social reality they are lifted up a third
time even higher above themselves. When they stride into social reality
motivated by the truth that the origin of life is indeed life and not death,
the truth that the avenues of understanding among people can and must
constitute the life of rights, when motivated by this twofold raising of consciousness,
they then realize not only what hovers above them as the angel of truth in this
social reality, and what hovers above them when they speak with each other as
the spirit of a language community. They then they come to that religious
consciousness which was addressed by Rudolf Steiner with the words that the
spirit of the age can and wants to be present in human beings who together take
the road to social reality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We can conjure up the following picture. You have no doubt
this fall and winter passed by fields that had been plowed. You may have been
deeply moved to see how the earth was heaved up, displaying its brown and black
shades of color, surrounded by the green of winter meadows. In your mind you
then would have seen the sower going over this field. By saying this, I am
really well into using a figure of speech, for sowing is mostly done
mechanically these days. Yet in one’s mind’s eye appears the image of a sower,
when seeing a plowed and tilled field, a real old-fashioned sower who has gone
over the field sowing the seeds. For a sower – and perhaps even today – it is
completely impossible to believe in the universal lie that death is the father
of life. This sower lives in these archetypal concepts that underlie all
reality, he experiences himself in this archetypal vitality of the world as one
of its members and from this awareness of the formative spirituality of the
real spirit, which is not frozen in chains of effects, he drops the seed onto
the plowed field. He is actually the most real representative of living
concepts and their truth that I can imagine. For him, it is a directly felt
truth in life that human needs and abilities spring from standing in that world
of truth that shapes all reality, and that from this world of truth arise the
true commodities that satisfy vital human needs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here is the living stream in which the commodities are
carried as products of nature, in which these wares swim, like the blood
corpuscles in the blood stream, and in which they are liberated from their heaviness
in accordance with the real spirituality which in this true formative spirit
stream gives them the buoyancy, the release in weight from their mere
naturalness, whereby they can become objects to satisfy real human needs. In
this way the sower, as a representative of the truth, walks over the field, and
in so doing he is not only a thinking, but also an acting human being, sowing
the seeds as one standing together with others in the practice of human life,
who is aware that he acts for the others and that he can do this only because
others do things for him. By standing in the real spiritualized processes of
nature as a representative of the living truth, he is responsible for the
formative forces of the spirit flowing out of the past. But by standing, on the
other hand, within the human community for which he is active and which acts
for him, so that he can in this sense of mutuality drop his seeds into the
furrows, by not only being a thinking man, but also a man of experience, he is
a representative of the future. He realizes, on the one hand, the past of the
spirit ever anew by knowing that he is part of the real formative process of
the living spirit, and by walking over the furrows and dropping the seeds, he
draws in the future with every dropping of a seed. And so the past and future
flow together in him. And it is this streaming together of past and future, of
thinking and walking or doing, that actually gives him the possibility to
communicate with others, for this is only possible if one is both a thinker <i>and</i> a doer, if one is aware of the
transubstantiating spirit that continues to work from the world of the past
into the present of the human being, and if, on the other hand, one is aware of
how the spirit of the future wants to incarnate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Realization from the past and transformation through
‘futurization’, their intersection enables a formation of human rights, which
can only constitute itself in human beings who are capable of speaking with
each other, of communicating, of conferring together, forming social organic
judgments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Please allow me to continue these introductory reflections a
little further. I would like to draw your attention to another point, namely
that Rudolf Steiner’s social organic course presents a new conception of the
idea of the threefold nature of the social organism, in accordance with the
social, cultural and historical situation, which in the year 1922 was already
different from the time that the threefold idea was inaugurated <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
and which today is altogether different. Yet the threefold impulse was not
given up, but transformed in a way that is also for us today, I believe, of the
greatest importance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We can rely on the words of Rudolf Steiner in order to show
how this course presents a metamorphosis of the threefold idea. Already in the
first lecture Rudolf Steiner states (p. 16): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“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;” – when the threefold idea was inaugurated –
“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.” <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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): “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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> This is
directly and indirectly expressed by Rudolf Steiner in many passages. At one
point, he says (p. 134): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“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.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here is another introductory remark. Of equal importance with
the problem of the just price there is another theme running through the course
that expresses the same thing and that is actually only the other side the
coin. This is the <i>fundamental social law
of occultism</i>. One side of the coin reads “The Just Price” and the other
“The Fundamental Social Law” as the true gold standard of the social organism.
This fundamental social law that pertains to a certain type of economic
behavior within the social organism, makes no moral demands – this is made
perfectly apparent from the way it appears in the course. This law is a social
organic observation according to the methods of natural science. Why
‘occultism’ we will consider later. Let us hear how it is formulated here – a
great, succinct formulation (p. 43):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“It is not a God, nor a moral law,
nor an instinct, but simply the modern division of labor that calls for
altruism in modern economic life, in labor and in the production of goods. Thus
it is a purely economic category that is demanding that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The fundamental social law of mutuality is no moral demand,
but a social organic observation according to the natural scientific method. It
is also formulated as follows (p. 42): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“The division of labor tends towards
a situation where nobody works for himself anymore and that what a person
produces must be passed over completely to others. A person’s needs must on the other hand be
met by society.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And another quote (p. 44): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Thus one of the first and foremost
essential economic questions comes before us: How are we to <i>eliminate this principle of</i> <i>working for a living </i>from the economic
process? Those who to this day are still mere wage-earners – earning a living
for themselves – how are they to be placed in the whole economic process, no
longer as wage-earners but as men who work out of social needs? Must this
really be done? Of course it must. For if this is not done we shall never
obtain true prices, but always false ones.
We must seek to obtain prices and values that depend not on the human
beings but on the economic process itself – prices that arise in the process of
fluctuation of values. The cardinal question is the <i>question of price</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The price problem must be solved by those measures that bring
the values to a proper fluctuation and a mutually inherent valuation in the
economic process. When this occurs, it is (already) independent from people; in
order for it to come to that, a human code of behavior is required, namely that
of mutuality, which by virtue of the division of labor is simply a fact in
social organics, but which people must become aware of as being a fundamental
question of existence. One last quotation about that (p. 133): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">”The overview of the economic process
will become active; the interest for one’s fellow human being will actually be
there in the economic process that is formed. In no other way can a true
economic judgment come about and thus we are impelled to rise from the economic
processes to the mutuality, the give and take between human beings and
furthermore to that which will arise from this, namely the objective community
spirit working in the associations. This will be a community spirit proceeding
not from any ‘moralic acid’, but from a realization of the necessities inherent
in the economic process itself…There is no lack of people nowadays who say:
‘Our economic life will be good – tremendously good – once human beings are
good. You people must become good!’ Think of men like Professor Förster <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> and
his kind, who go about preaching: ‘If only men and women will become selfless,
the economic life will become good.’ But such opinions are really of no more
worth than this one: If my mother-in-law had four wheels and a handle in front,
she would be a bus!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A wagon is built in the course on social organics with which
one can start to move into the future, maybe not today, nor the day after
tomorrow, but perhaps tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This unfortunately did not take place, as far as I know, although Herbert
Witzenmann gave numerous lectures and wrote many articles on this theme, none
of which are available as yet in English. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Rudolf Steiner inaugurated the threefold idea
privately in 1917 with his memoranda to the German and Austrian governments, hoping
that they would become the Central European basis for ending World War I. When this attempt failed, he turned to the
public in the spring of 1919 with his book <i>Towards
Social Renewal </i>which soon saw a second edition and which was translated in
many European languages, including English. An American edition also appeared.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The last sentence in this quotation is completely
missing from the heavily edited translation of Rudolf Steiner’s World Economy
Course by C. Budd, which was published by New Economy Publications in England
with the acknowledged help of the management of the Rudolf Steiner Press in
1993 under the <i>title Economics – The
World as One Economy</i>. In his editorial introduction the translator
justifies this omission by writing: “In some cases I have left out whole
sentences, in others I have supplemented them…My purpose has been to make the
sense and direction of Steiner’s approach clearer and more understandable than
is possible by a literal translation.” If this is really the case with other
passages remains to be seen; the omission of the sentence by Rudolf Steiner
that a new <i>thinking</i> is called for and
that this will be exemplified in this course so as to realize these ideas in
the near future etc., is quite incomprehensible to me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/First%20Lecture%20on%20December%2014.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><span lang="EN-NZ"> Förster, Friedrich
Wilhelm (1869 – 1966); </span>German pedagogue
and pacifist.</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-42641964981246504572012-08-30T04:09:00.003-07:002012-08-30T04:09:46.939-07:00Second Lecture on December 14, 1974<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
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</div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">I would like to reread from the course that succinct
formulation of the fundamental social law as a sort of meditative motto (p.
