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Title: Landauer’s Fallacy Author: Wayne Price Date: July 28, 2011 Language: en Topics: Gustav Landauer Source: http://anarkismo.net/article/20188
Reading contemporary anarchist literature, I repeatedly come across some
version of a quotation from the German anarchist Gustav Landauer
(1870—1919). A book on anarchism and education cites “Gustav Landauer’s
famous remark” (Suissa, 2010; p. 136),
“The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but
is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of
human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by
behaving differently.” (quoted in above)
The writer on education actually took this quotation from a work by the
well-known anarchist writer, Colin Ward. Another version of this “famous
statement by Gustav Landauer” (Gordon, 2008; p. 38) is cited in Uri
Gordon’s book on the nature of anarchism,
“One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass but…[only] idle
talkers…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 among human beings, a mode of behavior between men [note];
we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving
differently toward one another…We are the state, and we shall continue
to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real
community….” (quoted above)
In either version, this statement is fundamentally wrong, I will argue.
First, I will paraphrase the statement, to summarize what I think
Landauer was saying. He was denying that the state is primarily an
institution, a social structure. Instead, he claims that it is nothing
but a set of relationships among people. He draws the conclusion that it
is wrong to seek to overthrow the state in a revolution. Instead, we
should develop alternative ways of relating to each other, expressed in
alternate social arrangements created in the here-and-now, to gradually
replace the state. (While the quotations refer to the state, I assume
they generalize to all forms of oppression, particularly capitalism.)
Note that it is not I but Landauer who counterposed these approaches:
either we see the state as a thing, an institution, or we see it as
relationships. Either we aim for a revolution to smash the state or we
build alternate relationships here-and-now. This was his view and the
view of those who quote him—not mine.
The Landauer quotation is admired by those anarchists whose basic
strategy is to gradually build alternate institutions until they can
peacefully replace capitalism and the state. Sometimes this is called a
“new anarchism,” although it goes back to the ideas of Proudhon, not to
mention Landauer. This nonrevolutionary strategy is opposed to the
supposedly “old” strategy of revolutionary class struggle anarchism (see
Gordon, 2008; Price, 2009).
In his time, Landauer was an influential anarchist thinker and activist.
Erich Fromm referred to him as “one of the last great representatives of
anarchist thought” (Fromm, 1955; p. 221). Jesse Cohen stated, “Gustav
Landauer [should] be remembered, right along with Bakunin and Kropotkin,
as one of anarchism’s most brilliant and original thinkers” (quoted in
an advertisement for a new collection of Landauer’s writings, at the
back of Suissa, 2010). Paul Avrich, the historian of anarchism, wrote,
“He was also the most influential German anarchist of the twentieth
century” (same). Perhaps the most impressive blurb is a 1893 reference
in a German police file, “Landauer is the most important agitator of the
radical and revolutionary movement in the entire country” (same). High
praise indeed!
During his political career, Landauer went from being a Marxist
oppositionist among the youth of the German Social Democratic Party, to
complete hostility to Marxism and dedication to anarchism. (Until I have
seen the new collection of his work [Revolution and Other Writings: A
Political Reader, Gabriel Kuhn ed. & trans.; PM Press], I am relying on
Landauer; 1978 and Ward; 1965).
In 1919, following World War I and the Russian Revolution, revolutions
swept across Europe. Landauer was invited to serve on the central
council of the region of Bavaria, which was trying to establish a
repoublic of workers and peasants councils. Counterrevolutionary
military forces, under the orders of Social Democrats, overthrew the
council repoublic. Landauer was arrested, repeatedly shot, and then
trampled to death, similar to the killing of Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.
“When [Luxemburg] and Gustav Landauer were murdered by the soldiers of
the German counter-revolution, the humanistic tradition of faith in
[humanity] was meant to be killed with them” (Fromm, 1955; p. 210).
Landauer’s writings express keen insight into many of the problems of
Marxism: its teleological determinism, its centralism, its scientism,
its mostly uncritical attitude toward technology. He was entirely
correct that socialism requires new ways of human beings relating to
each other and of relating to nature. Almost all anarchists would agree
with these views.
However, he integrated the communist-anarchism of Kropotkin with the
gradualist alternative-institutionism of Proudhon’s mutualism. He
advocating leaving the cities (and the class struggle in them). Instead
he proposed building collective farms. These would spread until they
replaced capitalism and the state.
