The first Waldorf school was founded in 1919 in Germany by one of Rudolf Steiner’s followers, Emil Molt, who was the owner and director of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory. It was meant at first for the children of Molt’s employees and was based on Steiner’s educational ideas. Also, because Molt wanted to put into practice Steiner’s social ideas, namely the “Threefold Society” or the triformation of the social organism.
I first became aware of this back in the 1970s when I became involved in a Waldorf School my daughter attended in Argentina. In 1919 Rudolf Steiner published a book: Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (Basic Issues of the Social Question.) Later when I lived in Switzerland, I translated it. It was published in the U.K as Toward Social Renewal. The latest edition is titled Toward a Threefold Society published in the United States by AnthroposophicalPublications.org.
It is not an easy book, but it surprised me to realize that the same individual, whose work was the foundation of Waldorf pedagogy and who had spoken and written about angels, devils, religion, reincarnation and karma, had also introduced concepts about how society should be organized and renewed in a rational, practical way.
Basically, he said that society consists of three elements: the rights state (politics), the economy (production, distribution and consumption of goods) and the cultural or spiritual (everything else, especially education). The defining characteristic of the political state is equality; the defining characteristic of the economy is fraternity; and the defining characteristic of the spiritual-cultural sector is freedom. The problem is that each of the three sections should be autonomous — or at least semi-autonomous — whereas they are combined and confused. For example, the political state controls education which should be a factor of a free cultural section of society. The economy should not be controlled by the State nor by the “free” market, which doesn’t exist. Rather it should be determined by associations of producers, distributors and consumers.
The last paragraph in the book especially interested me:
“One can anticipate the experts who object to the complexity of these suggestions and find it uncomfortable even to think about three systems cooperating with each other, because they wish to know nothing of the real requirements of life and would structure everything according to the comfortable requirements of their thinking. This must become clear to them: either people will accommodate their thinking to the requirements of reality, or they will have learned nothing from the calamity and will cause innumerable new ones to occur in the future.”
The calamity referred to is the First World War, and since that time history has certainly shown these words to be prophetic. I am writing this in 2024 and since first reading the book in 1970 I have witnessed many and more terrible calamities, and the future looks bleak indeed.
A few days ago a young man named Luigi Mangione shot and killed the CEO of an American health care insurer on a street in Manhattan in broad daylight. Why am I not only shocked, but also sympathize to a certain extent with Luigi – if that is possible when the crime is murder. And I am not alone. He has become a modern Jessie James, a criminal good guy whose action was to help the average suckers who suffer under the brutal American capitalist so called “health care” system. The insurers work not for their clients’ health, but to make as much money as possible for themselves and their stockholders. Paid for by the insured. And they are very successful at making money. The victim CEO earned ten million dollars that year.
In 1919, when Steiner’s book was written, the Soviet Union was still in formation — a political-economic-cultural dictatorship. Then came the Second World War, more terrible by far than the First, and the holocaust. But the wars (cold and hot) never ended: Korea, Vietnam, etc. And even now as I write in 2024 the Middle East is about to explode in Israel’s face and Russia and Ukraine are fighting to the end. The calamities have been occurring ‘innumerably’ ever since. The ‘social question’ has never been answered in practice.
The world’s economy is not healthy; in fact, it has been ill at least since the industrial revolution, basically the transition from creating goods by hand to using machines. It began about 1760 and developed quickly, both positively and negatively. It began in Great Britain and soon spread around the world. Before that period, most households made their living farming and lived primarily in small, rural communities. With the advent of factories and more efficient production, people began working for companies located in urban areas for the first time. Often the wages were low, and conditions were extremely harsh. The increase in the number of factories and migration to the cities led to pollution, deplorable working and living conditions, and child labor. It was also responsible for creating capitalism.
