Gustav Landauer. Translated by J. Parent. (Telos Press, 7978), 150 pp., $3.00 paperback.
The history of German socialism is usually depicted as the conflict between the "orthodox" Marxists and the Revisionists in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and finally the clash between the SPD-and the Communist Party. However, there were other socialist currents in German socialism. Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) was a socialist thinker who was at odds with the thought and practice of the above socialisms. Landauer's path to anarchistsocialism led through the SPD in the 1890s. He was expelled from the SPD in 1893 because of his defense of the right of anarchists to a place in the Socialist International as socialists. Landauer's experience with the SPD's socialism led him to develop a critique of the emancipatory potential of such socialism and to develop an alternative socialism. Landauer was a close acquaintance of Martin Buber and through Buber he influenced the then developing kibbutz movement. Landauer was murdered in May, 1919, by troops unleashed by the "revolutionary" SPD government to put down the Bavarian Revolution.
We can thank Telos Press for the appearance of the first major work of Gustav Landauer in English. For Socialism is a translation of the second edition of Aufruf zum Sozialismus which was first published in 1911_ There is a new introduction for this edition by Russell Berman and Tim Luke. They have written a brief, yet - adequate, Survey of Landauer's career and thought for those unfamiliar with this interesting anarchist thinker. (See references at end of article). Unfortunately, there is no attempt to assess Landauer's work in light of such contemporary anarchist thinkers as the late Paul Goodman, Murray Book-chin, or Noam Chomsky. We are given an appraisal of Landauer as a precursor of themes later taken up by the Frankfurt School in the writings of such thinkers as Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. This concern is only natural as Telos Press is an offshoot of the American-based Frankfurt School-oriented journal Telos. There are a few minor points that prove irksome in the text itself ? the re-translation into English of the title of Peter Kropotkin's Fields, Factories, and Workshops as The Field, The Factory, The Workshop; the description of the ideas of Henry George in the "Name Index" as "the land in principle should belong to the state" (p. 150) which hardly does justice to the economic thought of George, and, in an American-produced book, one would hope to see a fairer summary of his ideas; and the unfortunate translation of the title as For Socialism rather than retaining Landauer's own explanatory title Call To Socialism.
Landauer's work is basically a call as the title states--a Call to Socialism. He believed that a community of communities where all could be self-active and self-regulating creative beings was possible here and now. The book is entitled a Call To Socialism rather than a Call To Anarchism as Landauer considered himself to be a socialist, more exactly an anarchist socialist and to him both of these terms were synonymous. In Landauer's eyes what was lacking for socialism was the calling, the belief, and the fortitude necessary to live as a free human in the here and now. This belief in freedom and this strength not only to desire freedom but to struggle for it and live as a free being daily was what Landauer subsumed under the concept geist. The term geist, or spirit, as it is used in the text, can be seen as the human self-active and self-regulating creative essence, the mettle and feeling essentially needed for socialism if people are to be free and live freely, that is, if they are to be able to act and realize themselves as humans. (Spirit is the English equivalent for the German word geist. In English spirit has very ethereal connotations. Spirits are ghouls, ghosts, etc. Spirit as Landauer used it can best be approximated in such English uses as "team spirit" or "school spirit" where spirit means feeling for, belief in and action as a member of one's team or school). Accordingly, geist is central to Landauer's vision of anarchist socialism and is the central concept of his Aufruf zum Sozialismus.
Socialists have geist, the spirit to be free, and hence they have the calling to act and to live freely as socialists; and the pseudo-socialists are for Landauer those who lack such vitality to act and live freely. Though they label themselves socialists, they are false socialists. The pseudo-socialists that Landauer faced in his own era in Germany were Marx and his followers and those who adhered to Edward Bernstein's revision of Marx's crisis theory of capitalist collapse. These groups of pseudo-socialists were found in the German Social Democratic Party. Landauer critiqued both orthodox Marxists and Revisionists of the SPD unmercifully in his Aufruf rum Sozialismus. (The terms "orthodox Marxists" and "Revisionists" refer to different factions of the German Social Democratic party. Sometimes Landauer used the term Marxist to describe the Social Democratic Party itself. These people were the Marxists to Landauer). He saw both as tapeworms of socialism for they drained away the spirit necessary for true socialism. They were bogus socialists to him as they lacked geist, the feeling of socialism and the fortitude to struggle for it as socialists, because they saw the further development of capitalism, even if they disagreed over the way of this development, as the growth of socialism itself.