“The socialist village, with workshops and village factories, with
fields and meadows and gardens…you proletarians of the big cities,
accustom yourselves to this thought…for that is the only beginning of
true socialism…” (quoted in Ward, 1965; p. 246). “Let us unite to
establish socialist households, socialist villages, socialist
communities….They should shine out over the country, so that the masses
of men [note] will be overcome by envy of the new primeval bliss of
satisfaction….” Landauer, 1978; p. 138).
There is nothing wrong with building cooperatives or collective
villages. But this is not a strategy for overthrowing capitalism and its
state. Its most “successful” implementation were the Israeli kibbutzim,
which were ideologically inspired partially by Landauer’s friend, the
Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Whatever their virtues, these served as
agents of a capitalist, colonial-settler, new state, not socialist
anarchism.
Along with his valid criticisms of Marxism, Landauer also condemned its
core orientation to the working class (he similarly condemns the
syndicalists). After all, he wanted the workers to leave the big cities
and industries where the class struggle was being fought out and (as the
“famous statement” has it) “contract other relationships” by building
collective agricultural-industrial farms in the countryside. This meant
that they must stop being industrial workers, proletarians.
He supported labor unions only if they worked with consumer
cooperatives, using their money to buy land for collective
industrial-agricultural villages. This was not a class orientation,
since he also hoped for “rich men [to] either join us completely or at
least contribute to our cause” (Landauer, 1978; p. 140).
Unfortunately, his writing is full of vile insults and degrading
caricatures of the working class. “Proletarians are the born uncultured
plodders….The proletarian’s uncultured mentally is, incidently, one of
the reasons why Marxism, systematized unculturedness, has been so well
received by the proletariat…..The workers are not a revolutionary class,
but a bunch of poor wretches who must live and die under capitalism….If
the revolution came today, no stratum of the population would have less
idea of what to do than our industrial proletarians.” (Landauer, 1978;
pp. 69, 86, 134)
It is ironic that Landauer died, not defending his fantasy of collective
villages, but as part of a real working-class revolution. Whatever his
weaknesses, he died bravely in the cause of proletarian anarchism.
Returning now to the “famous remark” of Landauer’s: saying that the
state is only a relationship between people, is like saying that Niagra
Falls is just drops of water flowing downward. It is true, but misses
the point. All institutions (social structures) are composed of
individual humans. If a neutron bomb killed off all the people but left
the buildings in which the government meets, there would be no more
state. But this does not mean that, as Margaret Thatcher once said,
there is no society, only individuals. When many people act in
consistent, repeated, and stable patterns, then that is an institution.
(By “act” I include both overt behavior and internal thinking and
believing.) And such institutions resist change. The US national state
has outlasted all those who once established it, and those who continued
it, for over 200 years; the individuals are different, but the state
continues.
No doubt, if tens of millions of individuals decided to live in a
different, nonstate, way, this would challenge the state. But what if,
at the same time, other millions decided to keep on living in a statist
fashion? What if they have self-interests in living as powerful and
wealthy people, and this is part of their self-conception? Statism will
not be settled by how many people chose to live this way or that. It
will take a clash, a conflict, a fight. Ruling classes have rarely
permitted those they exploit to chose to live differently; they use
force to maintain their institutions, especially the state—and the
oppressed are forced to either use violence to defend their choices or
to surrender to the masters.
Even Landauer notes that his strategy of collective villages and
cooperatives will face state resistance. “The state…will place the
greatest and smallest obstacles in the way of the beginners. We know
that” (Landauer, 1978; p. 141). What is his answer to this? “We’ll cross
that bridge when we come to it!” (same). This is hardly adequate.
Socialist-anarchism will need a mass movement of workers and all the
oppressed, determined to live differently, for ourselves and our
children. But it will not succeed if the movement blinds itself to the
obstacles, bases itself on fantasies, and refuses to prepare for an
eventual revolution.
References:
Fromm, Erich (1955). The Sane Society. Greenwich CT: Fawcett.
Gordon, Uri (2008). Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from
Practice to Theory. Ann Arbor MI: Pluto Press.
Landauer, Gustav (1978). For Socialism. (D. J. Parent, trans.). St.
Louis: Telos Press.
Price, Wayne (2009). “The two main trends in anarchism.”
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/13536
Suissa, Judith (2010). Anarchism and Education; A Philosophical
Perspective. Oakland CA: PM Press.
Ward, Colin (1965). “Gustav Landauer.” In Anarchy 54 (vol. 5, no. 8).
Pp. 244-254.