Gustav
Landauer –
Quintessentially
Anarchist and Preternaturally Prescient
Gustav Landauer is, for me, the quintessential anarchist.
The brilliance of his
mind was exceeded only by the depth of love for Humanity in his heart. His
analysis of the poetry of Goethe and Walt Whitman bear witness to this.
Gustav Landauer was a mystic. He was also one of the most grounded and
lucid thinkers the world has ever produced.
His ability to grasp the essence of both the spiritual and the material
in his mind and with his precious Soul was unique and
set him apart from many of his comrades. He was able to do this because he
apprehended, correctly, that both the spiritual and the material derive,
ultimately, from the same source – the Moral, and exist to express moral
imperatives.
Precious little remains of the writings of Gustav Landauer. Of that, little has been translated into English.
Below are two excerpts
from the writings of Gustav Landauer:
"One can throw
away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and
credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish
that one can smash in order to destroy it.
The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a
mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving
differently toward one another – One day it will be realized that Socialism is
not the invention of anything new, but the discovery of something actually
present, of something that has grown…We are the state, and we shall continue to
be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community
and society of men." – Gustav Landauer
"Schwache Stattsmanner, Schwacheres Volk!"
Der Sozialist, June, 1910
"…The realization
of Socialism is always possible if a sufficient number of people want it. The realization depends not on the
technological state of things, although Socialism when realized will of course
look differently and develop differently according to the state of technics; it depends on people and on their spirit…Socialism
is possible and impossible at all times; it is possible when the right people
are there to will it and to do it; it is impossible when people either don't
will it or only supposedly will it, but are not capable of doing it." –
Gustav Landauer
"For Socialism",
quoted in Martin Buber,
Paths in Utopia
Translated by R.F.C.
Hull
If there is one lesson
I learned from the 20th C. it is that revolution is not the way. I can think of
no recipe for disaster more sure fire than people having more freedom and
responsibility than they are prepared for. Landauer
understood this and warned against it repeatedly. He was not in favor of
revolution, but rather evolution. In his writings he warns against Communist or
Socialist governments and predicts, with startling prescience, what is destined
to occur if Communism or Socialism is made into a form of government. Landauer was not a Marxist. Had the Left adopted the
Socialism of Landauer, rather than those of Marx, the
tragic events of the 20th C. probably would not have occurred.
It is necessarily true
that the state must be gradually supplanted by substituting the ways in which
we now interact with one another with new and better ways. Common sense tells
us why.
Only in the actual
adoption of new and better ways of interacting with one another do we
demonstrate how and to what extent we are truly prepared for greater
responsibility and liberty. The state is transformed, as a matter of fact, by
those acts and only insofar as we are able to tolerate the specific new
freedoms and responsibilities and then only to those specific extents.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan,