Social Threefolding - Three Realms of Society - Cooperative Economic Life

Cooperative Economic Life

Steiner advocated cooperative forms of capitalism, or what might today be called stakeholder capitalism, as exemplified by the Rudolf Steiner Foundation's key involvement in the national movement in the U.S. to enact legislation permitting the creation of B-corporations, a new kind of for-profit corporation legally structured to be socially responsible. Steiner advocated cooperative forms of capitalism because he thought that conventional shareholder capitalism and state socialism, though in different ways, tend to absorb the State and human rights into the economic process and transform laws into mere commodities. Steiner rejected state socialism because of that, but also because he believed it reduces the vitality of the economic process. Yet Steiner disagrees with the kind of libertarian view that holds that the State and the economy are kept apart when there is absolute economic competition. According to Steiner's view, under absolute competition, the most dominant economic forces tend to corrupt and take over the State, in that respect merging State and economy. Second, the State tends to fight back counter-productively under such circumstances by increasingly taking over the economy and merging with it, in a mostly doomed attempt to ameliorate the sense of injustice that emerges when special economic interests take over the State.

By contrast, Steiner held that uncoerced, freely self-organizing forms of cooperative economic life, in a society where there is freedom of speech, of culture, and of religion, will 1) make State intervention in the economy less necessary or called for, and 2) will tend to permit economic interests of a broader, more public-spirited sort to play a greater role in relations extending from the economy to the State. Those two changes would keep State and economy apart more than could absolute economic competition in which economic special interests corrupt the State and make it too often resemble a mere appendage of the economy. In Steiner's view, the latter corruption leads in turn to a pendulum swing in the opposite direction: government forces, sometimes with the best of intentions, seek to turn the economy increasingly into a mere appendage of the State. State and economy thus merge through an endless iteration of pendulum swings from one to the other, increasingly becoming corrupt appendages of each other.

Steiner held that State and economy, given increased separateness through a self-organizing and voluntarily more cooperative economic life, can increasingly check, balance, and correct each other for the sake of continual human progress. In Steiner’s view, the place of the State, vis-a-vis the self-organizing, cooperative economy, is not to own the economy or run it, but to regulate/deregulate it, enforce laws, and protect human rights as determined by the state's open democratic process. Steiner emphasized that none of these proposals would be successful unless the cultural sphere of society maintained and increased its own freedom and autonomy vis-a-vis economic and State power. Nothing would work without spiritual, cultural, and educational freedom.

An example of Steiner’s students working toward cooperative capitalism is the RSF Social Finance organization. Among other things, RSF Social Finance has been a key supporter of B Lab, a company that is helping drive the national movement in the U.S. for legislation permitting the creation of B-corporations. Such legislation has been passed so far in a dozen or more U.S. states, and is being worked on in many more. The B-corporation, or benefit corporation, is a new corporate form designed for for-profit entities that want to consider the good of the society and the environment in addition to profit in their decision making process. Benefit corporations are legally protected from lawsuits charging a failure to consider only the maximization of shareholder value. The additional accountability provisions found in a benefit corporation require the director and officers to consider the impact of their decisions not only on shareholders but also on society and the environment. The benefit corporation seeks to merge the idealism of non-profits with the economic productivity of the profit motive, and is intended to further "stakeholder capitalism” – capitalism concerned with a broader set of interests than are pursued by the traditional shareholder-value-maximizing corporation. When Ben & Jerrys sold their socially responsible ice cream company, the law on maximizing shareholder value left them little other choice than to sell to whoever came along as the highest bidder. By contrast, the benefit corporation's legal form, if Ben and Jerry's could have adopted it at the time, would have permitted and required them to consider a broader set of concerns as well as shareholder value.