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THREEFOLDING

Social Threefolding and the Council Movement - Søren Groth 27th April 2003

According to Helmut Rudiger (a German syndicalist who fled Nazi-Germany and found a new home in Sweden) in his mammoth work about the ideological history of federalism (issued by Federativs in 1947), the ideas about councils during the German revolutionary period 1918-1919 was adapted:
a) as spontaneous organizing,
b) by the anarchist and syndicalist labor movement,
c) by leftwing communists,
d) and even embraced by some from the radical bourgeoisie – such as writers, artists, philosophers, radical Christians and such. 
 (ie The Bruderhof founder Eberhard Arnold ... wholeheartedly supported the anarcho-communist Landauer)

The councils even existed in Russia – the word Soviet simply means council, and was the people's spontaneous free organizing, a basic democratic structure, which seems to evolve whenever the existing social, economical and political structures collapse.
Lenin was at first positive to the council movement, likely for opportunistic reasons, and as they eventually came into conflict with the Bolshevik party's control over the state, the original soviet movement was crushed (in Kronstadt 1922 was the decisive event where the party took command over the revolution, away from the people's own organizational structure).
The remaining socialist parties, especially the Social Democratic Party in Germany, were so attached to the bourgeoisie state that they as representatives and vanguard for the working class movement actively oppressed the working class' own organizational initiatives.
The councils were by the Social Democratic Party in Germany during 1918 transformed into a toothless proposal for a law about worker representatives in consultative organs in each corporation.
(comment by Roger Rouge)

From a threefold view the interesting thing about the councils is that they developed along two lines: worker councils organizing and confederating in production – and councils based in neighborhoods.
The threefold movement was positive to the pure economic organization in the workers' councils. Rudolf Steiner actively supported this economic revolution, and urged the workers to rely on their own organizational ability, without subordinating it to the political sphere. The political claim should merely be to provide a framework leaving the councils and economical self-management to develop freely.
The contribution the threefold movement tried to give, was the importance of free individuality – the genius of the entrepreneur, which in capitalism becomes high jacked by speculants, and in Marxism dies in government bureaucracy – to replace 'free enterprise' as an economic term with 'free initiative' as a spiritual force:

"We don't even need to say: Private property must become community property. The concept of property will be without any meaning. It will make as much sense, as if the bloodstream in my body in certain places was supposed to be stored. The blood must be in circulation. That, which is capital, must go from the competent to the competent. Will the worker be in agreement with this kind of socialization? Yes, he will as his life conditions force him into being reasonable. He will say to himself: If the entrepreneur has the right knowledge, then I can trust him, then my labor will be used better with the right direction, than that of the capitalists, who haven't the right knowledge, but have replaced it with the unhealthy accumulation of capital.

"I can only give a hint about these matters: The future socialization doctrine about circulation of capital and means of production, will be the factual, true construction of, what even Karl Marx in an abstract way saw as the great goal for humanity - by each according to ability, to each according to needs. We have recently gone through a difficult time of human suffering, through a hard trial time for humanity. Nowadays we no longer need, as many claim, a new kind of human, who can socialize according to the principle: by each according to ability, to each according to needs! No, we could have the right faith. If only we have the will, then such healthy ideas as those about threefolding - into the cultural sphere, the rights sphere and the economic sphere, would be able to succeed. Because this economic life will only be healthy if it is separated from the other two. Then there will in the economic sphere, such as I have described in my book, be formed associations which aren't based on producing and profiting; but in a healthy way based on consumption and doesn't organize production in such a way that the labor is used in vain, but in a way where work is asked for in a recovery of consumption, to liberate the needs."

(Stuttgart 04/25/1919 GA 330 p 97-98)

The 22 May 1919 Steiner was invited by the Coordinating Committee for worker councils at the large factories in Stuttgart, to make an introduction at a meeting, where the above mentioned social democratic proposal for corporate democracy, a "fake socialization", was to be discussed.