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Title: Paths in Utopia
Author: Martin Buber
Date: 1949
Language: en
Topics: community, utopian socialism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pëtr Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Karl Marx, Lenin
Source: Retrieved on 4th May 2021 from http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=E7046B32D6C62AD156F91A4C4AFF69E7
Notes: Translated by R. F. C. HULL

Martin Buber

Paths in Utopia

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The translator would like to express his most cordial thanks to the

author for his great help in the preparation of this volume, both as

regards the translation and the correction of proofs. He is also

indebted to Mr. Paul Derrick for checking the titles of certain books

herein mentioned.

FOREWORD

The intention underlying this book is to give genetic account of what

Marx and the Marxists call “Utopian Socialism”, with particular

reference to its postulate of a renewal of society through a renewal of

its cell-tissue. I am not concerned to survey the development of an

idea, but to sketch the picture of an idea in process of development.

The fundamental question in the making of such a picture is — as in the

making of all pictures — the question of what one has to leave out. Only

so much of the massive material seemed to me to be relevant as was

essential to a consideration of the idea itself. It is not the false

turnings that are important for us, but the single broad highway into

which they invariably lead. From the historical process the idea itself

rises up before eyes.

There was yet another, if narrower, vista that had to be opened: the one

shewing the bold but precarious attempts to bring the idea into reality.

Only after that had been done was the ground cleared for a critical

exposition of the theoretical and practical relation of Marxism to the

idea of structural renewal — a relation which could only be hinted at in

an introductory manner at the beginning of the book. At the end, in a

kind of epilogue, I had to speak of one particular attempt, the

immediate knowledge of which was the occasion for writing this book. I

have naturally not described or reported it in detail, only thrown light

on its inner connexion with the idea — as an attempt that did not fail.

The chapter preceding the epilogue sums up my own attitude to the idea,

which could otherwise only be read between the lines; moreover it was

necessary to point out its significance in the present hour of decision.

The book was completed in the spring of 1945; the Hebrew edition

appeared in the following year.

Martin Buber.

Jerusalem 1949.

Martin Buber was born in Vienna and studied at the Universities of

Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin and Munich.

He was professor of religion and ethics at the University of Frankfurt

from 1924 to 1933. From 1938 until his retirement in 1951 he was

professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

One of the most outstanding religious philosophers of our time, Dr.

Buber has been active in the Zionist movement and the revival of Hasidic

thought. His works include a German translation of the Bible, For the

Sake of Heaven, Good and Evil, I and Thou, Israel and the World, Between

Man and Man, which has already been published as a Beacon Paperback, and

numerous other books and articles in the fields of Biblical scholarship,

religious existentialism, and comparative religion.

INTRODUCTION (1958)

by Ephraim Fischoff

The eightieth birthday of Martin Buber on February 8, 1958, and his

concomitant visit in this country for a series of lectures, have

stimulated a series of publications on or about Buber and a reissue of

some of his works. With this edition of his Paths in Utopia, the Beacon

Press joins in the expression of homage to one of the universal men of

our time, who is at once scholar and educator, seer and prophet.

Many are the sources of Martin Buber’s fame, and the manifestations of

his universality. The significant impact of his personality upon our

generation is due to his many-faceted cultural achievements. These are

both Judaistic and general, comprising both theoretical and applied

studies in various humanistic and sociological areas as well as in

religion. He is not only one of the foremost living philosophers of

Judaism, possibly its most persuasive exponent in the world’s parliament

of religions, and a unique interpreter of Jewish folklore as developed

in the Hasidic evangelical movement, but he is also a remarkable

translator of the Bible into an incomparable poetic version. He is a

distinctive social philosopher, and a significant exponent of religious

socialism in the great tradition of Utopian social thought.

Throughout his religious and metaphysical labors the sociological

interest — of which this study in Utopian socialism is only one aspect —

looms large; and consequently his social philosophy is religious at its

core.

Influenced by the pioneer work of modern German sociology, Ferdinand

Toennies’ Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887),

Buber became one of the professorial socialists of the German tradition;

and from other thought currents of the fin de siecle in his own country

and in general European thought, Buber imbibed a deep concern with the

restoration of true community. But Buber’s professorial socialism

differed from that of the other Kathedersozialisten, even from that of

the aforementioned Toennies, in that he was consistently a doughty

protagonist of social meliorism only if it retained a strongly religious

basis; i.e., only if it quested for a regenerated man in a restructured

society.

Buber’s espousal of Utopian socialism was the result of several

interacting factors, some distinctively Jewish and some reflecting

distinctive aspects of twentieth-century Occidental culture,

particularly in Germany. The former comprised his interpretation of

prophetic Judaism as achieved and manifested anew in the Jewish

evangelical movement known as Hasidism; and his particular understanding

of and activities on behalf of Zionism, construed as a movement of

ethnic or national regeneration. Some of the factors deriving from the

general culture included his study of Toennies’ Community and Society,

with its profound criticisms of developed capitalist society, which

influenced all of German sociology. There were also various currents of

thought and organizations among German intellectuals, professors and

clergy, designed to combat the inequities of capitalism and to recreate

a true community — a trend and yearning reflected in the literature and

youth movement of the day.

Professor Buber became intimately acquainted with one type of

cooperative living — that of the Kvutza --the communitarian colony of

the Jewish colonists in Israel. As a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938,

he settled in Israel where he became professor of social philosophy at

the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and had occasion to study the

Kvutza, its ideology, and its place in the whole stream of Utopian

thinking. His analysis of the history of Utopian thought and his

observations on the operation of the Kvutza strengthened his belief that

this particular manifestation of Utopian socialist thought had not

failed as a great historical experiment in restructuring society,

although admittedly much remained to be accomplished before the

experiment could be accounted a success, and many perils and impediments

lurked in the time ahead.

Nevertheless, Buber’s knowledge of this “experiment that did not fail”

was what stimulated him to write Paths in Utopia.

Buber’s researches into the lore and history of Hasidism had provided

him with an ideal type of a truly humane community, and his immersion in

Biblical doctrine had given him unusual preparation for understanding

the nature of messianism, as a permanent quest of man for a better world

order based on spiritual perspectives. It will be recalled that Buber

started as an interpreter of the foundations of Hasidism, the seminal

ideas of which — and in a larger sense of all authentic Judaism — he

considered to be unity, conduct, and the future. His whole subsequent

evolution as a religious existentialist philosopher, his system of

“dialogical life,” his interpretation of social issues and his

contributions to education, psychotherapy, and social philosophy, all

flowed out of this primary orientation to the cardinal spiritual tenets

of central prophetic Judaism as he interpreted it.

In the two years before World War I Buber had devoted himself to the

consideration of various theoretical and practical problems — at the

center of which stood the problem of regenerating man’s spirit and

redirecting human history — which he construed as being fundamentally a

problem of education. A major factor in Buber’s preoccupation with

social thought was his continuing concern with Zionism which antedated

the turn of the century.

Increasingly concerned with the deeper significance of Zionism as a

creative philosophy for the modern Jew, which might accomplish the

fortification of group loyalty as well as the deepening and

intensification of humanity, Buber saw ever more clearly the need of

educational effort. If the profound values of community were to be

transmitted, they would first have to be reawakened in the new

generation.

In 1913 Buber together with Erich Kahler and Arthur Salz summoned a

conference in Berlin designed to plan the establishment of a Jewish

college in Germany, to inaugurate the education of the coming generation

in the sense of a true and vital Judaism, which hopefully would exert an

influence beyond Jewish circles in advancing a general cultural and

religious renewal. In this quest Buber was in rapport with basic trends

of the time, for as Ernst Troeltsch remarked in Der Historismus und

seine Ueberwindung: “On all sides there was a demand for more

rooted-ness and community.” In 1914 Buber met in Potsdam with such

figures as Gustav Landauer, Florence Christian Rang, Theodor Daeubler

and other significant figures in European life to form a strong cultural

influence in behalf of international unity. Romain Rolland and Walter

Rathenau were also interested in the progress of the group. But the

outbreak of World War I put the quietus to this effort.

Buber was an earnest student of basic works in modern social thought by

such thinkers as Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel and Max Weber. He

projected and edited an interesting series of forty popular monographs

on sociological and psychological topics, under the general title

“Society” ( Die Gesellschaft), opening with a work on the proletariat by

Werner Sombart and including a piece on religion by Georg Simmel and one

on revolution by Gustav Landauer. The latter, a notable German socialist

and man of letters, who occupied an important position in the first

socialist government of German, exerted a profound influence on Buber’s

religious socialism and after the assassination of his beloved friend,

Buber wrote a memorial essay about him and issued some of his

unpublished works.

Essentially, the present volume is concerned with the repristination of

the word “utopia,” which, in the interpretation of Buber has been

victimized in the course of the political struggle of Marxism against

other forms of socialism and movements of social reform. In his struggle

to achieve dominance for his idiosyncratic system of socialism, Marx

employed “utopia” as the ultimate term of pejoration to damn all

“prehistoric” (i.e. pre-Marxian) social systems as unscientific and

futilitarian, in contrast to the allegedly scientific and inevitable

character of his system of historical materialism. As Marxian socialism

scored its massive victories, Utopian socialism or utopianism appeared

thoroughly discredited and doomed to the museum of intellectual

aberrations. The signal victory of the proletariat in the titanic

revolutionary struggle in Russia, culminating in the domination of the

Bolsheviks, would, it was felt, demonstrate finally the utter validity

of Marxian socialism. But the numerous failures of the Soviet Union to

achieve true socialism in the decades that have passed and the diverse

poignant frustrations and disillusionments with the “God that failed”

have re-awakened an interest in Utopian socialism, and have led not a

few to feel, as Buber expresses it, that Utopian and not Marxist

socialism “may well be clearing the way for the structure of the coming

society.” Recent years have seen a spate of books concerned with a

reconsideration of Utopian thought, from Lewis Mumford’s The Story of

Utopias (1922) and J. O. Hertzler’s History of Utopian Thought (1926) to

Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (trans., 1936), Harry Ross’ Utopias

Old and New (1938), Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia

(1950), Raymond Ruyer’s L’Utopie et les Utopies (1950), Glenn Negley and

J. Max Patrick’s The Quest for Utopia (1952), and Henrik F. Infield’s

Utopia and Experiment — Essays in the Sociology of Cooperation (1958).

Yet another expression of the same interest is David Riesman’s essay on

community planning and industrial society (“Some Observations on

Community Plans and Utopia,” Yale Law Journal, December 1947, pp.

I73ff.), which starts with a declaration that “a revival of the

tradition of Utopian thinking seems to me one of the important

intellectual tasks of today.”

Riesman’s analysis is based on a study of community in modern

technological society from the perspective of a progressive architect

willing to envisage “Utopian” changes in the quest for a genuine

community life which would overcome the fateful separation of production

from consumption that is construed as the primary cause of alienation in

the life of modern man. (Percival and Paul Goodman, Communitas: Means of

Livelihood and Ways of Life, 1947). In addition there have been numerous

studies of various contemporary experiments in cooperative or

communitarian living such as the studies of the Kibbutz in Israel by

Henrik Infield.

This volume purports to provide a re-examination of the Utopian ideal —

and the permanent value of this aspiration in the life of mankind. In

its endeavor to rescue a word from oblivion and to restore it to proper

esteem in the mind of mankind, the work provides an essay in semantics.

Buber has the conviction that socialism has become lost in a blind alley

from which it can be rescued partly by a re-evaluation of the true

significance of the maligned term “utopian.” But what sets this work

apart from other histories of the Utopian thought or quest is Buber’s

total religious philosophy. Here is a social theorist living in the

post-Stalin and post-Hitler era who, despite his experiences of the

horrors of World War II, retains his faith in man’s need and capacity

for regeneration and his inalienable quest for a synthesis of religion

and socialism.

Buber provides a survey of the development of Utopian thought, covering

such figures as Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen and Proudhon. From these

Buber proceeds to an evaluation of the achievement of Marx, stressing

the continuing Utopian element in the latter’s thought, despite his

derisive rejection of utopianism.

Buber demonstrates the relationships of Marx and Engels to those early

formulators of the socialist ideal of the universal transformation of

society. By virtue of the criticism by Marx and Engels the term

“utopian” came to denote social thinkers who had not taken account of

modern industrial development, the class struggle and the unique

function of the proletariat therein. Thereafter Utopian socialism became

the “dirty word” of social thought and a synonym for delusion,

obscurantism, or ideological obfuscation — a completely negligible

factor in the period of modern economic evolution. This arrogant

dismissal of Utopian thinkers, both “prehistoric” and post-Marxian, was

effected despite the admission by Engels that German socialist theory

would never forget the illustrious labors of the pre-Marxist romantic

social philosophers.

An examination of the thought of Lenin follows, culminating in an

analysis of the failure of the socialist ideal in communism. This is

followed by one of the most interesting chapters, “An Experiment That

Did Not Fail,” in which Buber analyzes the communitarian movement of the

Zionist Kibbutz, of which he was one of the ideological godfathers, and

argues that this venture in socialism did not founder precisely because

it has remained dedicated to the ideal of the emergence of a new

community.

Buber also carried into his understanding of sociology the same

perspectives he applied to Marxism. He interpreted sociology (founded,

in his judgment, by Saint-Simon) as a critical science, designed to

overcome the crises of the age; and he saw both Auguste Comte and Lorenz

von Stein as dedicated to the conquest of the inner contradictions of

the age through adequate knowledge of social conditions.

Even after Comte had departed from the doctrine of his teacher,

Saint-Simon, he still characterized Saint-Simon’s social program with a

formula that accurately described his own intellectual project: une

regeneration sociale fondee sur une renovation mentale. He emphasized

that all schemes for social reorganization based on the profound moral

and political anarchy of the time required a prior spiritual

reorganization of society, the creation of a new spiritual attitude to

prevent the deterioration and corruption of institutions. In one of

Buber’s essays, “The Demand of the Spirit and Historical Reality,” he

adverts to the insights of Siegfried Landshut, who interprets modern

sociology, in his Kritik der Soziologie, as an expression of the

criticism or critique of historico-social reality. But while Buber

admits the partial truth of the need for this assertion, he stresses the

necessity of continuing to work for the transformation of the spirit,

without which any alteration of institutions is doomed to failure. It is

inevitable that man must transform himself to the same degree that he

changes his institutions, lest, as Buber puts it, the new house man

hopes to erect become his burial chamber. In addition to putting

sociological data to political use, there must be a concern with the

education of men in the process of living together.

Buber’s entire sociology is of a piece with his philosophy and theology

in placing central stress on the concept of the community

(Gemeinschaft). For him this was not an ideal type or conceptual

construction as in some of the systems of German sociology like those of

Toennies or Max Weber. It was an empirical type of society with certain

marked features — notably a serious and constant concern with the

relationship of the divine in the manifestations of routine living. The

establishment of such a social organization was in profound consonance

with the doctrine of Judaism that the ideal is always the outflowing of

real, natural urges and drives, and the ideal service of God is the

establishment of the truly human community. For man’s commitment to God

must be manifested not in solemn ritual and world-rejecting meditation

but in daily living. The Judaistic doctrine of unification permits of no

dualism as between the ethics of the individual and the state, or

between the life of religion and life in the world.

Apparently credit must go to Ferdinand Toennies, the founder of German

sociology, for making the fundamental distinction between community

which deriving from communio signifies an organic, deep seated,

emotionally pervasive and hence genuine form of living together, as

opposed to society or association which is more mechanical, temporary,

purposive, and hence artificial or ephemeral. Indeed, Toennies speaks as

though a Gemeinschaft was itself an organism when contrasted with the

artificial character of society.

From this doctrine of Gemeinschaft both Landauer and Buber developed

their philosophy of the community — as the highest form of human

symbiosis. This philosophy of community was influenced by but was also

in part a protest against Marxism.

Buber construes the essence of community as being identical with the

Bund and not, as in Toennies’ view, with the natural community of the

family or village — a free association of individuals who find one

another in direct relationship, or an elective community of those who

cluster about a religious center. He espouses the rebirth of the commune

or the cooperative but he does not undertake to solve the technical

questions as to the degree of economic or political autonomy to be

permitted these cooperatives or communes, nor in general to lay down

general principles as to the relation between centralization and

decentralization. This massive problem, Buber avers, must be approached,

like everything having to do with the relationship between idea and

reality, only with great spiritual tact, with a constant and tireless

weighing and measuring of the right proportion between them. He insists,

however, that the community process and attitude must determine the

relations of the communes with each other, for only “a community of

communities merits the title of Commonwealth.”

In its positive conclusion, then, this work is a plea for a renewal and

deepening of the Cooperative movement,[1] with its drive toward the

structural renewal of society, the re-establishment of inward social

relationships within it, and the emergence of new congeries of

communitarian states ( consociatio consociationum). This trend, far from

being romantic or Utopian, is, rather, constructive to the highest

degree. What is necessary is not merely cooperative organization of

production or consumption, but the comprehensive integral “full

cooperative,” the most potent manifestation of which is the village

commune, “where communal living is based on the amalgamation of

production and consumption, production being understood not exclusively

as agriculture alone, but as the organic union of agriculture with

industry and handicrafts.” It may be helpful to recall that Buber had

affiliations, both personal and ideological, with the

religious-socialist movement in Germany — a variegated manifestation of

concern with the social gospel which after World War I culminated in an

outright effort at a synthesis of religion and socialism. Under the

impact of modern social problems, religion, particularly Protestant

Christianity, endeavored to find satisfactory solutions for the many

aspects of social disorganization induced by the rapid and unregulated

development of capitalism. Thus the Protestant churches of Germany and

Switzerland, particularly, developed a noteworthy social-religious

trend, and both they and the Roman Church endeavored to find ways of

reaching the proletariat, which had become increasingly alienated from

the churches. One aspect of this trend led to the formation of the

Christian Social Party, headed by the demogogic preacher Stoecker, while

the Protestant churches developed a program which crystallized in the

formation of the Evangelical Social Congress. There was also a more

liberal religious group which had a different attitude toward socialism

than the Protestant and Roman churches. For the Christian Social Party

was conservative in both theology and in politics and in sharp

opposition to the Social Democratic Party. On the other hand, the

Evangelical Social Party had a liberal orientation both politically and

theologically, and their rejection of socialism was by no means as

emphatic as that of the Christian Socialists. But in the freer Social

Religious Movement there was a positive attitude manifested toward the

Social Democratic Party, especially in its radical attack upon the

bourgeois social order. Finally, there was to emerge, after World War I,

a Religious Socialist group.

The source of this freer German social gospel movement has been traced

to the work of two distinguished German pietistic preachers, Johann

Christoph Blumhardt and his son Christoph, whose influence later spread

from Germany to Switzerland. Two other men also deserve credit for

having developed a socially conscious religious perspective. One was

Hermann Kutter (who died in 1931), who in a series of prophetic

critiques of the church of his time expounded the view that God had

willed to manifest Himself in the atheistic and materialistic Social

Democratic Party because it was doing the work which Christianity ought

properly to have done. Never politically active nor a member of the

Socialist Party, he was zealous for God and social justice, and he

interpreted the socialistic movement as a sign of God’s wrath against

His own people, whom He had abandoned in order to shame the pious by

consorting with the godless. The other great spokesman for the social

religious movement in Switzerland was Leonhard Ragaz (who died in 1948),

and who, unlike Kutter, had a very definite program of social reform for

which he fought throughout his life. He also differed from Kutter in his

unceasing effort to produce a synthesis of Christianity and socialism.

He averred that he was a member of the Social Democratic Party because

he saw in it something of the Kingdom of God and the adumbration of the

Christian truth. In the socialist ideal he saw a new world of solidarity

supplanting a world of brigandage, and a new hegemony of the spirit in

place of the dominion of matter; man was to be in the ascendant rather

than mammon; service rather than power.

The culmination of this synthesis was a religious socialism of which

Ragaz may properly be regarded as the founder. Under his influence there

was already in existence in Switzerland prior to World War I a society

of Social Democratic ministers who led groups of Social Democratic

churchmen, and the religious socialism spread to Germany after World War

I. One of its manifestations was the endeavor to bring together the

working class and the church by affirmation of socialism on the part of

Christian leaders.

There was a small group of intellectuals who gathered around men like

Paul Tillich, Karl Mennicke and Eduard Heimann, whose main concern was

to deepen the religious level of socialism for the purpose of enabling

it, once it had achieved this deeper level of understanding, to produce

or generate the desiderated “theonomous era,” as Tillich termed it.

Indeed, the latter continued to be one of the leading spirits in the

religious socialist movement and perhaps its most sophisticated

ideologist, writing widely on the subject and contributing to the

authoritative German encyclopedia of religion, Die Religion in

Geschichte und Gegenwart, the significant article on religious

socialism. He interpreted this movement not as the religious

absolutization of the socialist movement, but, rather, as a protest

against the absolutization of the middle class and the contemporary

social order; he also admitted that it constituted a recognition of the

problems inescapably brought to the attention of modern man by

sociology. The social and ethical ideal of religious socialism, he

declared, is the achievement of a meaningful and thoroughly reasonable

society in which the concrete potentiality of other human beings comes

to recognition or, what amounts to the same, in which true community

arises. Religious socialism was for Tillich the quest for a new social

and cultural existence filled with transcendant content (theonomy).

The situation was quite different in the various societies of “religious

socialists” that arose in Germany after 1919. Most of these groups were

led by ministers and had the double purpose of combatting the dominant

atheism in the Social Democratic Party in favor of a more sympathetic

attitude toward Christianity and of creating in the church a positive

understanding of socialism. Of course the religious socialists were not

Marxists, though no one can doubt their socialism. But it was of the

“utopian” variety which Marx had so scornfully dismissed in his

Communist Manifesto. In January, 1919, there came into being in Berlin a

“Society of Socialistic Friends of the Church” which a year later took

the name of “Society of Religious Socialists.” This had many sections in

Berlin and local groups in such cities as Cologne, Stettin, Breslau and

Koenigsberg, but at the height of its popularity it had not many more

than two thousand members.

There were other comparable groups independent of the Berlin society, as

for example in Baden. In 1924 the various societies joined forces and in

1926 took the name “Society of Religious Socialists of Germany.”

They began to issue a significant journal, Zeitschrift für Religion und

Sozialismus, edited by Professor Georg Wuensch of Marburg. The movement

was of course terminated immediately after the victory of the

Nationalist Socialist Party.

If one inquires as to the influence of this movement of religious

socialism, one is bound to say that it was not very effective. The

Social Democratic Party tolerated it but scarcely advanced it, and the

working class was very little touched by it. On the other hand the

religious socialist group was suspect to the churches and the

organizations connected with them, and it failed in its desired aim of

inducing a more friendly judgment of socialism among church people. It

would appear that religious socialism lacked the evangelical fervor

which might have achieved noteworthy popular influence. The various

constituent units manifested little of the pietistic quality of the

Blumhardts, Kutter, or Ragaz. Most of the leaders belonged to the

liberal theological wing and were rather close to the very free

religious groups, having but little understanding of the nature and

function of the church. As it turned out, their criticism of the church

was very sharp, while their judgment of the failings of the socialist

movement was rather muted. Their endeavor to achieve a synthesis between

socialism and Christianity frequently led them to equate socialist

slogans with Christian ones, thus identifying the classless society with

the Kingdom of God and the class struggle with the Holy War. There was

the ever-present danger that the religious content might become

completely secularized.

But for all the criticisms that were leveled at the religious socialist

movement on the part of the churches, there can be no doubt that it

contributed much to freeing the church from its excessively close

connection with the bourgeoisie and nationalism. In this respect the

achievements of Kutter and Ragaz had a permanent value.

After World War II the religious socialist movement arose anew on a

small scale. Once again there is a society of German religious

socialists with a central office in Frankfurt, and the organization

issues a periodical entitled Christ und Sozialist. Apparently the

present society is much closer to the church than the previous ones, and

its leaders obviously have a stronger theological foundation and

background. Nor is there as strong a polemic against the church as in

the earlier decade. Rather there appears to be a genuine effort to

achieve a clearer understanding between the church and the working class

through the dialogue between these two great forces.

Sombre indeed is Buber’s appraisal of the present situation, yet he is

hopeful. He sees great forces arrayed against one another, yet he is

confident of a messianic amelioration. One of the nineteenth-century

mappers of a path to Utopia was Moses Hess, for whom Buber had a high

regard. In one of his works, Rome and Jerusalem, Hess assigned a unique

function to Israel in the modern world. Following this example, Buber

sets up a contrast at this moment of history between Moscow and

Jerusalem: So long as Russia has not undergone an essential inner change

— and today we have no means of knowing when and how that will come to

pass — we must designate one of the two poles of Socialism between which

our choice lies, by the formidable name of “Moscow.” The other, I would

make bold to call “Jerusalem.”

Indeed, the words in which Buber characterizes Hess ( Israel and

Palestine, pp. 112f.) apply equally to his own views:

Much as he recognizes the importance of social conditions for the

development of social ideas, he nevertheless considers it essential that

socialism should be based not on the economic and technical stage of

development alone but also on that of the spirit. For him social freedom

is either a result of spiritual freedom, or it is without foundation and

turns over into its opposite; he sees the heart of the social movements

of our time proceeding “not from the needs of the stomach but from the

needs of the heart�� and from “ideas.”

He does not retreat from the insight into the importance of material

conditions for the development of social ends, but goes beyond it. And

in two ways. On the one hand he is concerned to fit socialism into a

wider supra-social cosmic content — and not into a materialistically

grounded context but following on from Spinoza ... into harmonious

conformity to a law which manifests itself in different spheres, the

cosmic, the organic, the practical and the social, without any

possibility of deriving one from the other.

In speaking of the saintly Rabbi Kook ( Israel and Palestine, p. 148),

Buber again employs language descriptive of his own stand:

Fundamentally he is not concerned so much with the continuation of the

existing holiness as with a true renewal. And for him holiness means not

a sphere above life, but the renewal of life and unity and the

transfiguration of this wholeness and unity.

What is the reaction of a social scientist to Buber’s noble ideological

analysis of utopianism?

From the viewpoint of social science, Henrik Infield, an empirical

observer of communitarian experiments and one who has also been

stimulated by the Kvutza (cf. his Cooperative Living in Palestine,

1948), expresses a certain discontent with the philosophical

rehabilitation of Utopia. Agreeing that a reassessment of Utopian

thought is desirable, he questions the value of an ideological analysis

in terms of absolutes, even though Marxism has been proved wrong, and

argues that a return to Utopia is impossible. There may be other

alternatives than Utopian socialism; e.g., single tax; and the criteria

of the good society may well change. Actually he goes on to challenge

the radical distinctions of the either/or variety postulated by Buber in

regard to the difference between Utopian, and scientific socialism. For

there are Utopian and apocalyptic traits in scientific socialism and the

converse is also true, at least in part. Science and Utopia are not

mutually exclusive propositions, so that despair of the former need not

necessarily drive us to the latter. For the social scientist, Infield

stresses, the reification of state and society and the absolutization of

ideals are barriers to critical investigation of societal phenomena.

Indeed, there is no reason to question Infield’s concern with an

experimental approach to social problems — and his preoccupation with

precise methods and techniques for investigation. Cooperative

communities certainly are important socio-economic laboratories for our

time; and it is to be hoped that the International Council for Research

in the Sociology for Cooperation will undertake and support research in

the sociological problems of all types of cooperatives, and that its

International Library for the Sociology for Cooperation will publish

these findings.