43):</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 19.85pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"It is not a God, nor a moral
law, or an instinct, but simply the modern division of labor that calls for altruism
in modern economic life, in labor and in the production of goods. Thus, a purely
economic category is demanding that."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I would also like to present this law in the way it was first
formulated. It can be found in one of the first early essays <i>Anthroposophy
and the Social Question</i> <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/Second%20Lecture.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
that were published in 1905/06 but that were not continued because of lack of
interest (p. 195):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"The well-being of a community
of people working together becomes greater the less the individual demands the
products of his work for himself, that is, the more of these products he passes
on to his fellow workers and the more his own needs are not satisfied out of
his work, but out of the work of others."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Please allow me to still make two further introductory
remarks. First: I have perhaps tired you yesterday afternoon with those many
quotations. You might say that knowing them by heart is of little use, but that
it is matter of using them as a working basis. Yet, one has to know them in
order to do that and it is important to hear them again and again. – One can,
however, also pose the question: What is the significance of this course –
which was originally addressed to an audience with a scientific background –
for a circle consisting of people, such as we are here, who have only a general
interest and not any type of special economic qualification?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Well, the answer to this question can actually only be given
by our ensuing joint endeavor; but perhaps a little bit can already be said in
general, in the sense that just in the practical run of economic affairs in
human life it is always a question of consciousness that is time and again
concentrated on the same main questions. In all practical behavior in economic
and social life, we have to do with the following three basic questions: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">How do I stand within
reality?</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> This
question is not formulated by many people as such, but it is felt to be the
existential question: What am I living for, why do I work? For the modern,
cognitive, and planning human being, this question can only be understood and answered
as a question concerning reality. What is the nature of reality? Is it only
causal-genetic, something in which death is the origin of life, or is it the
other way around, is spirit the origin of life? This is a question of consciousness,
a question about living thinking, for which the course gives practical
instructions; it is a course in mobility in thinking if one follows it through
actively to the end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The second question is the one
concerning <i>the bridge to other human
beings</i>. Can we still make ourselves understood? This is the question
pertaining to justice, to law and rights. How can rights be formed, how can
rights arise amongst people, if while conferring they cannot make themselves
understood? Questions of law and rights are questions of conferring, judging,
of coming to terms with one another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The third question is connected with
this existential question of meaning and with this question pertaining to
justice and mutual understanding: it is the question concerning the sense of
individuality, for one’s own and that of one’s fellow human being. For in every
social context it is a question of having a feeling for the peculiarity of the
person that one is facing. How can I do justice to his character? I can only
develop an organ for understanding the character of those I come across, if I
properly understand my own human character. In this sense, the Course on
National Economy, or whatever one likes to call it, is a practical book, purely
by virtue of the fact that by serving as a sort of social scientific book of
meditation, it elevates the mind and develops a worldview. As such it gives one
of the most important contributions towards answering practical questions of
existence. Rudolf Steiner already stated this in his essay that contained the
fundamental social law in its original form. I may perhaps read you the
sentence that points in this direction:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> (P. 200, <i>Anthroposophy
and the Social Question</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“It is true in the most
original meaning of the word: only the individual can be helped by giving him
bread; bread for the entire population can only be obtained by helping the
population to acquire a (spiritual) view of the world.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now we want to proceed from the new
formulation of the threefold idea as found in the Course. The new organization
of the economy was originally conceived as a component of the threefold idea;
now it is a question of understanding threefolding as components of the
economic life. This new exposition and formulation of the threefold idea
already begins in the first lecture, which is a prelude with a manifold graphic
quality. I would like to discuss only the first, indeed most important point,
namely this new exposition. In the first lecture the contrast in economic
development between England and Germany in recent times (in the 19<sup>th</sup>
century) is spoken of. It is said, among other things, that the economic
development of England was based on its colonies and that it could lean above
all, economically speaking, on India as a virgin land at a time when England
was becoming a world power. India had exported many practically raw nature
products for use in the English economy where they were refined and processed
further. In Germany, the economic development from an agricultural to an
industrial state had taken place extremely rapidly. Through this rapid
transformation, a contrast in the economic conditions and the formation of
capital arose, characteristic of the world economy at that time, in the sense
that the English economy was built up indirectly via the abundant nature
products, raw and half-finished products from India, while, because a huge
amount of capital was invested in the machinery for industrial production, the
German economy developed rapidly into an industrial economy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This indicates two different types of
economic development and capital formation as well as two different types of
human labor, out of which then arise the two different means of creating
surplus value that form the subject matter of the second lecture. But now that
this contrast has been presented in the light of the second lecture, we would
like to begin clarifying it in order to understand thereby in which way a <i>new form of the threefold idea</i> was
inaugurated. Rudolf Steiner develops the two basic concepts there forming the
pillars of the whole course and pertaining to the two basic ways that human
work can be performed in the social organic process. And in this way the
problem of price comes to the fore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The first type of labor and the value
it generates occurs naturally when human labor is applied in one way or another
to nature by plowing the earth, fertilizing the land, sowing the seeds,
breeding cattle, mining coal and ore. Labor being applied to nature: N<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">L</span><span style="mso-text-raise: 3.0pt; position: relative; top: -3.0pt;">V</span>, nature (N)
changed by human labor (L). This creates value (V). This is the working world
that was of fundamental importance for the emergence of the English economy,
because England could lean on a country with abundant natural resources. The
value that arises in this way Rudolf Steiner often calls V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Then there is another completely
different way of generating value: the human mind or spirit (S) is directed
towards human labor (L). This leads again to a certain value, namely V<sub>2</sub>
or L <sub>S</sub><sup>V</sup>. The process leading to division of labor is
illustrated by Rudolf Steiner by the following well-known example. In a certain
area, people are transforming nature products. Every single worker must somehow
travel to his working place. Then someone gets the bright idea that when the
work people do is organized in a special way, work could be saved that way. He
comes up with a wagon and now the workers do not all need go by foot anymore,
he lightens their workload, thereby saving energy and also time. Work applied
to nature is conserved by the spirit that is applied to human labor. This gives
rise to V<sub>2</sub>. These are therefore the two fundamentally different ways
of generating value, which can only be looked at with a certain reverence,
because what happens when V<sub>1</sub> is created? By man adding to nature out
of his own ability, nature is being brought closer to man. That is a <i>process of transubstantiation</i>. By the
mind or spirit being applied to labor, more spirit is incarnated in human
events, in the working world and also in the course of nature. This is a <i>process of incarnation</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">That is how these two values as well
as their interaction arise, and thus arises the just price, because it is
always the case that those applying their mind or spirit to labor, must be fed
by the others. But they in turn save the others labor. The two ways of creating
value enter in a relationship, come together and the question is: How can they
be mutually evaluated in the right way? The price problem is a question of the
right balance between the two polarities of the social organic process. The
price formation is influenced by the relation between these two value
formations: How much work on nature is it worth, this work by the spirit, this
organizing of human labor by the human mind? Through the interaction of these
polarities in the working world, of the value creating processes, the social
organic work of art must be designed that expresses itself in price formation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The body social is created like any
other work of art, for each work of art has to do with transubstantiating
matter and incarnating spirit in it. The emergence of the social organic work
of art in its cultural symptomatic mode of appearance, on the one hand in the
(economic) contrast between England and Germany and on the other hand in its
basic conceptual structure, that is what makes up the introduction and the
foundation of the whole course. And right away you see how the threefold idea
is propounded anew. In the transubstantiating labor we have the economic life
in a narrow sense. In the incarnating labor we have what actually constitutes
the spiritual life. And now both value formations must be brought together and
balanced out in such a way that each one is given its due. This is a question