The purest form of capitalism is free-market capitalism. Here, private individuals and corporations are unrestrained. They may determine where to invest, what to produce or sell, and at which prices to charge for goods and services without checks or controls. In reality there is no such thing as a “free market”. A market is a situation which may be freely used or restricted. The free marketeers call their offspring a call to freedom, not only for them, but also for the consumers who – according to them – are free to buy or not. The capitalist was and is also free to buy human labor, not the whole human being as in slavery, but an essential part of him: his work.
There were even economic philosophers, such as my namesake Adam Smith, who recognized that the capitalist was greedy, but that greed is good in the sense that as the capitalist earns ever more, everyone – including the worker – benefits (“it trickles down”). But it doesn’t work that way. The capitalists kept and keep their earnings for themselves and become ever richer, while the workers earn a small trickle indeed, in some cases barely enough to survive.
Along came Karl Marx, a German philosopher who had to leave Germany, where his ideas and writings were unacceptable, to the freedom of expression still available in England. There he wrote his magnum opus “Das Kapital”, which saw the working class as historically and inevitably inheriting the power then in the hands of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
His books were far beyond the intellectual capacity of most members of the working class, but were convincing for better educated social activists. Marx contended that there would be a revolt of the urban industrial workers, who would eventually be the new rulers. Eventually, or more likely in the distant future, in the proletarian (workers) state, all would be equal economically as well as spiritually, to the extent that the state would no longer be necessary and a materialistically moral anarchy would result. But it had to be helped along, so Marx and his patron Friedrich Engels published a powerful message: The Communist Manifesto, which cried out: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose, but your chains!”
During the 1850s Marx was struggling economically in London, but he and his large family (four children) survived with help from Engels and by writing articles for the New York Daily Tribune. Surprised? Marx continued to write articles for that newspaper until in late 1861 there was a change in editorial policy. No longer was the Tribune to be a strong abolitionist newspaper. The new editorial board supported an immediate peace in the Civil War in the United States with slavery left intact in the Confederacy. Marx strongly disagreed with this new political position and in 1863 was forced to withdraw as a writer for the Tribune.
Marx’s Russian followers, Lenin and Trotsky, attempted to put into practice his concept that the economy – production, distribution, even consumption – be controlled by the state: the Soviet Union. Not long after the communist revolution the Soviet Union became a brutal dictatorship, worse than what they hoped to displace.
After Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II, the Soviet Union under Stalin took control of a large chunk of Europe and engaged in a cold war with the United States and the United Kingdom. The Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight in 1990 and eventually became Russia again, as capitalist as the rest and a dictatorship to boot. And we’re back to where we started from.
In the west there has been much talk about the Russian “oligarchs”. But what about the American oligarchs, who are so enormously rich that they exceed the Russians’ wealth by far. In fact, capitalist oligarchs control a world in which the majority of the planet’s population is miserably poor.
The associative economy
The political state should not control or enact economic activity, but unlike communism, which gives absolute power – economic, political and cultural – to the state, the Threefold Society assigns the economy to “associations” consisting of representatives of producers, distributors and consumers, the three players in every or most business transactions. Accordingly, representatives of these three should make all the economic decisions: prices, quality, profit margin, etc.
Let’s take an industry that I know --or knew something about when I was active in the international airline industry. I worked for American Airlines as a ticketing, check-in and passenger service agent at La Guardia Airport in New York City for about three years, from 1959 until 1962; then for the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as a Tariff Integrity and Fraud Prevention manager in Buenos Aires, Zurich, Frankfurt, Geneva and back to Buenos Aires. Until retirement.
At that time all the international airlines met regularly at IATA’s head office in Geneva to discuss fares aka tariffs – passenger and freight – as well as flight conditions, and much more. This was technically monopolistic behavior and would have been illegal if governments hadn’t given airlines exemption from anti-monopoly laws when acting within the embracing arms of the International Air Transport Association. The argument IATA used to obtain this exemption was that the airlines needed to be able to charge fares high enough to ensure safety. This was in 1944, when IATA was founded in Havana, Cuba, of all places, and when bumpy commercial air travel was still considered risky.