Infield’s impatience with philosophical analysis of fundamental problems

leads him to doubt the value of the term “Utopian” altogether, and he

identifies it with a eulogistic term suggesting praise of a social

deviation. For Buber this is to neglect the basic distinction between

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft types of society. Whatever the force of

the impatient dismissal by empirical researchers of such fundamental

conceptual inquiries as are contained in this work, we are enriched by

this fresh exploration of the eternal problems of social philosophy and

practice. We remain in the debt of Buber for proclaiming afresh to our

generation the message of Leonhard Ragaz: “Any Socialism which sets

limits to God and man is too narrow for me.”

In a brief essay on “Three Theses of a Religious Socialism” which is

introduced by the above quotation, Buber affirms anew his faith in

messianic or prophetic socialism. In defining religious socialism he

stresses that religion and socialism are dependent on one another, and

that each of them needs the covenant with the other for the fulfillment

and perfection of its own essence. “ Religio, that is, the human

person’s binding of himself to God, can only attain its full reality in

the will for a community of the human race, out of which alone God can

prepare His kingdom.”

Attachment to God and community among human beings belong together:

“Religion without socialism is disembodied spirit, and hence not

authentic spirit; socialism without religion is body emptied of spirit,

hence also not genuine body.

“All ‘socialist’ tendencies, programs and parties are real or fictitious

according to whether they serve as the strength, direction, and

instruments of real socialitas — of mankind’s really becoming a

fellowship — or whether they only exist alongside its development, or

even conceal the flight from real socialitas, which comprises men’s

immediate living with and for one another in the here and now.”

Buber emphasizes that the point where religion and socialism can meet is

in the “concrete personal life.” He maintains that in both the stress is

properly on the inward aspect. In religion this means that dogma and

ritual are secondary to abiding in the profundity of a “real reciprocal

relation with the mystery of God.”

Similarly the heart of socialism’s truth is not any tenet or political

strategy but an enduring orientation “in the abyss of concrete

reciprocal relation with the mystery of man.”

Buber holds that it is presumptuous to expect to accomplish socialism

without living out a communitarian pattern. As in religion it is the

management of the workaday world “that sanctifies or desecrates

religious devotion,” so in socialism there must be a constant concern

with the means employed to secure its ends lest the goals be vitiated or

impugned by the means. For in religious socialism the most serious

attention is given to certain fundamental existential facts: “the fact

that God is, that the world is, and that the concrete human person

stands before God and in the world.”

I. THE IDEA

Among the sections of the Communist Manifesto which have exerted the

most powerful influence on the generations up to our own day is that

entitled “Der kritisch-utopistische Sozialismus und Kommunismus” (The

Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism).

Marx and Engels were entrusted by the “League of the Just” with the

formulation of a communist credo — an important preliminary to the

convocation of a Universal Communist Congress, the “Union of all the

Oppressed”, planned for 1848. The League Directorate laid down that

fundamental expression should also be given in this credo to the

“position as regards the socialist and communist parties”, i.e. the line

of demarcation dividing the League from the affiliated movements, by

which were meant above all the Fourierists, “those shallow folk” as they

are called in the draft of the credo which the Central Authority

presented to the London League Congress. In the draft written by Engels

there is as yet no mention of “utopian” socialists or communists; we

hear only of people who put forward “superlative systems of reform”,

“who, on the pretext of reorganizing society, want to bolster up the

foundation of existing society and consequently the society itself,” and

who are therefore described as “bourgeois socialists” to be attacked — a

description which, in the final version, applies in particular to

Proudhon. The distance between the Engels draft and the final version

drawn up substantially by Marx is immense.

The “systems”, of which those of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are

mentioned (in Marx’s original version Cabet, Weitling and even Babeuf

are also named as authors of such systems), are all described as the

fruit of an epoch in which industry was not yet developed and hence the

“proletariat” problem was not yet grasped; instead there appeared those

same systems which could not be other than fictitious, fantastic and

Utopian, whose aim was at bottom to abolish that very class-conflict

which was only just beginning to take shape and from which the

“universal transformation of society” would ultimately proceed. Marx was

here formulating afresh what he had said shortly before in his polemic

against Proudhon: “These theoreticians are Utopians; they are driven to

seek science in their own heads, because things are not yet so far

advanced that they need only give an account of what is happening under

their eyes and make themselves its instruments.” The criticism of

existing conditions on which the systems are built is recognized as

valuable explanatory material; on the other hand all their positive

recommendations are condemned to lose all practical value and

theoretical justification in the course of historical development.

We can only assess the political character of this declaration in the

framework of the socialist-communist movement of the time when we

realize that it was directed against the views which used to reign in

the “League of the Just” itself and were supplanted by Marx’s ideas.

Marx characterized these views twelve years after the appearance of the

Communist Manifesto as a “secret doctrine” consisting of a “hodge-podge

of Anglo-French socialism or communism and German philosophy”, and to

this he opposed his “scientific insight into the economic structure of

bourgeois society as the only tenable theoretical basis”. The point now,

he says, was to show that it “was not a matter of bringing some Utopian

system or other into being but of consciously participating in the

historical revolutionary process of society that was taking place before

our eyes”. The polemical or anti-utopian section of the Manifesto thus

signifies an internal political action in the strictest sense: the

victorious conclusion of the struggle which Marx, with Engels at his

side, had waged against the other so-called — or self-styled — communist

movements, primarily in the “League of the Just” itself (which was now

christened the “League of Communists”). The concept “utopian” was the

last and most pointed shaft which he shot in this fray.

I have just said: “with Engels at his side.” Nevertheless reference

should not be omitted to a number of passages from the Introduction with

which Engels, some two years before the Manifesto was drafted, had

prefaced his translation of a fragment from the posthumous writings of

Fourier. Here, too, he speaks of those same doctrines which are

dismissed as Utopian in the Manifesto; here, too, Fourier, Saint-Simon

and Owen are quoted; here, too, a distinction is made in their works

between the valuable criticism of existing society and the far less

relevant “schematization” of a future one; but earlier on he says: “What

the French and the English were saying ten, twenty, even forty years ago

— and saying very well, very clearly, in very fine language — is at long

last, and in fragmentary fashion, becoming known to the Germans, who

have been ‘hegelizing’ it for the past year or at best re-discovering it

after the event and bringing it out in a much worse and more abstract

form as a wholly new discovery.” And Engels adds word for word: “I make

no exception even of my own works.” The struggle thus touched his own

past. Still more important, though, is the following pronouncement:

“Fourier constructs the future for himself after having correctly

recognized the past and present.” This must be weighed against the

charges which the Manifesto lays at the door of utopianism. Nor should

we forget that the Manifesto was written only ten years after Fourier’s

death.

What Engels says thirty years after the Manifesto in his book against

Dühring about these self-same “three great Utopians”, and what passed

with a few additions into the influential publication The Evolution of

Socialism from Utopia to Science a little later, is merely an

elaboration of the points already made in the Manifesto. It is

immediately striking that once again only the same three men, “the

founders of Socialism”, are discussed, those very people who were

“utopians”, “because they could not be anything else at a time when

capitalist production was so little developed”, people who were

compelled “to construct the elements of a new society out of their heads

because these elements had not yet become generally visible in the old

society”. In the thirty years between the Manifesto and the anti-Dühring

book had no socialists emerged who, in Engels’ opinion, deserved the

epithet “utopians” and his notice alike, but who could not be conceded

those extenuating circumstances, since in their day the economic

conditions were already developed and “the social tasks” no longer

“hidden”? To name only one and of course the greatest — Proudhon — one

of whose earlier books, The Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of

Misery, Marx had attacked in his famous Polemic written before the

Manifesto — from Proudhon a series of important

works had appeared meanwhile which no scientific theory about the social

situation and the social tasks could afford to overlook; did he also

(from whose book, albeit attacked by Marx, the Communist Manifesto had

at any rate borrowed the concept of the “socialist utopia”) belong to

the Utopians, but to those who could not be justified? True, in the

Manifesto he had been named as an example of the “conservative or

bourgeois socialists” and in the Polemic Marx had declared that Proudhon

was far inferior to the socialists,

“because he has neither sufficient courage nor sufficient insight to

raise himself, if only speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon”; and

after Proudhon’s death he asseverated in a public obituary that even

today he would have to confirm every word of this judgment, and a year

later he explained in a letter that Proudhon had done “immense harm”

and, by his “sham-criticism and sham-opposition to the Utopians” had

corrupted the younger generation and the workers. But another year

later, nine years before writing the anti-Duhring book, Engels states in

one of the seven reviews which he published anonymously on the first

volume of Marx’s Capital, that Marx wanted to “provide socialist

strivings with the scientific foundation which neither Fourier nor

Proudhon nor even Lassalle had been able to give” — from which there

clearly emerges the rank he awarded to Proudhon despite everything.

