Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/634/en

Aspects of the Social Question

In contrast to the prevailing tendency to render the working human being superfluous in industrially oriented agriculture, the development and leadership of a biodynamic farm organism requires the force of consciousness and the joy in work of ever more human beings. With this counter-movement, which began in the 1960s, the «social question» entered agriculture — more than a hundred years after the emergence of the urban proletariat in the nineteenth century. Today, on biodynamic farms, it has become a burning one. As set out in the introductory chapter, capital in the industrial production process brings about division of labour. The extraordinarily manifold life-activity between earth and cosmos in agriculture, and the way in which the human being, through working, enters into a personal relationship with it, articulates the wholeness into domains of work. Rigid division of labour tears the members of the agricultural organism into fragments and makes them self-contained. To meet this great danger, a social order must be sought within the farm from the outset — one directed toward the wholeness of all the members of the farm organism working together. This new social form takes shape in communities of responsibility or farm communities. In germinal beginnings, such communities are laid out on every biodynamic farm. Every formerly peasant family enterprise has developed, through the articulation of its manifold tasks, step by step into a family-bound community of responsibility.