Landauer noted in the Call to Socialism that the orthodox Marxists saw socialization arising from the ever greater concentration of capital, the centralization of the means of production into the hands of fewer and fewer people until a crisis of capital accumulation occurred, and, with the faltering of the capitalist class the proletariat would leap onto the stage of history. According to Marx, the proletariat is totally immiserated by the tendency of capital to rob the working class of more and more of what it creates until the brute interest of necessity drives the working class at the time of crisis to seize the means of production for the good of all. Marx's version of socialism is thus seen here as the takeover and eventual rationalization of capitalism by a totally debased humanity which has lost not only the means of survival but the right to live as humans for they have lost control over their own lives. Landauer saw no new social relationships arising here and he saw only human enfeeblement as people were made ever more powerless and told to accept their debasement, their proletarization, as a sign of socialist development itself. Landauer also discussed the crisis theory in Aufruf zum Sozialismus, and he considered this to be hokum for there were ever more people in his own time who materially benefited from the domination of the capitalist system. The second group, the Revisionists, Landauer noted in his Aufruf zum Sozialismus, did not subscribe to the crisis theory of ever greater proletarization and capitalist productive collapse but rather saw socialism as the continuation of capitalism, the result of the direct and peaceful evolution of capital ism, where modern efficiency meant capitalist concentration of enterprises and this passing of ownership into fewer and fewer hands was seen as socialization. To the Revisionists all that was needed for socialism was for a majority of voters to take part in the electoral process and vote socialism in. Socialism was seen as a legal, state takeover of the remaining large industrial combines combined with the newly created state ones with welfare state legislation such as minimum wage laws and social insurance guaranteeing the material wellbeing of all. Thus, both groupings saw socialism as "immanent" in capitalism. (p. 68)
Therefore, socialism was seen by Marx and his followers as simply a rationalization of capitalism, or--as Murray Bookchin put it in a discussion on Marxism as a form of bourgeois ideology given at the Free Association in New York, April 14, 1978, ? this form of socialism is merely capitalism with a "Conscious 43 ness of its own brutalization," and not a true break with capitalism. For Landauer the view that the beautiful free community of creators was a growth of capitalism was nonsense, an enfeebled caricature of what socialism is in actuality_ Socialism to him was neither the logical extension of capitalism nor was it the logic of capitalism rationalized. Material development to Landauer was not necessarily socialist development or did it have any automatic results. Commenting on the logic of socialism as a flowering of capitalism he noted, "Capitalism will not necessarily change into socialism. kneed not. perish." (p. 74).
Such "socialists" did not fight for socialism nor could they tell people that they could strive for freedom or actually be free and be socialist as they had no conception of freedom beyond material development. In this they were united with the bourgeoisie as they both believed that human emancipation was the product of material development and the way of human fulfillment. This form of "socialism" was devoid of geist for it had no belief in socialism as a new way of life. In success, without the geist of socialism being held by all, it would usher in a more instrumentally rationalized capitalism, a worse unfreedom, as the kinks in the capitalist system would be ironed out leaving even less space for freedom in the clock-like world of the dictatorship of the proletariat where all could be conscripted into industrial armies and all would be employees of the same company as was put forth in Lenin's Taylorized vision of "communism" in State and Revolution. Consequently, Landauer saw that even in their belief in change these people had their eyes affixed on what was, and not on the socialism that could be and should be.
Socialism for Landauer was a "new beginning." (p. 136) In contrast with the view that saw human emancipation subsumed under the logic of the rationalization of capitalism as a product of material development, his notion of change was that of the logic of a break with the world of estrangement where social relations are based on dominance and submission, on a power and powerlessness that debases humans into mere instrumentalities to be used as objects. Landauer saw socialism as a growth of disalienation in the here and now. Landauer's notion of change was a step by step creation of freedom. The creation and nurturing of little pockets of free life that were possible even in the unfree now was his way of change. One did not wait for the forces of history, the development of the mode of production, to permit us to be free. One acted now as an anarchist socialist to create a world worthy of oneself as a human. As a socialist, one became a subject rather than an object of history- Landuaer realized that the "bearers of history are persons." (p.62) If socialism did not come, it was our fault. -
Accordingly, unlike the orthodox Marxists and Revisionists, Landauer perceived no great liberatory potential residing in the proletariat as they represented the total loss of subjectivity. They were without geist they were totally estranged from their creative nature as they were not self-active and self-regulating beings, but rather they were objectified. They were objects, controlled and dominated by extrinsic forces, regimented by others, rather than subjects who could act and realize themselves. From such beings, devoid of geist, he saw no possibility or reconstructive praxis. Landauer's vision is unlike the orthodox Marxists and Revisionists who saw something good coming from the inexorable march of both spiritual and physical alienation, the loss of control over one's own life. (The orthodox Marxists glibly accepted both the loss of control over one's own life and the stuff of life and the Revisionists worried enough to fill the belly but accepted the "spiritual" immiseration of life, the loss of the ability to act and realize oneself in the name of modernity, rational manufacture, the factory system, technical progress, bureaucratization, ad nauseam, as the price one paid to insure material well-being for all.) Landauer's vision of anarchism did not rest on estrangement. Emancipation for Landauer rested on the infusion of life with a subjective demand for freedom, a sensibility that requires freedom now as a matter of life itself. Degradation could not lead to emancipation. One becomes free by ceasing to be a proletarian, an object; emancipation starts in acting as human.