In 1844 Marx and Engels (in their book The Holy Family) had found in

Proudhon’s book on Property a scientific advance which “revolutionizes

political economy and makes a science of political economy possible for

the first time”; they had further declared that not only did he write in

the interests of the proletariat but that he was a proletarian himself

and his work “a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat” of

historic significance. And as late as May, 1846, in an anonymous essay,

Marx had dubbed him “a communist”, in a context, moreover, which makes

it obvious that Proudhon was still a representative communist in his

eyes at the time, some six months before the Polemic was written. What

had happened in the meantime to move Marx to so radical an alteration of

his judgment? Certainly, Proudhon’s “Contradictions” had appeared, but

this book in no way represented a decisive modification of Proudhon’s

views, also the violent diatribe against communist (by which Proudhon

means what we would call “collectivist”) Utopias is only a more detailed

elaboration of his criticism of the “Communaute”

which can be read in the first discussion on property, so lauded by

Marx, in 1840. However, Proudhon’s refusal of Marx’s invitation of

collaboration had preceded the “Contradictions”. The situation becomes

clearer for us when we read what Marx wrote to Engels in July, 1870,

after the outbreak of war: “The French need a thrashing. If the

Prussians win, the centralization of State power will subserve the

centralization of the German working-class. German domination would

furthermore shift the focus of the

Western-European workers’ movement from France to Germany, and you have

merely to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 up to now

to see that the German working-class is superior both in theory and in

organization to the French. Its supremacy over that of the French on the

world-stage would at once mean the supremacy of our theory over

Proudhon’s, etc.” It is thus in eminent degree a matter of political

attitude. Hence it must be regarded as consistent that Engels should

describe Proudhon soon afterwards in a polemic against him ( On the

Housing Question) as a pure dilettante, facing economics helplessly and

without knowledge, one who preaches and laments “where we offer proofs”.

At the same time Proudhon is clearly labelled a Utopian: the “best

world” he constructs is already “crushed in the bud by the foot of

onward-marching industrial development”.

I have dwelt on this topic at some length because something of

importance can best be brought to light in this way. Originally Marx and

Engels called those people Utopians whose thinking had preceded the

critical development of industry, the proletariat and the class-war, and

who therefore could not take this development into account; subsequently

the term was levelled indiscriminately at all those who, in the

estimation of Marx and Engels, did not in fact take account of it; and

of these the late-comers either did not understand how to do so or were

unwilling or both. The epithet “Utopian” thereafter became the most

potent missile in the fight of Marxism against non-Marxian socialism. It

was no longer a question of demonstrating the Tightness of one’s own

opinion in the face of a contrary one; in general one found science and

truth absolutely and exclusively in his own position and utopianism and

delusion in the rival camp. To be a “Utopian” in our age means: to be

out of step with modern economic development, and what modern economic

development is we learn of course from Marxism. Of those “pre-historic”

Utopians, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, Engels had declared in his

German Peasant War in 1850 that German socialist theory would never

forget that it stood on the shoulders of these men, “who despite all

their fantasticalness and all their utopian-ism must be counted among

the most significant brains of all time, who anticipated with genius

countless truths whose validity we can now prove scientifically”. But

here again — and this is consistent from the political point of view —

consideration is no longer given to the possibility that there are men

living today, known and unknown, who anticipate truths whose validity

will be scientifically proved in the future, truths which contemporary

“science” — i.e. the trend of knowledge which not infrequently

identifies itself in general with Science — is determined to regard as

invalid, exactly as was the case with those “founders of socialism” in

their day. They were Utopians as forerunners, these are Utopians as

obscurantists. They blazed the trail for Science, these obstruct it.

Happily, however, it is sufficient to brand them Utopians to render them

innocuous.

Perhaps I may be allowed to cite a small personal experience as an

instance of this method of “annihilation by labels”. In Whitsun, 1928,

there took place in my former home-town of Heppenheim a discussion,[2]

attended mainly by delegates from religious socialist circles, on the

question of how to nourish anew those spiritual forces of mankind on

which the belief in a renewal of society rests. In my speech, in which I

laid particular emphasis on the generally neglected and highly concrete

questions of decentralization and the status of the worker, I said: “It

is of no avail to call ‘utopian’ what we have not yet tested with our

powers.”

That did not save me from a critical remark on the part of the Chairman,

who simply relegated me to the ranks of Utopian socialists and left it

at that.

But if socialism is to emerge from the blind-alley into which it has

strayed, among other things the catchword “Utopian” must be cracked open

and examined for its true content.

II. THE UTOPIAN ELEMENT IN SOCIALISM

What, at first sight, seems common to the Utopias that have passed into

the spiritual history of mankind, is the fact that they are pictures,

and pictures moreover of something not actually present but only

represented. Such pictures are generally called fantasy-pictures, but

that tells us little enough. This “fantasy” does not float vaguely in

the air, it is not driven hither and thither by the wind of caprice, it

centres with architectonic firmness on something primary and original

which it is its destiny to build; and this primary thing is a wish. The

Utopian picture is a picture of what “should be”, and the visionary is

one who wishes it to be. Therefore some call the Utopias wish-pictures,

but that again does not tell us enough.

A “wish-picture” makes us think of something that rises out of the

depths of the Unconscious and, in the form of a dream, a reverie, a

“seizure”, overpowers the defenceless soul, or may, at a later stage,

even be invoked, called forth, hatched out by the soul itself. In the

history of the human spirit the image-creating wish — although it, too,

like all image-making is rooted deep down in us — has nothing

instinctive about it and nothing of self-gratification. It is bound up

with something supra-personal that communes with the soul but is not

governed by it. What is at work here is the longing for that Tightness

which, in religious or philosophical vision, is experienced as

revelation or idea, and which of its very nature cannot be realized in

the individual, but only in human community. The vision of “what should

be” — independent though it may sometimes appear of personal will — is

yet inseparable from a critical and fundamental relationship to the

existing condition of humanity. All suffering under a social order that

is senseless prepares the soul for vision, and what the soul receives in

this vision strengthens and deepens its insight into the perversity of

what is perverted. The longing for the realization of “the seen”

fashions the picture.

The vision of Tightness in Revelation is realized in the picture of a

perfect time — as messianic eschatology; the vision of rightness in the

Ideal is realized in the picture of a perfect space — as Utopia. The

first necessarily goes beyond the social and borders on the creational,

the cosmic; the second necessarily remains bounded by the circumference

of society, even if the picture it presents sometimes implies an inner

transformation of man. Eschatology means perfection of creation; Utopia

the unfolding of the possibilities, latent in mankind’s communal life,

of a “right” order. Another difference is still more important. For

eschatology the decisive act happens from above, even when the elemental

or prophetic form of it gives man a significant and active share in the

coming redemption; for Utopia everything is subordinated to conscious

human will, indeed we can characterize it outright as a picture of

society designed as though there were no other factors at work than

conscious human will. But they are neither of them mere cloud castles:

if they seek to stimulate or intensify in the reader or listener his

critical relationship to the present, they also seek to show him

perfection — in the light of the Absolute, but at the same time as

something towards which an active path leads from the present. And what

may seem impossible as a concept arouses, as an image, the whole might

of faith, ordains purpose and plan. It does this because it is in league

with powers latent in the depths of reality. Eschatology, in so far as

it is prophetic, Utopia, in so far as it is philosophical, both have the

character of realism.

The Age of Enlightenment and its aftermath robbed religious eschatology

in increasing measure of its sphere of action: in the course of ten

generations it has become more and more difficult for man to believe

that at some point in the future an act from above will redeem the human

world, i.e. transform it from a senseless one into one full of meaning,

from disharmony into harmony. This incapacity has become an actual

physical incapacity, in avowedly religious no less than in a-religious

people, save that in the former it is concealed from consciousness by

the fixed nexus of tradition. On the other hand, the age of technology

with its growing social contradictions has influenced Utopia profoundly.

Under the influence of pan-technical trends Utopia too has become wholly

technical; conscious human will, its foundation hitherto, is now

understood as technics, and society like Nature is to be mastered by

technological calculation and construction. Society, however, with its

present contradictions poses a question that cannot be dismissed; all

thinking and planning for the future must seek the answer to it, and

where Utopia is concerned the political and cultural formulations

necessarily give way before the task of contriving a “right” order of

society. But here social thinking shows its superiority over technical

thinking. Utopias which revel in technical fantasias mostly find

foothold nowadays only in the feebler species of novel, in which little

or none of the imagination that went into the grand Utopias of old can

be discovered. Those, on the contrary, which undertake to deliver a

blueprint of the perfect social structure, turn into systems. But into

these “utopian” social systems there enters all the force of

dispossessed Messianism. The social system of modern socialism or

communism has, like eschatology, the character of an annunciation or of

a proclamation. It is true that Plato was moved by the desire to

establish a reality proportioned to the Idea, and it is true that he

also sought, to the end of his days and with unflagging passion, for the

human tools of its realization; but only with the modern social systems

did there arise this fierce interplay of doctrine and action, planning

and experiment. For Thomas More it was still possible to mingle serious

instruction with incongruous jesting, and, with supercilious irony, to

allow a picture of “very absurd” institutions to rub shoulders with such

as he “wishes rather than hopes” to see copied. For Fourier that was no

longer possible; here everything is practical inference and logical

resolve, for the point with him is “to emerge at last from a

civilization which, far from being man’s social destiny, is only

mankind’s childhood sickness”.

The polemics of Marx and Engels have resulted in the term “utopian”

becoming used, both within Marxism and without, for a socialism which

appeals to reason, to justice, to the will of man to remedy the

maladjustments of society, instead of his merely acquiring an active

awareness of what is “dialectically” brewing in the womb of

industrialism. All voluntaristic socialism is rated “utopian”. Yet it is

by no means the case that the socialism diametrically opposed to it —

which we may call necessitarian because it professes to demand nothing

more than the setting in motion of the necessary evolutionary machinery

— is free of utopianism. The Utopian elements in it are of another kind

and stand in a different context.

I have already indicated that the whole force of dispossessed

eschatology was converted into Utopia at the time of the French

Revolution. But, as I have intimated, there are two basic forms of

eschatology: the prophetic, which at any given moment sees every person

addressed by it as endowed, in a degree not to be determined beforehand,

with the power to participate by his decisions and deeds in the

preparing of Redemption: and the apocalyptic, in which the redemptive

process in all its details, its very hour and course, has been fixed

from everlasting and for whose accomplishment human beings are only used

as tools, though what is immutably fixed may yet be “unveiled” to them,

revealed, and they be assigned their function. The first of these forms

derives from Israel, the second from ancient Persia. The differences and

agreements between the two, their combinations and separations, play an

important part in the inner history of Christianity. In the socialist

secularization of eschatology they work out separately: the prophetic

form in some of the systems of the so-called Utopians, the apocalyptic

one above all in Marxism (which is not to say that no prophetic element

is operative here — it has only been overpowered by the apocalyptic).

With Marx, belief in humanity’s road through contradiction to the

overcoming of the same, takes the form of Hegelian dialectic, since he

makes use of a scientific inquiry into the changing processes of

production; but the vision of upheavals past or to come “in the chain of

absolute necessity”, as Hegel says, does not derive from Hegel. Marx’s

apocalyptic position is purer and stronger than Hegel’s, which lacked

any real driving power for the future; Franz Rosenzweig has pointed out,

and rightly, that Marx remained truer to Hegel’s belief in historical

determinism than Hegel himself. “No one else has seen so directly where

and how and in what form the last day would dawn on the horizon of

history.” The point at which, in Marx, the Utopian apocalypse breaks out

and the whole topic of economics and science is transformed into pure

“utopics”, is the convulsion of all things after the social revolution.

The Utopia of the so-called Utopians is pre-revolutionary, the Marxist

one post-revolutionary. The “withering away” of the State, “the leap of

humanity out of the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom” may be

well-founded dialectically, but it is no longer so scientifically. As a

Marxist thinker, Paul Tillich, says, these things “can in no way be made

intelligible in terms of existing reality”, “between reality and

expectation there is a gulf”, “for this reason Marxism has never,

despite its animosity to Utopias, been able to clear itself of the

suspicion of a hidden belief in Utopia”. Or in the words of another

Marxist sociologist, Eduard Heimann: “With men as they are, a withering

away of the State is inconceivable. In speculating on a radical and

inmost change of human nature, we pass beyond the borders of empirical

research and enter the realm of prophetic vision where the true

significance and providential destination of man are circumscribed in

stammering metaphors.” But what is of decisive significance for us is

the difference between this Utopianism and that of the non-marxist

socialists. We shall have to observe this difference more closely..

When we examine what Marxist criticism calls the Utopian element in the

non-marxist systems we find that it is by no means simple or uniform.

Two distinct elements are to be distinguished. The essence of one is

schematic fiction, the essence of the other is organic planning. The

first, as we encounter it particularly in Fourier, originates in a kind

of abstract imagination which, starting from a theory of the nature of

man, his capacities and needs, deduces a social order that shall employ

all his capacities and satisfy all his needs.

Although in Fourier the theory is supported by a mass of observational

material, every observation becomes unreal and untrustworthy as soon as

it enters this sphere; and in his social order, which pretends to be

social architecture but is in reality formless schematism, all problems

(as Fourier himself says) have the same “solution”, that is, from real

problems in the life of human beings they become artificial problems in

the life of instinctive robots — artificial problems which all allow of

the same solution because they all proceed from the same mechanistic

set-up. Wholly different, indeed of a directly contrary nature, is the

second element. Here the dominant purpose is to inaugurate, from an

impartial and “undogmatic understanding of contemporary man and his

condition, a transformation of both, so as to overcome the

contradictions which make up the essence of our social order.

Starting with no reservations from the condition of society as it is,

this view gazes into the depths of reality with a clarity of vision

unclouded by any dogmatic pre-occupation, discerning those still hidden

tendencies which, although obscured by more obvious and more powerful

forces, are yet moving towards that transformation. It has justly been

said that in a positive sense every planning intellect is Utopian. But

we must add that the planning intellect of the socialist “Utopians”

under consideration, proves the positive character of its utopianism by

being at every point aware, or at least having an inkling, of the

diversity, indeed the contrariety, of the trends discernible in every

age; by not failing to discover, despite its insight into the dominant

trends, those others which these trends conceal; and by asking whether

and to what extent those and those alone are aiming at an order in which

the contradictions of existing society will truly be overcome.

Here, then, we have one or two motives which require further explanation

and amplification both in themselves and in order to mark them off from

Marxism.

In the course of the development of so-called Utopian socialism its

leading representatives have become more and more persuaded that neither

the social problem nor its solution can be reduced to a lowest common

denominator, and that every simplification — even the most

intellectually important — exerts an unfavourable influence both on

knowledge and action. When in 1846, some six months before he started

his controversy with Proudhon, Marx invited the latter to collaborate

with him in a “correspondence” which should subserve “an exchange of

ideas and impartial criticism”, and for which — so Marx writes — “as

regards France we all believe that we could find no better correspondent

than yourself,” he received the answer: “Let us, if you wish, look

together for the laws of society, the manner in which they are realized,

but after we have cleared away all these a priori dogmatisms, let us

not, for God’s sake, think of tangling people up in doctrines in our

turn! Let us not fall into the contradiction of your countryman Martin

Luther who, after having overthrown the catholic theology, immediately

set about founding a protestant theology of his own amid a great clamour

of excommunications and anathemas.... Because we stand in the van of a

new movement let us not make ourselves the protagonists of a new

intolerance, let us not act like apostles of a new religion, even if it

be a religion of logic, a religion of reason.” Here it is chiefly a

question of political means, but from many of Proudhon’s utterances it

is evident that he saw the ends as well in the light of the same freedom

and diversity. And fifty years after that letter Kropotkin summed up the

basic view of the ends in a single sentence: the fullest development of

individuality “will combine with the highest development of voluntary

association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees and for all

possible purposes; an association that is always changing, that bears in

itself the elements of its own duration, that takes on the forms which

best correspond at any given moment to the manifold strivings of all.”

This is precisely what Proudhon had wanted in the maturity of his

thought. It may be contended that the Marxist objective is not

essentially different in constitution; but at this point a yawning chasm

opens out before us which can only be bridged by that special form of

Marxist utopics, a chasm between, on the one side, the transformation to

be consummated sometime in the future — no one knows how long after the

final victory of the Revolution — and, on the other, the road to the

Revolution and beyond it, which road is characterized by a far-reaching

centralization that permits no individual features and no individual

initiative. Uniformity as a means is to change miraculously into

multiplicity as an end; compulsion into freedom. As against this the

“utopian” or non-marxist socialist desires a means commensurate with his

ends; he refuses to believe that in our reliance on the future “leap” we

have to do now the direct opposite of what we are striving for; he

believes rather that we must create here and now the space now possible

for the thing for which we are striving, so that it may come to

fulfilment then; he does not believe in the post-revolutionary leap, but

he does believe in revolutionary continuity. To put it more precisely:

he believes in a continuity within which revolution is only the

accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has

already grown to its true possibilities.

Seen from another angle this difference may be clarified still further.

When we examine the capitalist society which has given birth to

socialism, as a society, we see that it is a society inherently poor in

structure and growing visibly poorer every day. By the structure of a

society is to be understood its social content or community-content: a

society can be called structurally rich to the extent that it is built

up of genuine societies, that is, local communes and trade communes and

their step by step association.

What Gierke says of the Co-operative Movement in the Middle Ages is true

of every structurally rich society: it is “marked by a tendency to

expand and extend the unions, to produce larger associations over and

above the smaller association, confederations over and above individual

unions, all-embracing confederations over and above particular

confederations”. At whatever point we examine the structure of such a

society we find the cell-tissue “Society” everywhere, i.e. a living and

life-giving collaboration, an essentially autonomous consociation of

human beings, shaping and re-shaping itself from within. Society is

naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units

and the associations between them.

Under capitalist economy and the State peculiar to it the constitution

of society was being continually hollowed out, so that the modern

individualizing process finished up as a process of atomization. At the

same time the old organic forms retained their outer stability, for the

most part, but they became hollow in sense and in spirit — a tissue of

decay. Not merely what we generally call the masses but the whole of

society is in essence amorphous, unarticulated, poor in structure.

Neither do those associations help which spring from the meeting of

economic or spiritual interests — the strongest of which is the party:

what there is of human intercourse in them is no longer a living thing,

and the compensation for the lost community-forms we seek in them can be

found in none. In the face of all this, which makes “society” a

contradiction in terms, the “utopian” socialists have aspired more and

more to a restructuring of society; not, as the Marxist critic thinks,

in any romantic attempt to revive the stages of development that are

over and done with, but rather in alliance with the decentralist

counter-tendencies which can be perceived underlying all economic and

social evolution, and in alliance with something that is slowly evolving

in the human soul: the most intimate of all resistances — resistance to

mass or collective loneliness.