of rights.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 1.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 1.0pt 4.0pt 1.0pt 4.0pt;">
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">N <sub>L<span style="mso-text-raise: 6.0pt; position: relative; top: -6.0pt;">V</span><span style="mso-text-raise: 3.0pt; position: relative; top: -3.0pt;"> </span></sub><span style="mso-text-raise: 3.0pt; position: relative; top: -3.0pt;"> </span>Social Organic Work of
Art <span style="mso-text-raise: 3.0pt; position: relative; top: -3.0pt;"> </span>L
</span><sub><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%;">s</span></sub><sup><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">V</span></sup><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText2" style="border: none; line-height: 115%; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 1.0pt 4.0pt 1.0pt 4.0pt; padding: 0cm; text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Economic Life Price Spiritual Life<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText2" style="border: none; line-height: 115%; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 1.0pt 4.0pt 1.0pt 4.0pt; padding: 0cm; text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText2" style="border: none; line-height: 115%; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 1.0pt 4.0pt 1.0pt 4.0pt; padding: 0cm; text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Rights Sphere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I have made this little sketch to
which we shall return later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The most important social organic
processes take place in the form of purchase and sale. Naturally this a
question of price formation, but based on processes that first make price
formation possible: the transubstantiating and incarnating labor. In that
sense, price plays the decisive role in all events and phases of the social
organic process. This form of pricing is again connected with the interaction
and opposition of the two ways of creating value: value and counter-value is
equal to price. These two types of value, transubstantiating and incarnating
value have a tendency to devaluate each other. This has actually become clear
from what has been developed, but we will nevertheless ask the question: Why
must this be so, that both values devaluate each other?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps, I will have to speak about a
misunderstanding here that, although based on short-sightedness, one runs into
all the time: The value formed through labor applied to nature would, so it is
maintained, no longer exist, for this labor has been taken over by machines, in
agriculture as well as in industry. But this is a basic misunderstanding. For
whether I work with my hands, with a scythe or with a complicated machine,
wherever means of production are being applied to natural resources, whereby
transubstantiation takes place, we are in effect dealing with V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span>. This is
substantiated by the course (p. 93): “Now when the Spirit absorbs processed nature…means
of productions arise.” That means, when what arises through the direct
treatment of nature products is processed and transformed further by the
spirit, when ore is dug out, then refined in the iron and steel works, further
processed in a rolling mill, the steel rolled first cold then hot – all this is
transubstantiating value formation. But this is by no means the end of it. From
the steel, machines can now be made, lathes, milling and woodworking machines
and presses. (P. 93): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"What we call means
of production is …a nature product that is absorbed by the spirit, a nature
product that the spirit must have. From the pen which I possess as my means of
production to the most complicated machinery in a factory, means of production
are, as it were, nature grasped by the spirit."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We are dealing here with a
continuation of the transubstantiating labor in which the incarnating labor is
playing a role. But basically, the means of production are refined products of
nature. They serve for their part again to further elaborate and process
nature. They therefore serve in transubstantiating value formation that occurs
wherever labor is being organized and where under certain circumstances also
means of production are made through the organizing of labor, in which case
both types of labor coincide. So one can say everywhere: Where means of
production are used, in the fabrication of these means as well as in their use,
transubstantiating labor is at work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We now have to turn our attention to
a process that I have already mentioned and that is basically connected with
incarnating work and value formation, V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>. This is what organizes labor and
that always results in the division of labor. It is not so that one person must
always perform all the various strands of the work involved; the labor is
divided. By integrating the labor categories, labor is saved and for that
reason the results, the products or services become cheaper. We have brought
this to mind with the example of the wagon builder. But with the division of
labor, all economic processes become more diverse, even though rationalizing
the individual labor process makes it simpler; the labor process as the sum
total of all the work done becomes more difficult to overlook. This demands a
higher grade of consciousness than was the case with the instinctive, simpler
type of work where one and the same person united in himself all the labor
processes necessary for making a product. Thus, along with the increasing
division of labor, with the progress in the formation of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2 </span>, the labor
process becomes more and more a question of consciousness. Parallel to that,
the demand crops up for a greater awareness of the rights sphere, for a
conscious awareness of how these two types of labor and value formations are
properly contrasted with each other. That awareness of rights has to do with
just price, but also – you will see this right away – with balancing community
consciousness against freedom consciousness. For consider: V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2 </span>,<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;"> </span>the
incarnating value, can arise only out of the deeds of free, spiritually
productive individuals. With the transubstantiating values, it is just the
other way around; there it is primarily a matter of people working together.
The creative individual works also for others, but out of his individual
productivity, while the transubstantiating values arise out of the communal
labor of people at work in transforming nature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">From the increasing division of labor
and the coincidence of both types of value formation, there not only arises a
demand for an enhanced, holistic consciousness, but also for an increased
awareness of rights. In that way the basic question of rights poses itself that
we considered from another viewpoint in the afternoon, but that I would like to
put before you from the viewpoint of the formation and consciousness of rights.
With these basic questions of human rights, we have to do again with three
questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The first one is: How do people place
themselves within reality in the right way, and what can I do to help people feel
themselves properly grounded within reality? That is basically the existential
question: In what kind of reality can I experience myself as a worthy human being?
More or less consciously connected with the existential question is the demand
for human dignity in work, which, right or not, is proclaimed very strongly.
This phrase is often understood to mean nothing more than the improvement of
working conditions, the rise in social benefits and the dismantling of what is
felt to be unsociable. Actually it is something completely different that is being
demanded here, namely a question of consciousness of reality: How is the human
being grounded within reality and what does he work for? That is in a certain
sense a question of rights: How can I fit in properly and what do I contribute?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The second question is: How can I fit
into the community and what can I contribute so that people can integrate into
the community, that they make themselves understood in counsel, that they form
associations?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The third basic question of community
rights is: How do I do justice to an individuality, i.e. how can I do justice
to the productive capital that he or she has, or has in him or her, how can I
put him or her at the right place in the working world of the social organism?
That is the sense for the uniqueness for the human being and the sense that a
human being can become the representative of a community. That is the amazing
thing: a representative of the community I can only be according to my
uniqueness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In order to answer these basic
questions, out of which proper community rights and the forming of just prices
can arise, a <i>worldview</i> is required.
For you see, we can answer the questions as to what the place of the human
being within the community is, and what his relation to his own spirituality is
only from a worldview background, from an overview of the nature of the world,
the human being and his cognitive abilities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">With this is connected a very
essential consciousness factor – I emphasize that it is to begin with a
question of consciousness – the <i>overcoming
of the self-sufficiency principle</i>.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/Second%20Lecture.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This is naturally an eminently practical code of behavior; its foreground and
background lie in a certain mental attitude, which contrasts with the usual
self-sufficiency idea, the idea that one must get something in return for what
one does and that the human being is actually on earth in order to work for his
own needs in life and for those of his dependents. This self-sufficiency
attitude is more or less subconsciously something quite natural, but it is,
socially and economically speaking, neither sensible nor right, because it
contradicts the very nature of economy, which can only prosper if everyone,
instead of wanting <i>to have</i> as much as
possible, wants <i>to give </i>as much as
possible. This is a very primitive formulation of the fundamental social law,
but it is actually a truism: there can only be as much in the whole of the
economic process as people have put into it. It is completely senseless to want
to have something; one can only consider what one can put into the social
organic process. Then something can flow back again. But as soon as one
concentrates on what ought to flow back to oneself, one leads one’s own
productivity astray. It must be clear thereby that every <i>wage-earner</i> practices <i>self-sufficiency</i>.