Drawing on Peter Kropotkin's ground-breaking argument put forth in Fields, Factories, and Workshops, Landauer also rejected the orthodox Marxists' and Revisionists' shared contention that technology, the mode of production needed for socialism, means centralization or the loss of the human scale in life, the lapse of human self-management. To Landauer this belief was simply steam, so much hot air. In Au fruf zum Sozialismus he declared that Marx's view of techniques was appropriate for the age of steam, but in Landauer's own time the development of electricity made decentralization a possibility since there was no technical necessity to centralize creative life around the driveshaft of a steam engine under the roof of one huge factory. Indeed, other technical possibilities and mixes were now definitely open to humans. Landauer concluded that there were no technical reasons that could justify centralized social organization in his own era.
Landauer also put aside another aspect of this technical myopia that conveniently summed up whole epochs of human being as merely the clash between slave and master, serf and feudal lord, proletariat and bourgeois, as the mode of production was seen as engendering all human being as its product. He believed that socialism was possible if we strive for it. "Socialism, you Marxists, is possible at all times and with any kind of technology, while at all times, even with splendidly developed machine technology, it is impossible for the wrong group." (p.74) Hence, the history of humans also contains a human history, that of guilds, village communities and free communes at their best. These were as much the possible material realities of the level of material development of the Medieval epoch as discussed by Kropotkin in Mutual Aid as was that of feudal lord and serf. For Landauer, life is not totally a product of the mode of production. As an anarchist, rather than stressing degradation as human history, he--like Kropotkin--stressed the history of human reconstruction, of mutual aid, of attempts to end and overcome the world of domination and hierarchy.
One can argue with Landauer over the possibility of a socialism based on generalized want surviving without the struggle for the things of life erupting to re-create a hierarchical society as some would want to escape the communion of shared misery. What Landauer was certain of was that material conditions do not guarantee a miserable life. History is not a closed book. There have been societies wherein people were more free with less material development. Landauer realized that the human subject can make things better if she or he so believes in the beauty of socialism. As Landauer states, "Socialism is a striving with the help of an ideal to create a new reality." (p.29) To say that the collectives of Spain in 1936 were materially premature, and therefore impossible under the then present mode of production is to deny their possibility. (Consequently, it was justified by such "socialists" to destroy physically what could not possibly exist as it had to be counterrevolutionary for it was too good for present material development). As Murray Bookchin put it in his study on Spanish anarchism, "Spanish Anarchism revealed how far proletarian socialism could press toward an ideal of freedom on moral premises alone." (Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936, New York: Free Life Editions, 1977, p. 308).
History to Landauer then is not a product, an extrinsic result of laws of material development, an object created by the mode of production indifferently manufactured without regard to human acts, but rather it is the struggle for the human, the struggle for geist. Accordingly, Landauer could conclude that there was an alternative to the impossible present that confronts life, if "enough people want it." (p. 74) Any further material development was not the absolute prerequisite or "practical premise" for a free life as Marx and Engels stated in The German Ideology. Material well-being may underpin a free life, but it can not create it nor can it guarantee it.