Victor Hugo called Utopia “the truth of to-morrow”. Those efforts of the

spirit, condemned as inopportune and derided as “utopian socialism”, may

well be clearing the way for the structure of society-to-be. (There is,

of course, no historical process that is necessary in itself and

independent of human resolve.) It is obvious that here, too, it is a

matter o\ preserving the community-forms that remain and filling them

anew with spirit, and a new spirit. Over the gateway to Marxist

centralization stands — for who knows how long? — the inscription in

which Engels summed up the tyrannical character of the automatism in a

great factory: “Lasciate ogni autonomia voi ch’entrate.” Utopian

socialism fights for the maximum degree of communal autonomy possible in

a “restructured” society.

In that socialist meeting of 1928, I said: “There can be

pseudo-realization of socialism, where the real life of man to man is

but little changed. The real living together of man with man can only

thrive where people have the real things of their common life in common;

where they can experience, discuss ‘and administer them together; where

real fellowships and real work Guilds exist. We see more or less from

the Russian attempt at realization that human relationships remain

essentially unchanged when they are geared to a socialist-centralist

hegemony which rules the life of individuals and the life of the natural

social groups.

Needless to say we cannot and do not want to go back to primitive

agrarian communism or to the corporate State of the Christian Middle

Ages. We must be quite unromantic, and, living wholly in the present,

out of the recalcitrant material of our own day in history, fashion a

true community.”

III . THE FORERUNNERS

I have pointed out that in “utopian” socialism there is an organically

constructive and organically purposive or planning element which aims at

a re-structuring of society, and moreover not at one that shall come to

fruition in an indefinite future after the “withering away” of the

proletarian dictator-state, but beginning here and now in the given

conditions of the present. If this is correct it should be possible to

demonstrate, in the history of Utopian socialism, the line of evolution

taken by this element.

In the history of Utopian socialism three pairs of active thinkers

emerge, each pair being bound together in a peculiar way and also to its

generation: Saint-Simon and Fourier, Owen and Proudhon, Kropotkin and

Gustav Landauer. Through the middle pair there runs the line of cleavage

separating the first phase of this socialism — the phase of transition

to advanced capitalism — from the second, which accompanies the rise of

the latter. In the first each thinker contributes a single constructive

thought and these thoughts — at first strange and incompatible with one

another — align themselves together, and in the second Proudhon and his

successors build up the comprehensive synthesis, the synthetic idea of

restructure. Each step occupies its own proper place and is not

interchangeable.

A few figures will help to make the relations between the generations

clear. Saint-Simon was born twelve years before Fourier and died twelve

years before him, and yet both belong to the generation which was born

before the French Revolution and perished before 1848 — save that the

younger, Fourier, belongs by nature and outlook to the eighteenth

century and the older, Saint-Simon, to the nineteenth century. Owen was

born before the great Revolution, Proudhon at the time of the Napoleonic

triumphs; thus they belong congenitally to different generations but, as

they both died between 1848 and 1870, death united them once more in a

single generation. The same thing is repeated with Kropotkin, who was

born before 1848, and Landauer, before 1870: both died soon after the

first World War.

Saint-Simon — of whom the founder of sociology as a science, Lorenz von

Stein, justly says that he “ half understood, half guessed at society

(that is, society as such in contradistinction to the State) “for the

first time in its full power, in all its elements and contradictions” —

makes the first and, for his epoch, the most important contribution. The

“puberty-crisis” which mankind had entered meant for him the eventual

replacement of the existing regime by “le regime industriel”. We can

formulate it in this way: the cleavage of the social whole into two

essentially different and mutually antagonistic orders is to yield place

to a uniform structure. Hitherto society had been under a “government”,

now it was to come under an “administration”, and the administration was

not, like the former, to be entrusted to a class opposed to society and

made up of “legalists” and “militarists”, but to the natural leaders of

society itself, the leaders of its production. No longer was one group

of rulers to be ousted by another group of rulers, as had happened in

all the upheavals known to history; what remains necessary as a police

force does not constitute Government in the old sense. “The producers

have no wish to be plundered by any one class of parasites rather than

by any other.... It is clear that the struggle must end by being played

out between the whole mass of parasites on the one hand and the mass of

producers on the other, in order to decide whether the latter shall

continue to be the prey of the former or shall obtain supreme control of

society.” Saint-Simon’s naive demand of “messieurs” the workers that

they should make the entrepreneurs their leaders — a demand which was to

weld the active portion of the capitalists and the proletarians into one

class — contains, despite its odd air of unreality, the intimation of a

future order in which no leadership is required other than that provided

by the social functions themselves; in which politics have in fact

become what they are in Saint-Simon’s definition: “the science of

production,” i.e. of the pre-conditions most favourable to this. In the

nature of things governments cannot implement policies of this sort;

“government is a continual source of injury to industry when it meddles

in its affairs; it is injurious even where it makes efforts to encourage

it.” Nothing but an overcoming of government as such can lead society

out of the “extreme disorder” in which it languishes; out of the dilemma

of a nation which is “essentially industrial” and whose government is

“essentially feudal”; out of division into two classes: “one that orders

and one that obeys” (the Saint-Simonist Bazard expressed it even more

pungently soon after the death of his master, in 1829: “two classes, the

exploiters and the exploited”). The present epoch is one of transition

not from one sort of regime to another, but from a sham order to a true

order, in which “work is the fountain-head of all virtues” and “the

State is the confederacy of all workers” (so runs the formula of the

Saint-Simonists). This cannot be the affair of a single nation only, for

it would be opposed by other nations; the “industrial system” must be

established over all Europe and the feudal system, persisting in

bourgeois form, annihilated. Saint-Simon calls this “Europeanism”. He

realizes, however, that altering the relationship between the leaders

and the led is not the sole intention, but that the alteration must

permeate the whole inner structure of society. The moment when the

industrial regime is “ripe” (i.e. when society is ripe for it can be

“determined with reasonable exactitude by the fundamental circumstance

that, in any given nation, the vast majority of individuals will by then

have entered into more or less numerous industrial associations each two

or three of which will be interconnected by industrial relationships.

This will permit a general system to be built up, since the associations

will be led towards a great common goal, as regards which they will be

co-ordinated of themselves each according to its function”. Here

Saint-Simon comes very near to the idea of social restructuring. What he

lacks is the conception of genuine organic social units out of which

this re-structuring can be built; the idea of “industrial associations”

does not provide what is required. Saint-Simon divined the significance

of the small social unit for the rebuilding of society, but did not

recognize it for what it was.

It is just this social unit which is the be-all and end-all for Fourier.

He thought he had discovered “the secret of association “ and in this he

saw — the formula dates from the same time, about 1820, when Saint-Simon

gave his “industrial system” its final formulation — “the secret of the

union of interests”. Charles Gide has rightly pointed out that Fourier

was here opposing the legacy of the French Revolution, which had

contested the right of association and prohibited trades-unions; and

opposing it because it was from the collapse of the cadres of the old

corporations that the “anarchic” principle of free competition had

derived, which, as Fourier’s most important pupil — Considerant — had

foretold in his manifesto of 1843 on the principles of socialism (by

which the Communist Manifesto appears to have been influenced), would

inevitably result in the exact opposite of what its introduction

purposed, namely, in die “universal organization of great monopolies in

all branches of industry”. Fourier countered this with his “association

communale sur le terrain de la production et de la consummation” (as

Considerant again formulated it in 1848); which is to say the formation

of local social units based on joint production and consumption. It is a

new form of the “commune rurale”, which latter is to be regarded as

‘Telement alveolaire de la societe” — a conception not, of course, found

in Fourier himself but only in his school that was also influenced by

Owen (whom Fourier did not wish to read). Only free and voluntary

association, so we are told in 1848, can solve the great organic problem

of the future, “the problem of organizing a new order, an order in which

individualism will combine spontaneously with ‘collectism’ “ (sic). Only

in this way can “the third and last emancipatory phase of history” come

about, in which the first having made serfs out of slaves, and the

second wage-earners out of serfs (we find this idea in Bazard as far

back as 1829), “the abolition of the proletariat, the transformation of

wage-earners into companions (associes)” will be accomplished. But one

will scan Fourier’s own expositions of his system and the drafts of his

projects in vain for the concrete expression of his opposing principle.

His “phalanstery” has been compared with a large hotel, and in fact it

offers many similarities to those typical products of our age which meet

the greatest possible part of their requirements with their own

production — only that in this case production is managed by the guests

themselves, and instead of the minimum conduct regulations as in the

notices in hotel-rooms there is a law which regulates the daily round in

all its details — a law that has various attractions and leaves one’s

powers of decision fundamentally untouched but is, in itself,

meticulously exact. Although the supreme authority, the “Areopagus”,

issues no commands, but only gives instructions and each group acts

according to its will, nevertheless this will simply “ cannot deviate

from that of the Areopagus, for he is the puissance d’opinion”. Many

things in this law may strike us as bizarre, but all the same it

expresses some important and fruitful ideas, such as the alternation of

various activities — a notion that foreshadows Kropotkin’s “division of

labour in time”. On the other hand, and regarded precisely from this

standpoint, the phalanstery is a highly unsocialistic institution. The

division of labour in the course of a summer day leads the poor Lucas

from the stables to the gardeners, from there to the reapers, the

vegetable-growers, the manual workers, etc., while the same division of

labour leads the rich Mondor from the “industrial parade” to the hunt,

from there to fishing, to the library, greenhouses and so on. When we

read that the poor have to enjoy a “graduated state of wealth that the

rich may be happy”, or that “only through the utmost inequality of

worldly possessions can this beautiful and magnanimous agreement be

reached”, i.e. the renunciation by the rich of a great part of their

dividends in favour of work and talent — we realize that these units

which bear the stamp of a mechanical fantasy have no legitimate claim to

be considered as the cells of a new and legitimate order. Their

uniformity alone (for despite their appearance of inner diversity they

represent, item for item, the same pattern, the same machinery) renders

them totally unsuitable for a restructuring of society. Fourier’s

“universal harmony” which embraces world and society means, in society

itself, only a harmony between the individuals living together, not a

harmony between the units themselves (although some people may, of

course, imagine a “federation of phalanges”). The interconnection

between the units has no place in his system, each unit is a world on

its own and always the same world; but of the attraction which rules the

universe we hear nothing as between these units, they do not fuse

together into associations, into higher units, indeed they cannot do so

because they are not, like individuals, diversified, they do not

complement one another and cannot therefore form a harmony. Fourier’s

thought has been a powerful incentive to the Cooperative Movement and

its labours, in particular to the Consumer Co-operatives; but the

constructive thinking of “utopian socialism” has only been able to

accept him by transcending his ideas.