And the tendency in the <i>social conflicts</i>
today to demand more and more wage or pay increases is nothing else than
getting stuck at the level of the mental attitude of those self-sufficiency
practitioners. Now naturally someone will say: The working people today are no
longer so concerned with a rise in pay; what interests them is the <i>human dignity of the work</i>, that is,
improved working conditions. But that is basically only self-delusion. As long
as a person within the social organic process comes to the fore demanding
something, he demands advantages for himself and that is always payment. One
can put it as beautifully as one can. The living conditions can naturally be
far from beautiful and good, but as long as they are demanded, one demands an
improvement in pay; one must realize that all other formulations are delusions
and self-delusions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now it appears to me not without
significance with what this self-sufficiency mentality is connected or – I must
formulate carefully – why this self-sufficiency mentality is anchored so deeply
in the consciousness of people today. We will not trace its origin; that is a
very complicated question. But the question just mentioned before can be
answered clearly. The predominance of the self-sufficiency mentality is
connected with the universal lie that dominates the world today; the lie that
the life of the human spirit is only an epiphenomenon, only an ideology, only
an emission of the real thing, material processes. Certain representations
about reality are connected with that, namely that <i>there is a ready-made reality in materialistic form for the human being
and that this reality is sufficient for earning his own livelihood</i>. That is
the mentality in the background. It seems very important to me to make this
clear to oneself. The universal lie that dominates the world today wanting to
drive out the spirit from our world, leads to a certain representation of
reality and a certain related mood or sentiment in life, namely that the human being
can take care of himself by means of the reality around him and be taken care
of by it. Reality is somehow out there and the human being must see to it that
he gets what he needs in order to live. This conscious attitude grows into the
self-sufficiency mentality of the wage-earner, which totally dominates the
situation in the economic and social sphere today. Dominated by the universal
lie, the human being make believes that he can and must take care of himself by
means of a ready-made reality; that notion then spreads to his behavior on the
work floor and to his moral conduct in the labor process. He would be merely a
copier of the ready-made reality that is there outside his own realm of
consciousness; he imprints this reality more or less exactly into his own
consciousness or can only represent it through certain signs or symbols. Similarly, he must be taken care of,
supported by an economic and working world by means of the wage that he
demands, and just as the human being must be looked after by a world that came
into being without his doing, the state (the government) must see to it that he
is being taking care of according to his need to be paid. Yet, the truth is not
this universal lie; the basic experience, ability and task of the human being is
<i>self-</i><i>realization</i>, not
self-deception.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The human being is not taken care of
by a ready-made reality; he must constantly implement reality. Each instance of
his waking consciousness he realizes the fully incoherent percepts that come to
him through his senses by holistically integrating them in his thinking. He is
a ‘realizer’ and must <i>give himself away
to the world</i>. And only as much as he gives, can be given back by the world,
so that his life makes sense. True, this
is the fundamental social law of cognition and not the fundamental law of
economic life. <i>But the self-sufficiency
attitude in cognition and work are one and the same thing in terms of
consciousness, but looked at from two different sides</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This
is also important for understanding a sentence in the social organic course
such as (p. 53): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Money is realized spirit.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For money is but an order – I want to
say it in a complicated way on purpose – for [acquiring] those elements that
can be set to use in the social organic process in such a way that surplus
value arises. These elements are the means of production, capital resources.
Money is an expression for the fact that means of productions were made, that
nature was enhanced, that this enhanced nature was transformed into means of
production and that they can continue to be used. <i>Money</i> is an expression for the fact that capital resources are
available and that the just necessities of life and the needs of other people
can be met by these means of production; indeed, in this way the recipients for
their part can become active as spiritual producers, as creators of incarnation
values in the social organic process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Thereby one’s mind is directed to the
forming of capital of a sort that is connected with this fact. For isn’t it
true: means of production can only arise and be used, but above all be
fabricated, if there is capital available. Now, the situation is such that
those values, which are to arise by those means, are not there yet at the
beginning; they lie in the future. Manufacturing the means of production is an
expenditure that can only be reimbursed in the future by those things that are
going to be fabricated with them. Thus arises the corresponding need to invest
on the part of the entrepreneur who makes means of production available. He
must <i>borrow</i> the money, because the
profit that he can earn with his means of production lies in the future. Loan
capital and also debt capital arise in that way, for the borrower becomes the
debtor. Now, it is very interesting to see that this loan, which is put to the
disposal of the debtor for creating the means of production, is given to him
personally on the basis of the trust that the lender has in the debtor’s
overall grasp of the situation and his ability to perform. This is <i>personal</i> credit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now what is interesting is that this
personal credit reduces costs, as opposed to collateral credit, which is still
given today to a large degree on the basis of land. Collateral credit on the
other hand increases costs. These are two fundamental insights that one can become
conscious of in the sense of the overall context of the course and especially
from the viewpoint of the forming of price: personal credit must reduce costs
under the assumption that a just price is given.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now we have seen that creative
activity, the creation of incarnation values, has the effect of reducing costs,
because it saves labor. That is why the credit used for creation of incarnation
values has the effect of reducing costs, while collateral credit on land
increases costs. Interest must be paid on collateral credit, because land does
not yield any economic value. I am not talking about land that has been worked
on and improved, that is a means of production and for that personal credit can
be given. But today credit is given for fallow land and that causes an increase
in its value. Interest rests on the land that is not used as a means of
production and that is why collateral credit increases costs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is perhaps the right moment to
look within this context at another facet that is connected with the raising
and giving of personal and collateral credit. We can ask ourselves: How did
this collateral credit that is so prevalent today come about, how did it come
to exercise its bad influence? It is easy to see how this came about, for the
two types of real surplus value creation generate capital. This capital cannot
for its part be used again in the social organic process to purchase goods, to
consume goods, or to put the means of production to use; nor can this capital
be used to recycle, improve or reuse the means of production after they have
been written off. Surplus capital arises; this capital seeks a place to invest
and is then accumulated and piled up on land. That is how collateral credit
comes about. This collateral credit is one of the greatest pests in today’s
economic life. And so the question arises: How can the surplus capital be
prevented from piling up on land, thereby causing a shift in the forming of prices
due to the ensuing imbalance? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">At this point Rudolf Steiner mentions
his <i>associations</i>. And one of their
most important tasks is to see to it that there is no undue accumulation of
capital. The associations are conceived as advisory bodies in which producers,
traders and consumers, those active and productive on the side of the
transubstantiating value as well as on the side of the incarnating value, come
together in order to form common judgments concerning what is just for the
social organism. This will lead therefore to the forming of just prices. And in
such properly composed advisory bodies or associations the right judgment must
therefore be formed concerning how, for example, capital can be prevented from
accumulating on land, so as not to lead to the forming of costly collateral
credit. And so we see that one of the most important tasks accorded to the
associations would be <i>directing the flow
of capital</i>. The flow of capital must be directed properly, thus not alone
prevented from accumulating, but led in the right direction. Thereby the
question arises: what directions are there? And what is the right way to lead
them? It is simply a question of not only managing that capital arises in the
social organic process, but also that it is consumed again in the right way.
The right judgment concerning this can also only be formed in associative or
advisory bodies under certain preconditions that must be fulfilled, if these
bodies are to be capable of giving advice. This we still need to discuss. In
any case, the task of these bodies is to work at directing the flow of capital,
something which is presently done by the <i>banks</i>,
but purely from the viewpoint of maximizing profit, not from the viewpoint of
just price.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The task, perhaps even the main task
of the economic life is to check too strong a forming of capital, and to kindle
one that is too weak. How can this be done? One of the most important means of <i>kindling capital</i> is by granting <i>personal credit</i> to the right recipients,
not to social-organically non-creative people. That is one of the most important
means, but not the only one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">How can excessive formation of
capital be checked? We would like to leave this question for the moment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We want to bring to mind a relatively
simple way, which in the present economy is until now not sufficiently used.