Who can honestly deny today that material conditions are still not yet ripe (if not over ripe) to permit food, clothing, and shelter for all in advanced industrial societies? Yet, and it is our tragedy, there is still no socialism as Landauer describes it, and the world is definitely more materially developed now than when Landauer lived. Kropotkin could write of the Conquest of Bread but we now live in an era of throw-away containers, built-in obsolescence, and in which crops are plowed under to make it worthwhile to grow food. Long before Landauer wrote, Marx and Engels could write in 1848 that communism was a specter haunting Europe. How long does one have to wait for the machinery of freedom, the means of life to develop to permit a free way of life to flower? Consequently, Landauer realized that it was the subjective dimensions of freedom that prove to be the impediment to the development of socialism. Material development has already been , achieved. If people did believe in a free society, there would be a free society. Technical development is not the problem, nor does techne humanize humans. Instead, "technology . in a cultured people, will have to be developed according to the psychology of free people who want to use it." (pp. 96-97)
Accordingly, for Landauer, reconstruction, the creation of socialism, the creative action of those who have received the call, the geist, the willed fortitude and vision to create socialism, is the true hope of humanity. Not only is belief necessary for freedom, the creation of a world suited to the individual as a creative productive being is also necessary. In the face of a world of powerlessness that gained substance from lives through dominance and submission, Landauer called out for a "...Socialism that is a reversal of this. Socialism is a new beginning. Socialism is a return to nature, a re-endowment with spirit, a regaining of relationship." (p. 136) Landauer concluded that socialism was to be nurtured in bands of friends, in the bund, these natural groups based on face to face affinity would league together to develop and learn the ways of socialism. "So let us unite to establish socialist households, socialist villages, socialist communities." (p.138) Following in the German romantic volkish tradition as epitomized by Goethe, Landauer believed that true emancipation could only be nurtured in contact with the earth. Socialism was to be nurtured in settlements in the countryside, fields with good earth where conditions could let human nature grow. These little pockets of the anarchist society, based on face to face sociation, human scaled technics, and in contact with the earth, would act as magnets of free life. Others would be attracted and follow through the strength of one's human example of free life.
Human emancipation was a human act for Landauer. As Eric Muhsam, a friend of Landauer's who was later brutally murdered by the Nazis, stated, Landauer was the theorist of the "permanent revolutionary." (Eric Muhsam, quoted in Ruth Link-Salinger (Hyman), Gustav Landauer: Philosopher of Utopia, (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977, p. 53) The personal act of bearing witness for socialism was a political act. The anarchist for Landauer was a different sort of person, one who lived not immersed in the grand promise of a distant anarchist future after the proverbial revolution made all things possible; but one who lived as if anarchist society already existed and one's life depended on its existence. In one's own life one drew on the "intrinsic," a term used in the Call to Socialism to show that freedom is rooted within the individual and not on the extrinsic.
Thus, for Landauer anarchists do not act like other people. They are beings who believe in freedom and live in freedom as best they can in an estranging world. And for Landauer, if a person acts as less than an anarchist in one's own personal life, if one speaks merely words from one's mouth about an anarchist future while one acts as less than an anarchist, if one uses others for convenience as objects while posing as an anarchist, if one lives as less than a creative being, if one waits for the "revolution" instead of struggling for his or her freedom now, if one lives apart from nature and is denatured--one is the counter-revolutionary. Such a person proves to be the reactionary wearing liberatory labels. Such a one loses everything, for as we betray anarchism as the concrete stuff of one's life we betray ourselves and lose everything, "Everything begins with the individual, and everything depends on the individual." (p. 136) This concern for the human subject as the moral base upon which a free life, a truly human life, is to be erected is the legacy which Landauer gave to anarchism.
? Will Petry
References
The best overall introduction in English to Gustav Landauer's life and thought is still Eugene Lunn's The Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley, California: University of California Press,
1973). Lunn's book contains a useful bibliography. Also of interest for Landauer is Martin Buber's "Landauer" in his Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 7958), pp. 46-57; Martin Buber, "Recollections of a Death," in Pointing the Way: Collected Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), pp. 175.120; Paul Breines, "Jew as Revolutionary: The Case of Gustav Landauer," Leo Baeck Yearbook MI (1967), pp. 7584; C. W. (Colin Ward), "Gustav Landauer,- Anarchy no. 54 (August 1965), pp. 244-251; and Jack Frager, "A Look at Gustav Landauer," Libertarian Analysis vol. 1, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 43-45. Two works that are somewhat less than adequate in their treatment of Landauer are Charles B. Maurer's The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971) and Ruth LinkSalinger (Hyman)'s Gustav Landauer: Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977) Link-Salinger's book contains a helpful bibliography, "Oeuvres Gustav Landauer," by Arthur Hyman and this work also deals with Landauer's contact with the early kibbutz movement and Martin Buber. Paul Avrich's excellent review of both Lunn and Maurer can be found in The Nation no. 17(23 November 1974), pp. 533-536. This same review in an expanded form with interesting bibliographic information on Landauer appears in The Match! via/. 5, no. 2 (December 1974), pp. 10-12.
The only other writings of Landauer's to appear in English translation are "The 12 Articles of the Socialist Bund," published in both Lunn and For Socialism, and his article "Social Democracy in Germany," first published in English by Freedom Press in 1896, and can be found republished in Libertarian Analysis vol. 1, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 47-54