It lasted a long time. Around 1980 the U.S. government decided that such monopolistic activity was harmful for consumers’ (passengers, aka voters) interests, so it withdrew the exemption for U.S. carriers. So U.S. airlines could no longer participate in IATA’s fares negotiations.
The European and Asian airlines continued setting fares thus giving the U.S. government the cold shoulder. But in the era of the American Empire, this was not a good idea. They were able to hold out a while, until the U.S. government decreed that foreign airlines could not even sell tickets in the U.S. involving travel to or from the U.S. using the fares which had been determined within IATA. That was the end of IATA´s “traffic conference” fare setting. Although there had been no competition involving one-way fares, there was plenty of competition in quality, frequency, passenger service, group and triangular fares etc.
The consequence was the reverse of what the government promised. Many airlines went bankrupt, such as PanAm, TWA, Eastern, and some of the best: Swissair and Varig (Brazil). Just as Marx prophesied, the big guys swallowed the little guys; and there are far fewer international airlines operating now than before “open skies”, even when it doesn’t appear so: Iberia is now a vassal of British Airways, KLM belongs to Air France, and so on. Passengers have “benefited” by miserable, arrogant service, higher fares – including all the add-ons – and crowded aircraft.
About a year before the U.S. government lowered the boom, I wrote an article for a magazine called INTERAVIA World Review of Aviation – Astronautics – Avionics; it was widely read by people active in the air transport industry. The article’s title is “The Associative Principle – its application in the air transport industry”.
Basically, I proposed that the airlines invite representatives of passengers and travel agents to their traffic conferences, where fares and other travel conditions were decided. I had already heard rumors that the U.S. government was considering prohibiting the American airlines from participating in said traffic conferences. Although it was only the U.S. airlines at the beginning, it would surely spread. But if passenger representatives were also participating in the decision-making process, and therefore defending their own interests, there would no longer be a rationale for prohibition.
However, according to my conditions of employment with IATA, I had to submit anything I might publish having to do with the air transport industry to Geneva for the Director General’s permission. This was not arbitrary, for if an article such as this one shows the author as belonging to management of IATA, it would seem as if the airlines that were members agreed with it – which they decidedly did not. In fact, I asked the representative of Swissair what he thought of the idea: he said that the airline reps had enough difficulty agreeing among themselves, while having passenger reps participating would make agreement that much more difficult, if not impossible. This was also the viewpoint of a comment that appeared in the same issue as my article. It was quite long and argued strongly against the idea, which seems attractive at first glance, but... It was signed by Klaus H. Regelin, Publisher and Managing Director of the magazine.
I will only mention that the Director General of IATA at that time was Knut Hammarskjold, nephew of Dag Hammarskjold. (If you don´t know who Dag H. was, ask Google.) He liked the article, but his employers – the world’s international airlines – would have had a collective fit if they knew who wrote it. So he allowed me to have the article published in Interavia , but not under my own name. The article’s author appeared as “Francis Tate”.
In seems obvious that the producer-capitalists of all or of most industries would not willingly accept their consumer-customers participating in price and quality decisions. There have been airline passenger groups over the years, one of the latest being Flyers Rights. org , who would gladly participate. However, if the producers refuse to participate, the solution would necessarily be a law (determined by the democratic state) establishing associative economic groups for the various industries to guarantee consumers rights.
If you think that it is overly idealistic to imagine that such associative economic groups would ever come into existence, or even more unlikely a “threefold society” based upon liberty, equality and fraternity, you may well be right, but I will take the liberty of reminding you of Rudolf Steiner’s words from over a century ago:
“One can anticipate the experts who object to the complexity of these suggestions and find it uncomfortable even to think about three systems cooperating with each other, because they wish to know nothing of the real requirements of life and would structure everything according to the comfortable requirements of their thinking. This must become clear to them: either people will accommodate their thinking to the requirements of reality, or they will have learned nothing from the calamity and will cause innumerable new ones to occur in the future.”