Kindling and checking are not only possible by directing the flow of capital –
this function exercised by the banks today will be the future task of the associations
– but there is another way. Not only the flow of capital can be directed, but
also the flow of working people by transferring workers from one place or from
one factory to another, if their activity in the firm or factory in question is
not advantageous for the social organism. This would naturally entail a major
re-education program, which today is beginning to happen, but not enough. It
has been understood that to be able to direct an economy, there is a need for
re-training the labor force. By moving the workers from one place to another,
the forming of capital can be changed there - under certain circumstance for
example weakened, if it can be kindled at another place. And by doing that, one
also influences naturally the forming of prices in factories where the products
are becoming too cheap, where therefore more is produced than is
social-organically justified and demanded, and above all more than is allowed
by the social organic balance. This then devalues the commodities. For
producing more than necessary does not lead to forming more capital. Thus, the
labor can be directed to where too little is produced and where the commodities
are becoming too expensive. Then the effect at one place of a healthy rise in
prices is the formation of capital, while at another a healthy lowering of the
prices results in checking capital formation. The result of more and more
production is therefore not in all circumstances the forming of capital,
because overproduction leads to a lessening of capital formation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now you will ask further: When it is
all a matter of arriving at the just price by balancing transubstantiating
labor against incarnating labor, how does one manage to do this? It can be
understood that it must be done, but how? Already in his book <i>Towards Social Renewal</i>, Rudolf Steiner
had developed an enlightening viewpoint on this question. He refers to in the
sixth lecture of the<i> World Economy</i>
course (p. 72): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“The formula which I gave in my book <i>Towards Social Renewal</i> was as follows:
‘A <i>true price</i> is forthcoming when
someone receives as counter-value for a product he has made, sufficient to
enable him to satisfy his needs, including of course the needs of his
dependants, until he will again have completed a similar product.' Abstract as
it is, this formula is none the less <i>exhaustive</i>.
In setting up a formula it is always necessary that it should contain all the
details. I do believe that for the sphere of economy this formula is no less
exhaustive than, say, the theorem of Pythagoras is for all right-angled triangles.
But the point is – just as we have to introduce into the theorem of Pythagoras
the varying proportions of the sides, so shall we have to introduce many, very
many variables into this formula. Economics is precisely an understanding of
how the [whole] economic process can be included in this formula.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Hence, a price is just when somebody
receives so much for a product that he can live from that until the time that
he has produced a similar product. If <i>Leonardo</i>
<i>da Vinci</i> worked five or six years on
a painting, he would have to get as a counter-value what his needs are for five
or six years; if <i>Picasso</i> paints a
picture in half an hour, he would have to get as a counter-value what his needs
amount to for half an hour. I am expressing myself paradoxically on purpose.
There is something else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Rudolf Steiner calls the formula
exhaustive. We want to occupy ourselves with that. The time has run late, but I
still want to mention some points that we can take through the night. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If we look at the incarnating labor,
at the organizing labor that produces and works with the means of production,
then one must be clear about one thing that, at least to begin with, puts in
the right those who would like to belittle spiritual labor. With respect to the
past, spiritual work is indeed unproductive, for spiritual or cultural workers
are consumers. They need to be clothed, housed and fed and are dependent on
what they receive from the transubstantiating labor. That produce must have
been made in advance. Spiritual or cultural work is only productive with
respect to the future in that it makes new value creation possible and thereby
reduces costs or in that it releases new artistic, productive abilities and
possibilities in people. The blindness for the value and value creation of
spiritual labor is based on the materialistic superstition of our time that is
connected with the blindness for realization and reality. Often the people who
gravely belittle and defame spiritual workers and those who develop worldviews,
as cranks hung up in the clouds, often these people claim to be solid folks
with both feet planted squarely on the ground. In truth, these people are
extremely far removed from reality, because they are blind to reality, because
they do not have an eye for seeing that the basic work that every human being
must do consists of <i>realization</i>. The
human being is constantly a ‘realizer’. Only in as far as he practices
realizing, does he really stand in the world. Only then is he generally viable
and capable of living. And to the degree that he neglects and scorns this basic
human ability and dignity, his life becomes meaningless and the social economic
work of art collapses. For what Rudolf Steiner calls the <i>social organic</i> <i>trinity</i>,
namely<i> paying-lending-giving</i>, can in
fact not be instituted in the social organic process, until it is recognized
that the incarnating labor, thus the value V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>, has at least the same significance
as the transubstantiating labor V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span>. For paying and purchasing can take place only
if enhanced nature products are available, only if sufficient transubstantiating
work can be done. But this labor becomes too expensive unless at the same time
labor is organized and therefore made cheaper through the value V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>. This is
however not possible without lending.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To that must be added a third
element, namely the concept of <i>giving</i>
that we need for answering the question: How can we check the surplus capital
from accumulating on the land? It can be checked by giving it to spiritually
creative individuals. This then enhances the potential of incarnation labor and
thus the potential of this side of the social organic process. The right
appreciation of the role of the spirit, the mind in the social organic process by
the rights sphere directs the money flow in the direction of lending and
giving, thereby reducing costs.</span></div>
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<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/Second%20Lecture.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;"> These essays are published in Rudolf Steiner, <i>Reincarnation and Immortality</i>, Blauvelt
NY, 3rd</span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ;">
printing 1974.</span><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/RobertJan/Mijn%20documenten/The%20Just%20Price/Second%20Lecture.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;"> It must be noted here that Herbert Witzenmann is
talking about the outdated self-sufficiency principle <i>in the economic sphere</i>, not in the spiritual sphere where it is in
the sense of Emerson’s self-reliance and self-realization completely at home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
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Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-412043690894060574.post-4995112688142085952012-08-30T03:23:00.000-07:002012-08-30T03:23:15.949-07:00Third Lecture on December 15, 1974<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; text-indent: 0cm;">Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends,</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We began yesterday to work out some basic
outlines from the course by Rudolf Steiner and I took the liberty of pointing
out that the two main pillars that carry the whole course consist of the two
ways of creating value, two ways that work can be done, namely the
transubstantiating and the incarnating labor, and that by means of their
cooperation and intersection prices arise and just price should be formed. For
reasons of methodology, I have distinguished fairly sharply between these two
branches of labor in order to define these two modes of determining the social
organic process as distinctly as possible. Naturally, it is apparent that none
of these two ways and means of labor output and surplus value creation exist in
the economic reality purely by themselves, but that both of them are always
interconnected, so that we can only speak of a predominance of the one or the
other. We have already seen when looking at the means of production that these
two streams intertwine in a special way in these means of production.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If
we look at the <i>origin</i> of the means of
production, there is a predominance of incarnating labor involved. But that is
not the only thing to be considered, for also the nature products and the
fabrication of semi-finished products must be taken into consideration;
predominant, however, is the incarnating labor, because it takes a lot of
spiritual, mental work to make a machine. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In
the <i>use</i> of the means of production,
transubstantiating labor prevails, because the latter goes into the making of
consumer goods. But there the organizing labor [management] must also play a
role. So, with regard to the means of production, we clearly see how both ways
of creating surplus value and performing work are intertwined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We
finished yesterday by looking at the social organic trinity of the concepts:
paying – lending – giving. We can begin by considering the concept of giving.
The making of gifts is distinguished for their part again in the light of the
immanent threefold components that form the basis of economic life: one can
give to the sphere of purchase money by pressing a 10 dollar bill into the hand
of a hungry person, but actually one gives in this case also to the free
spiritual, cultural life. For when the hungry person can keep his physical
organism in order, one offers him the possibility of also keeping his spirit,
his mind in order. Donating is always a question of giving to the free
spiritual life. But one can obviously give in a more direct way to the
spiritual sphere, to especially productive individuals or centers of learning,
not only to schools for children, but to free universities that constitute the
centers of the free spiritual life – and everyone actually forms such a free
university around himself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When
one makes a gift with a view to furthering the rights sphere so that
associative or advisory bodies can be formed, it is also a donation to the free
spiritual life, for it is a matter thereby of endowing the spiritual activity
that formulates and constitutes rights.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A
very special type of donation takes place when capital resources in the form of
factories are not handed over by right of heredity, but on the basis of
associatively formed judgments to the most capable persons. This is also a
basic task of the associations: transferring the means of production, motivated
by judgments formed out of a true community spirit, to the most capable people,
whereby not the mechanism casts the deciding vote, but the creative potential
that a person brings to the fore. Thereby it is not a question of handing over
the ownership of the factories, for these belong in the sense of social
organics to the general public. No, the firms and factories are put at the
disposal of those individuals that, on the basis of decisions made by the
associations, are deemed to be the best suited for managing the task at hand.
