The French Revolution (1789-1799) brought the slogan “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” and “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.”[1] These core concepts of individual liberty and democracy were insufficient to resolve the continuing social and economic inequalities in France, leading to the June Days uprising of June 23-26, 1848. The question of class inequality, which is at the core of the social question, “was brought to the attention of the public due to the intense participation of socialist workers and artisans in the social struggles in the spring of that year, and particularly in the ‘June Days’ in France.”[2] This uprising “would stand as the clearest example of class struggle in the modern European experience.”[3] “At that time [the 19th century in Europe] the social question was the central subject of volatile political conflicts between the ruling classes and working-class movements.”[4] In modern times, the social question continues and pertains not just to socioeconomic inequalities but also to the inequalities of race, sexual orientation, gender identification and religious beliefs, also including inequalities of workplace inequality and equality for persons with disabilities. These inequalities share a common theme:
[T]he social problem as Steiner identified it was that individuals are prevented from fully developing, but the focus here is not on the end-state of a ‘developed’ individual, but on the process of continual transformation.[5]
To understand the history of the revolutions that have occurred in Europe and America[6], we can bring to our awareness that the need for freedom and equality arose from our previous incarnation around the time of Christ and early Christianity. From a lecture Steiner gave to the Theosophical Society on October 26th 1905 entitled “The Social Question and Theosophy” (GA 68d):
…all those souls who today cry for liberty and equality have learned it at another stage of their existence, in an earlier incarnation. The greatest needs of the human being of today were embodied in the early time of Christianity, in the first Christian centuries. All human beings have taken up this press for equality, before which the human being of today stands in spiritual life. Christianity brought the message of equality before God. In times prior to that, there had been no such equality.[7]
This leads our thinking to the question, if we stand equal before God, why do we not stand equal before our fellow man? Unfortunately, the concept of “equal before our fellow man” turned away from equality in justice, freedom and dignity and instead descended into seeking material equality:
The soul that 1800 years ago was accustomed to claiming equality for the beyond now brings the impulse for equality with it, but in connection with what is important today: “equality before Mammon.”[8],[9]
This descent must be corrected:
If it [the soul] is to find an ascent again, it must find the spirit in the present, the inwardness, in the soul element itself. That is what the Theosophical world movement is striving for: to prepare the soul for the third stage [see John Root’s comments about this phrase “the third stage”], because it is filled with God, filled with divine wisdom, and will thereby again know how to place itself in the world, so that it will again find the harmony between itself and the surrounding world.[10]
As an aside, note the phrase “the spirit must find” (as it has been translated in English), and how fourteen years later in 1919, Steiner introduces the three aspects of the social question in GA 332a, Lecture 1, with this statement: “The spirit must give the answer to the following [three questions].”[11]
Furthermore, Steiner emphatically stated that the idea that we are victims of our environment, a product of our circumstances, is completely wrong:
Our national economists and our social theorists today so often say: the human being is only the product of outer circumstances. The human being has come to this because he has lived in these or those outer conditions. Thus speaks, for example, in earnest, social democracy, saying that the human being becomes what the environment makes of him, that because he has become a proletarian worker, due to the entire development of industry, he has also become one in his soul, the way he has evolved through just these conditions. The human being is a product of circumstances. We can often hear that. Let us study the conditions themselves, let us consider what is round about us, what we are most dependent on. Are we dependent merely on nature? No![12]
Rather:
The deepest humanity, the deepest soul-inwardness must first stream out of our own hearts into the world. Then the world will be an image of the soul, and in this soul there will be an image of the world. This will be able to satisfy people again…The first things that have to be worked over, what we have to take up first as the social question, are the souls of today, which produce the environment of tomorrow.[13]
This “deepest humanity” is concretely acquired through acquiring Theosophical knowledge and the development (at least a kernel) of universal brotherhood (brackets are John Root’s):
If human beings realize that the improvement of conditions depends on themselves, if they acquire Theosophical knowledge, and if they cognize the first fundamental principle to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood [Refers to the first fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society: “To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”] and develop it in themselves as a social feeling for the surrounding world, then the actual social is possible, and one is prepared for what will happen in the near future.[14]
Let us remember that universal brotherhood is characteristic of the sixth epoch for which we are being prepared through the development of our consciousness soul:
In the sixth epoch … it is the spirit self that must be developed within the souls of men, just as now the consciousness soul is being developed. The nature of spirit self is that it must pre-suppose the existence in human souls of the three characteristics of which I have spoken: social life in which brotherliness prevails, freedom of thought, and pneumatology. These three characteristics are essential in a community of human beings within which the spirit self is to develop as the consciousness soul develops in the souls of the fifth epoch.[15]
Steiner then very elegantly (and quite unexpectedly in my opinion) connected the social question and universal brotherhood to the false premise of economic theory! The false premise of economic theory is that production of commodities is associated with the wage paid for the labor to produce those commodities. If instead one works from premise of universal brotherhood that “arise[s] out of the human being and from humanity”[16] one arrives at the realization that a “…commodity is the result of something other than directly compensated work. Thus its value also has nothing to do with what is to be paid in wages.”[17]
And now we get to the crux of the matter, the resolution of the social question:
Just as the Greek laborer did his work under the compulsion of his master and a present laborer works under the compulsion of wages, just so in the future only freedom will obtain.[sic] Labor and compensation will in future be completely separated.
That will constitute the health of social conditions in the future. You can see it already today. Work will be a voluntary performance out of the recognition of necessity, out of the realization that it must be done. People perform it because they look at the person and see that he needs work done for him. … Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand, with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor, and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal.
I often find it useful to rework Steiner’s logic in reverse. When, in the future, labor is a sacrifice for humanity because I see the need of humanity, then I do this work because I have a developed consciousness soul and spirit-self. I produce commodities completely independently of any wage for this labor and so “I stand in a free relation to labor.” From this ascent of my soul, I am no longer bound by the materialistic thinking Mammon. I stand equal not only before God, I stand equal before my fellow man. “Thus labor becomes anything but a burden. It becomes something into which we place what is most sacred for us, our compassion for humanity, and then we can say: Labor is sacred because it is a sacrifice for mankind.”[18] I am not a product of my circumstances, instead I am producing the environment of tomorrow. In this future of brotherhood, the issues of inequality no longer exist.
As a final word, one of the posters on Janusz Korczak that Mariola Strahlberg put up for her presentation “Children as Stars” is a quote by Korczak that I find succinctly reflects the topics discussed in this essay: “I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and act. It is not the duty of those around me to love me. Rather, it is my duty to be concerned about the world, about man.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen
[2] F. Andreucci, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001, Chapter 3 titled “Marx and Engels”
[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0574
[4] Thomas Faist, The Transnationalized Social Question, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 33
[5] Brogan, A. Steiner Shorts 3: The Social Problem
[6] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/theminewars-labor-wars-us/
[7] Steiner, R. GA 68d: The Social Question and Theosophy, translated by John Root, Sr., Lecture given to the Theosophical Society on Oct 26 1905, online at https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA068d/
[8] Mammon in the New Testament of the Bible is commonly thought to mean money, material wealth, or any entity that promises wealth, and is associated with the greedy pursuit of gain.
[9] Steiner, R. GA 68d, Lecture 1
[10] Ibid.
[11] Steiner, R. The Social Future, Lecture 1, The Social Question as a Cultural Question, a Question of Equity, and a Question of Economics, October 24, 1919
[12] Steiner, R. GA 68d, Lecture 1
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Steiner, R. Preparing for the Sixth Epoch, Lecture given on June 15, 1915
[16] Steiner, R. GA 68d, Lecture 1
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
Marc Clifton 