But these decisions can naturally only come about in the right way and in the
right spirit, if they are based on and carried by true knowledge of the human
being and of the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In
this context, I would like to quote yet another time from the course. With the
gifts that we just spoke about, it is a matter of caring for the free spiritual
life (culture), and when this declines - as is visible for example in our time
– it must be clear that this is not due to a lack of human capabilities; these
lie within the spiritual nature of the human being and are being taken care of
by the spiritual world. But when these potentials are not being developed, it
is because too little is being donated to the spiritual life and because too
little knowledge concerning this exists; that is why the decisions to make
gifts are not taken (p. 82): “These associations will find that when spiritual
life declines, too little is being given freely; they will grasp the
connection. They see the connection between too little giving and too little
free spiritual work.” Their task is then to let more capital flow in the
direction of gift possibilities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When
we look closer at this trinity of the concepts paying – lending – giving, we
see immediately that nothing could be paid for or bought, if there was no
transubstantiating creation of value: N<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">L</span><span style="mso-text-raise: 3.0pt; position: relative; top: -3.0pt;">V</span>. Lending is that process of directing
personal credit on the basis of associative capital flow decisions and
judgments to capable people, so that the other creation of surplus value, the
incarnating one, can arise when the spirit or mind is applied to labor. These
processes work into each other and with each other. Lending reduces the cost of
purchasing, for transubstantiating labor becomes cheaper to the extent that
more incarnating labor is applied to it. That causes an increase in the value
of products. The more value a product has, the cheaper it is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Loan
money makes purchase money valuable, because it reduces the costs of
commodities. Through purchasing, on the other hand, more capital arises, that
can be used for personal credit. But now it must be taken care of that the
overflowing capital does not accumulate and pile up on the (unimproved) land in
collateral credit. Therefore, the profit made from the sale must be transferred
into the gift sphere, fructifying the free spiritual life and offering new
possibilities for making personal credit available to capable personalities.
Lending, on the other hand, i.e. giving personal credit to set up means of
production, generates surplus capital again, that also needs to be transferred
to the gift sphere. But making gifts, for its part, reacts again on the sphere
of purchase money, because it has the indirect effect via personal credit of
making commodities cheaper and increasing the value of purchase money. In that
way, the three spheres are intertwined; that is how they function together. It
is important to always ask oneself: how does the trinity of concepts work
together and into one another, and how is this then expressed in the forming of
price?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
forming of the just price has been occupying us, and what actually underlies
and must underlie every view on social organics. Now there are in the economic
life of today a number of price-falsifying influences. We cannot take the time
to make a list of all these factors; we can only deal with the most important
ones. Wages are considered to be the price for the work that is done. Today
practically everyone is still convinced that the worker sells his work to the
entrepreneur and that the entrepreneur pays the worker for his work. The
economic confusion and the social struggles of our time actually all revolve
around this question of wages, even when it is masked by saying that it
revolves around the human dignity of the work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As
soon as somebody demands something in exchange for his work output, he demands
a wage, and if he is willing and able to accept something in return for his
labor as demanded, he is practicing self-sufficiency. Yet, it is an illusion to
believe that the work in the factories is paid for and, as a matter of fact,
could even be paid for. To be sure, in the present social conflicts of the
working world this illusion has been turned into a reality, but it is in
reality an illusion. For work cannot be bought, it is not an object, a
commodity that can be consumed; work is rather something that is connected with
the spiritual nature of the human being. We cannot move a finger without a
spiritual impulse. The transubstantiating labor also has its origins in an
incarnation process, in bringing spiritual forces in and out. Work cannot be
bought. The entrepreneur does not buy the work from the worker, but the product
that the worker makes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here
we are faced again with the central price problem: What is the right relation between
V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1 </span>and V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>, of
transubstantiation value and incarnation value? The worker works primarily on
the transubstantiating side, while the entrepreneur – and especially so as
trader, which he also is – stands on the incarnating side. In the sale of
transubstantiation products in compensation for incarnation products, we have
again a meeting of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1 </span>and V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>, and the right balance between the two values must be
expressed in a right primary price for the transubstantiation product. Wages do
not exist; there is only a primary price for the transubstantiation product.
This is a just price when it is properly weighed in relation to incarnating
labor that causes an increase in the value of the transubstantiation product by
reducing its cost. Hence the question is: how can the increase of value of the
transubstantiation product be expressed in its primary price, an increase in
value that occurs by its being put on the market by the entrepreneur and
thereby reduced in cost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1 </span>and V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2 </span>meet again
at the point where the entrepreneur as trader buys the primary products. This
draws our attention again to that most important question of price formation.
Another quote (p. 90): “This therefore is the most important question in
relation to price formation: How can we harmonize the tension that exists in
the creation of prices between the evaluation of goods arising from the free
will of human beings and that of goods in the production of which nature has a
hand?” Again, V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1
</span>and V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span> are meeting head on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In trying to understand the problem of price formation, it
can be helpful to bring to mind that we have so far looked at two processes in
the social organism flowing in opposite directions. The first one was called
the transubstantiating current flowing in the direction of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span> with nature as its source. The second one
flows in the opposite direction, because it does not reside in nature; it has
its source in the spiritual life and goes in the direction of the value
creation V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>.
The V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1 </span>current
begins in nature that is transformed by human labor, and then the process of
creating value already moves into the forming of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span> by virtue of the fact that the human mind is
applied to labor. At this moment, the current passes over into the
counter-current, which is mainly expressed by the transubstantiation products
being only enhanced to the degree that they become means of production. When
these means of production are again put to work as such, they are called <i>industrial capital</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 45.0pt; margin-right: 29.2pt; margin-top: 0cm; tab-stops: 468.0pt 486.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1 </span>Spirit (Mind)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 45.0pt; margin-right: 29.2pt; margin-top: 0cm; tab-stops: 468.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"></span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Labor (Work) </span><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¯</span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 45.0pt; margin-right: 29.2pt; margin-top: 0cm; tab-stops: 468.0pt 486.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Nature V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 45.0pt; margin-right: 29.2pt; margin-top: 0cm; tab-stops: 468.0pt 495.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Transubstantiation Incarnation <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is the capital, the value
creating potential that the entrepreneur puts at the disposal of the workers
occupied in the transubstantiation current. This incarnation stream thereby
passes over into the transubstantiation stream; consumer products are made that
are directly put on the market and consumed in a natural process. This constant
counter-current of two streams that are transformed into each other, their
opposition, constitutes the whole social organic process; and the equalization
of the two streams that arises from the cooperation and collusion of the
polarities is one of the most important social organic tasks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This
will be the task of the associations, which they can fulfill by harmonizing the
creation of values, by balancing the parts that both streams play in the social
organic process through the corresponding control of capital, but also by
guiding and managing the workers. Just or true prices arise by controlling the
flow of capital in this whole stream in the right way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now the social-economic thinking of today is to a large
extent dominated by the old prejudice that true prices will come about by
themselves on the market and that nothing more needs to be done than to see to
it that there is a free play of supply and demand on the market. Within this
free play prices can and must be formed; this is the old view of Adam Smith,
which is still dominant in today’s social economic thinking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now
according to Rudolf Steiner, this generalization of Smith’s formula – price
formation through the interaction of supply and demand – is justified to a
certain, limited degree; it must however not be generalized, for it must be
understood that supply and demand exist everywhere in the social organic
process, and that one party is not only supplying and the other merely
demanding. When the producer brings his goods to the market, he is not only a
supplier; putting goods on the market is a demand for money, while the consumer
on the other hand makes a demand in buying goods, a demand for goods. Putting
goods on the market is demand for money, and buying goods is based on a supply
of money. This gives rise to the three famous formula’s which Rudolf Steiner
put forward in the <i>World Economy</i> <i>Course</i> (p. 100) and which, as you know,
caused a great deal of discussion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One
of the reasons for the misunderstanding which, in my opinion, entered into
those discussions, is that the corresponding text by Rudolf Steiner on this
point is obviously partly wrong. But let us look at these equations and try to
understand them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Rudolf
Steiner says namely: X – that is value formation and price formation – is a
function of three factors that are all equally justified, a function of supply,
demand and price: X = ƒ (s,d,p). </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">But,
says Rudolf Steiner, this function for X is only the case in the sphere of the
trader, where it can thus be said: p = ƒ (s,d). The trader equation is
therefore essentially accurate, because in trade it is actually neither a
question of money or goods, but something midway in between money and goods.
Then consider: for the trader the goods that he offers are money, and the money
that he takes in, he transforms immediately into goods. He offers money-goods </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">mg</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;"> and takes in goods-money </span><i style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">gm</i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">, so that we must change the price X
to money-goods. It comes about in the evaluation of a supply of money-goods or
goods-money meeting a demand for goods-money or money-goods.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now
there is furthermore a <i>producer </i>and a
<i>consumer equation</i>. We have already seen:
When the producer puts his goods on the market, it is a demand for something.
For what? Money; I must there write index m; this demand is a function of
supply and price: d<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span> = ƒ (s,p). With
consumers it is not a matter of demand for money, but supply of money. And that
is again a function of two factors, namely of price and demand: s<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span> = ƒ (p,d).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
question is: What is meant by supply and demand? With the producers equation it
is quite clear that the producer expresses a demand for money and that his
supply is one of goods. But what is this price p? Is that the goods price? Do
we write down <i>pg</i>? Does a supply of
goods not become a demand for money, in the background of which stands a demand
for goods? In that case, we would have the trader’s equation again. If you
write <i>pg</i> for that, you flatten it
out, and that cannot be right. And if you read the <i>World Economy Course</i> concerning this point carefully, you will
notice that also Rudolf Steiner indirectly said that it cannot be a matter of
the price of the goods, but a matter of the prices that the producer sets for
his products. These prices he sets and can set according to what can be
obtained within the social organic process. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now
what is the possibility of determining and fetching this price dependent on? On
the value and price of money. It is obviously a question of the price of money,
for otherwise it reverts back to Smith’s formula. When the producer demands
money by offering his wares, he can only do this within the realm of the
obtainable prices. And these obtainable prices, which are expressed in money,
arise from the general possibilities within the social organic process and
these are precipitated in the price and value of money. It cannot be otherwise
in my opinion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now
we come to the <i>consumer equation</i>. The
consumer has money and offers it. This money supply is connected with the
interaction of two factors, namely price and supply. Price here obviously means
the price of the goods <i>pg</i>, and this
is set by the seller on the basis of demand. But demand for what? For money d<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span>. The less he
demands money or the less the value of the money, the higher he sets the price
for his goods. And conversely, the higher the value of the money, the lower he
sets the price of his goods. Here we have to do with the interplay of the price
of goods and the demand for money. This is the answer to the supply of money by
the consumer. Only in this way, I believe, can these equations be interpreted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 1.35pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">p<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">mg</span> = ƒ(s<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">mg</span>, d<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">gm</span>) Traders
equation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 1.35pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">d<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span>
= ƒ(s<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">g</span>, p<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span>) Producers equation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 1.35pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">s<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span>
= ƒ(p<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">g</span>, d<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">m</span>) Consumers equation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If you examine this closely, you will
recognize that a different indexing of the factors always reverts back to
Smith’s one-sided formula, which is only valid for traders. I have advocated
this view now and then before to the amazement of my audience, which is perhaps
also the case here among some you, because I spoke of the price of money. But today in these times of inflation we live
daily with “the price of money”. And moreover, the concept “price of money”
appears in Rudolf Steiner’s course itself. I could quote you a whole list, but
I will give you only a few examples (p. 150): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“How does money itself influence the forming of price? For
money itself plays the chief part nowadays both in the ordinary purchase and
sale, and in the payment of wages, and in all the rest of economic life as
well. We must distinguish between that which eventually emerges as price in
terms of money, and that which constitutes the essential value of money in the
hand of one man or another.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Or a little later that (p. 151): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Money as such receives
its value by the free process of circulation.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> This is expressed in the price of money, in
the currency. Then (p. 153):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 27.0pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Economically the
situation is that money itself, simply through the economic process, undergoes
change.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Or once again (p. 158): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 1.0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“In that case I would be
a bad economist if I used very young money. For young money, by virtue of its
youth, is the most valuable and accordingly the most expensive. Thus, if I need
the money for a shorter period, I shall provide myself with cheaper money.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This we must speak about later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> The
concept price of money is no doubt mentioned here by Rudolf Steiner, as is
evidenced by the text; this is a philological issue, not a cognitive one. But
we can also understand it, for money becomes valuable and its price as well, in
the social organic process by virtue of its aging. We have reached the question
of the aging of money.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">(Pause)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">1.<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Short answer to a question:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Social organic control of capital is only sensible against
the background of a viable worldview of the nature of the human being and the
world. All social organic processes only serve to give human beings the chance
to experience themselves as spiritual beings living productively in a spiritual
world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; mso-list: skip; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 18pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">2.<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Short answer to a question: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Economic rationalization gives rise
to leisure time, which can enable individuals to partake in the social and cultural
activities of a free spiritual life. This spiritual life must be present within
society with initiative and productivity. But there is something else. If the
incarnating value only takes place towards a maximization of profits, we are
moving in a direction without social organic style. It is namely not only a
matter of maximization and so-called price reduction of products, if with that
is meant their human, spiritual value. Incarnating labor should not only be
looked at from the viewpoint of rationalization (efficiency), but from the
viewpoint of the enhancement of products in connection with the enhancement of
human needs. The rationalization of labor must be properly weighed against the
labor of enhancement. Thus, no
rationalization without human enhancement!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It
is very true that we require a stable value of money, but a balanced, not a
static one. So that one can say: currency devaluation only in connection with
synchronous currency revaluation. Money value may also decrease to the degree
that new money arises. This brings us to a very important concept of the social
economic course, the concept of <i>old and
young money</i>. Rudolf Steiner speaks about old and young money, because money
in the sense of social organics can be nothing else than an order for
(obtaining) values. Economic values are expressed for the most part in the
means of production in which the two values, the transubstantiating and the
incarnating ones, flow together. That is how money is covered – real financial
collateral can consist only of the useful means of production, useful in the
sense of true social organics, for those means of productions used for making
weapons of mass destruction are in this sense not useful and cannot create
financial security. Money can only be covered by useful means of production.
That is its real value. Not real, for example, is the value that is deposited
on fallow land in the form of collateral credit. Once it is understood that
money can only be covered by the useful means of productions, then it can also
be understood that money must age and die as well as be born. It must age to
the degree that the means of production are worn out. They can under certain
circumstances be devalued completely by one industrial process being replaced
by another that is not only more rational, but that has a greater value in
enhancing human needs. To that degree money ages, it becomes old; as the means
of production become old, money must get old and diminish in value. But when it
only ages, the social organic process cannot go on. The aging must go hand in
hand with money creation. There must be young money to the degree that there is
old money. That is how stability in the process can be achieved.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We
see that the value of money is on the one hand dependent on human capabilities.
By making new means of production, organizing takes place, spirit is applied
and products arise. (Process: money creation, money regeneration, renewal.) By
using these means of production, money too is worn out; it gets old,
depreciates and expires. Now a very interesting question comes up here. The old
money must be taken out of circulation by the associations. New money can only
be brought into circulation to the extent that goods are produced. If aging
money predominates, and therefore an inflationary tendency arises, the
circulation of money must be decreased, because an increase in the money
circulation decreased its value. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Naturally,
the more means of production are made, the more money can be brought into
circulation. In the light of the social organic process, currency depreciation
must be met with a decrease in the money circulation, the opposite of what
happens today.<a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Through
increasing and decreasing the value of money (regeneration and devaluation) the
associations can control the money flow by, for example, directing young money
to the loan sphere. Young money increases in value. It is spent on newly made
means of productions. It increases in value, if these means of production are
used in the sense of social organics, from a minimal value to the highest
maximum value possible. At that point, it should enter into the purchasing
sphere. It diminishes in value when the means of production become old and worn
out and need to be replaced. The money that has become old can under certain
circumstances be steered directly into the gift sphere, where it is only a
question of taking care of the daily needs of those spiritually productive;
they for their part contribute to the creation of young money in the future.<a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Not a statistical stability of the money value is obtained in this way, but a
stabilization by balancing the aging process and regeneration of money, whereby
the aging corresponds to a decrease in the money circulation and the
regeneration to an increase.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There
is another formula given by Rudolf Steiner that is worthwhile considering. The
forming of the just price by balancing both value streams in the right way: V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span>, on the one
hand can also be expressed by N (Nature) times L (Labor) = V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span>. On the
other hand, we have seen that through the incarnating value V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>, labor is
saved, i.e. negative labor. Now the
Course gives for the V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2 </span>formula: Spirit minus Labor. In my opinion, however, it should
be: Spirit times minus Labor V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span> = S </span><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">´</span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> (- L). In the Course it is not
printed in that way, but this is obviously an error. Labor is not subtracted
from the spirit, labor is saved and therefore it must read:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-right: 101.75pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-right: 1.35pt; tab-stops: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span> = S </span><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">´</span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> (- L)
Spirit times minus Labor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-right: 1.35pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span> = N </span><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">´</span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> L Nature
times plus Labor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; margin-right: 1.35pt; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">My reflections have led to this interpretation.
In this proper balancing act just price originates. It is based on the to and
fro of the process of steering transubstantiating and incarnating labor. The
two value currents intermingle; neither appears purely by itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I
would still like to point out a few other problems that seem especially topical
to me. One of them is the <i>currency
problem</i>. If it is understood that just price originates by balancing
“Nature times plus Labor” against “Spirit times minus Labor” in the right way,
if it is understood that the labor that would have to be expended for the
forming of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span> is saved by the forming of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>, then it
must be said that this conservation of labor expresses the value of this
incarnating labor. The incarnation worker would therefore have to get from the
transubstantiation side so much as a counter value as is saved by his output,
and this would have to correspond, if things go right, to what he needs to
cover his necessities in life in order to again produce the same output or an
equivalent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We have heard, on the one hand, the formula
that the value of the transubstantiation labor saved is determined by the
incarnation worker having to receive for his costs of living that which is
necessary to produce the same output or an equivalent. If everything runs as it
should, then the necessities in life for the time that he requires in order to
produce his spiritual output corresponds with the amount of transubstantiation
labor saved by the incarnating labor. With that the following objection can be
met: A toddler making only a few strokes gets more than a hard-working painter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We
come to a third, important point of view: All transubstantiating labor is made
possible by the available land, not only farmland, but also the natural
resources underground. What is available
for the individual within the transubstantiation sphere can be expressed by the
ratio of land area to population. Every single member of the earth’s population
would have in principle that much land area available as results from this
ratio. The increase in value of the earthly usability of the land is
proportional to the means of productions that are applied to this land area,
for the land itself has no value; otherwise we would get into the sphere of
collateral credit. The value of the land area is expressed by the totality of
the means of production capable of being put to use on it. Accordingly, the
currency factor is the ratio land to population, i.e. La : Po. That is the real
currency coefficient. We must thereby proceed from an average land area, not
from a desert, and must bring this average land area in relation to the
population and the means of production applied to, or used on this land. That
is the currency coefficient according to the facts of reality and that is what
matters here. Each member of the population would therefore have to receive so
much for his basic necessities for living as corresponds to the value of the
average land area allotted to him. The prices for calculating his basic needs
must be included in this factor. The prices may therefore not go beyond the
margin in value (German: Wertspanne) that is thereby expressed. In this
respect, we have a currency regulator. The time factor is expressed by the
working factor (German: Bearbeitungsfaktor). The value that arises in a certain
work time is available for the individual in his leisure time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now
among the many questions that all this raises there is an important one with
respect to the fundamental social law that contains the social organic
altruism, the social organic reciprocity. With a certain justification, but
only based on a misunderstanding, it could be objected here that one of the
most important, powerful <i>incentives to
work</i>, namely working for profit, would disappear if this law became valid.
It is said today and rightly so: People will no longer work, if there are no
more incentives. But then it is interpreted falsely in the way that only the
prospect of gain expressed in possessions, property etc. provide an incentive
for the human being and that this is simply human nature. I say that in a
modern, structured social organism profit remains as before the decisive
incentive, but in a modern metamorphosis. Then it will also be a matter of
profit, <i>but profit as gain in
productivity</i>. There must be as much productivity flowing in as possible,
and the desire for increasing productivity will continue to be the incentive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Let me close with a final
observation. The social organic process
came to the fore as the interpenetration of V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span> and V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span>, the transubstantiating and
incarnation values. This interpenetration leads always to a work of art, to the
highest art that there is, the social work of art, and the health and beauty of
this social work of art is expressed in the just price, in the right money
value. I would like to add two short points of views to that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Social
organic transubstantiation requires a common conscious awareness that comes to
life in mutual acts of giving in the sense of the fundamental social law. This
law says: The gain in productivity is greater, the less I keep my productivity
for myself, and the more unrestrictedly I donate my productivity to the social
organism. Then, depending on its contents, something out of this great
collecting pot can be given back, always with respect to the La : Pop, the
currency coefficient. This requires a common consciousness, a consciousness of
mutual giving. In this realm there is a consciousness over and beyond what the
individual human being can encompass with his personal consciousness. Transubstantiating labor leads within the
consciousness of mutual giving to the forming of a common consciousness in the
sense of the Christmas Conference <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>,
which points to the fundamental social factor of the future, to the forming of
a common consciousness that can absorb more than the sum total of the individual
conscious minds. An enhanced, higher consciousness content can become present
within the common consciousness of the transubstantiating labor; there a
super-terrestrial community life can be experienced. That is why the fundamental
social law is designated as the law of <i>occultism</i>:
A higher potential in super-terrestrial consciousness becomes present in the
mutual acts of giving. Every active in the field of transubstantiating labor
experiences himself within and through this common consciousness as its
representative. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">This is one of the great sources of labor and labor output
that at the same time expresses the human dignity of labor by virtue of living,
being active and working in the sphere of a common super-terrestrial consciousness.
That makes their work sensible and worthy of a human being.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
other great working impulse is not connected with community consciousness, but
with the consciousness of freedom, the basis of which - as is shown by soul
observation - is the realization faculty of the human being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
human being realizes reality by constantly letting living concepts flow into
his percepts, which are individualized in this process. He does not receive a
ready-made reality; he has to first create it, he is a constant ‘realizer’.
Since he is not dependent on a finished reality, he is a free human being. This
realizing-consciousness is the source of all creativity, out of which all
creative activity flows forth. This experiencing of oneself in freedom and
realizing-consciousness is the other great working impulse. The community
consciousness in the sense of the fundamental social law through the
reciprocity of the acts of giving that lead to the representative consciousness
is a future consciousness, while the consciousness of freedom draws on the past
of the spiritual world, from which human beings bring forth their free creative
impulses and ever new driving forces. V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">1</span> and V<span style="mso-text-raise: -3.0pt; position: relative; top: 3.0pt;">2</span> unite, as you see, in the streaming together
of these two fundamental working impulses and incentives; they must stream
together in associative or advisory bodies, in which then a constantly renewing
and continuing formation of the rights sphere takes place, in which true
justice in the balancing of the two value poles, leads to Just Price.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
working world economy and the social community will not be rescued by a world
computer [internet], but by a network of associations spread out over 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText2" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">These then were some small samples
from the social organic Course.</span></div>
<div>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-NZ"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-NZ"> During inflation
the rate of the circulation of money increases. (Note by the publisher of the German
original edition).</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-NZ"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-NZ"> The words <i>in the future</i> were added to this
sentence by the German publisher.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=412043690894060574#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">[</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> On the occasion of the so-called Christmas Conference during the turn of the year 1923/24, the Anthroposophical
Society was founded anew in Dornach (Switzerland). See Herbert Witzenmann, <i>The Principles of the Anthroposophical
Society</i>, working translation, Willehalm Institute, 6<sup>th</sup> ed.
Amsterdam, 2001. </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Willehalmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12322730217506893806noreply@blogger.com1