Fourier’s chef d’oeuvre appeared in 1822, the Traite d’Association

Domestique Agricole; Saint-Simon’s Le Systeme Industriel in 1821 and

1822; and from 1820 dates Robert Owen’s Report to the County of Lanark,

which appeared in 1821 and was the matured presentation of his “plan”.

But Fourier’s La Theorie des Quatre Mouvements et des Destinies

Generates, which contains his system in a nutshell, had already appeared

in 1808; Saint-Simon’s De la Reorganisation de la Societe Europeenne in

1814; Owen’s A New View of Society — the theoretical foundation of his

plans — in 1813 and 1814. If we go still further back in time we come to

Saint-Simon’s earliest work at the turn of the century, in which the

impending crisis of humanity is already announced, and Fourier’s article

on universal harmony, which may be regarded as the first sketch of his

doctrine. At the same time, however, we find Owen engaged in purely

practical activity as the leader of the cotton-spinners in New Lanark,

in which capacity he brought about some exemplary social innovations.

Unlike that of Saint-Simon and Fourier his doctrine proceeds from

practice, from experiment and experience. No matter whether he knew of

Fourier’s theories or not, Owen’s teaching is, historically and

philosophically speaking, a rejoinder to theirs, the empirical solution

of the problem as opposed to the speculative one. The social units on

which society is to be built anew can in this case be called organic;

they are numerically limited communities based on agriculture and

sustained by the “principle of united labour, expenditure and property,

and equal privileges”, and in which all members are to have “mutual and

common interests”. Already we see how Owen, as distinct from Fourier,

presses forward to the simple pre-requisites for a genuine community

where the rule is not necessarily and exclusively common ownership, but

rather a binding together and “communizing” of property; not equality of

expenditure, but rather equality of rights and opportunities. “Communal

life,” says Tonnies of the historical forms of “community”, i.e. the

“true and enduring forms of men’s life together”, is “mutual possession

and enjoyment, and possession and enjoyment of common property”. In

other words, it is a common housekeeping in which personal possessions

can stand side by side with common ones, save that through the building

of a common economy (quite otherwise than in the scheme of Fourier) only

a narrow margin is set between differences in personal possessions and

that, as a result of mutuality, of mutual give and take, there arises

that very condition which is here termed “mutual possession and

enjoyment”, i.e. the appropriate participation of all members in one

another. Precisely this conception underlies Owen’s plan. (Later he goes

further and reckons common ownership and co-operative union among the

basal foundations of his projected Colony.) He does not fail to

appreciate that great educational activity is required for its

realization. “Men have not yet been trained in principles that will

permit them to act in union, except to defend themselves or to destroy

others.... A necessity, however, equally powerful, will now compel men

to be trained to act together to create and conserve.” Owen knew that

ultimately it was a matter of transforming the whole social order, and

in particular the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. “The

interest of those who govern has ever appeared to be, and under the

present systems ever will appear to be, opposed to the interest of those

whom they govern,” This must continue “while man remains

individualized”, that is, while society refuses to build itself up out

of the real bonds between individuals.

The change will reach completion in each single one of the village

communities planned, before it extends from them to the community as a

whole. The Committee governing the individual village will “form a

permanent, experienced local government, never opposed to, but always in

closest union with, each individual governed”. Certainly there remain at

the outset the problems of what Owen calls “the connection of the new

establishments with the Government of the country and with the old

society”, but from his appellation “the old society” it is clear that

Owen is thinking of the new society as growing out of the old and

renewing it from within. At the same time various stages in the

evolution of the new society will have of necessity to exist side by

side. A characteristic example of this is given in the Draft of Statutes

(inspired by Owen) put forward by the “Association of All Classes of All

Nations”, founded in 1835, which, using a term that had only just begun

to be current in this sense, called itself “The Socialists”. Of the

three divisions of this association the lower two have only the function

of Consumer Co-operatives; the third and highest, on the contrary, is to

establish a brotherhood and sisterhood which shall form a single class

of producers and consumers differentiated by age alone, “without

priests, lawyers, soldiery, buyers and sellers’ . This is Utopia, to be

sure, but a Utopia of that special kind without which no amount of

“science” can transform society.

The line of development leading from Saint-Simon to Fourier and Owen

rests on no sequence in time; the three men whom Engels names as the

founders of socialism worked in approximately the same period; one could

almost say that it is a development in contemporaneity. Saint-Simon lays

down that society should progress from the dual to the unitary, the

leadership of the whole should proceed from the social functions

themselves, without the political order superimposing itself as an

essentially distinct and special class. To this Fourier and Owen reply

that this is only possible and permissible in a society based on joint

production and consumption, i.e. a society composed of units in which

the two are conjoined, hence of smaller communities aiming at a large

measure of self-sufficiency. Fourier’s answer affirms that each of these

units is to be constituted like the present society in respect of

property and the claims of the individual, only that the resultant

society will be led from contradiction to harmony by the concord of

instinct and activity.

Owen’s answer, on the other hand, affirms that the transformation of

society must be accomplished in its total structure as well as in each

of its cells: only a just ordering of the individual units can establish

a just order in the totality. This is the foundation of socialism.

IV . PROUDHON

“When the contradictions of ‘ communaute’ and democracy,” Proudhon wrote

in a letter of 1844, “once revealed, have shared the fate of the Utopias

of Saint-Simon and Fourier, then socialism, rising to the level of a

science — this socialism which is neither more nor less than political

economy — will seize hold of society and drive it with irresistible

force towards its next destination.... Socialism has not yet attained to

self-consciousness; to-day it calls itself communism.” The first

sentence reminds one in many respects of the later formulations of Marx.

Three months before the letter was written Marx had met Proudhon, who

was ten years his senior, in Paris, immediately to conduct night-long

conversations with him.

Little as Proudhon wished to go back to the “utopian” systems and deeply

as he was opposed to their principles, he nevertheless continued the

line of development that began with them. He continued this line by

drawing it afresh, only on a higher plane where everything anterior to

it was taken for granted. All the same he had a profound fear of himself

adding a new system to the old. “System,” he wrote in 1849, “I have no

system, I will have none and I expressly repudiate the suggestion. The

system of humanity, whatever it be, will only be known when humanity is

at an end.... My business is to find out the way humanity is going and,

if I can, prepare it.” The real Proudhon is very far removed from the

man Marx attacks in his polemic and earlier in a letter to a Russian

friend, from the man for whom, as the letter says, “categories and

abstractions are the primary facts”, “the motive forces which make

history” and which it is sufficient to alter for alterations to follow

in real life. This “hegelizing” of Proudhon misfires. No man has

questioned more honestly and more pungently than Proudhon the social

reality of his time and sought its secret. “The economic categories,”

declared Marx in his poleimic, “arc only theoretical expressions for the

social relationships of production,” whereas Proudhon, he says, saw in

these relationships only the embodiments! of principles; but the fixed

social relationships are produced by human beings just as are cloth,

linen, etc. Proudhon rightly remarks in the margin of his copy of the

polemic: “That is exactly what I’m saying. Society creates the laws and

the raw material of its expedience.” In one of his later, and most

mature, writings — Du Principe Federatif (1863) — he pronounces the same

judgment from another angle, when he says of reason that it leads the

movement of history towards freedom butt only on condition that it takes

the nature of the forces concerned into account and respects their laws.

Proudhon’s fear of “systems” has its roots in his fundamental

relationship to social reality. He observes society in all its contrasts

and contradictions and will not rest until he has understood and

expressed them.

Proudhon was a man who had the strength and courage to steep himself in

contradiction and bear the strain of it. He did not remain in it in

quite the way that Unamuno thinks, who compares him in this respect to

Pascal; he did, however, remain in it for so long as was necesssary for

him to grasp it in all its cruelty, to resolve “the conflict of

elements, the clash of contrasts” fully in his thought. And sometimes it

was too long, judg;ed by the shortness of human life. When Unamuno says

of Pascal that his logic was not dialectics but polemics, this is true

also of Proudhon to a certain extent; but when he goes on to say that

Pascal did not seek any synthesis between thesis and antithesis, it is

not in reality true of Proudhon. He sought no synthesis in the Hegelian

sense, no negation of negation; he sought, as; he says in a letter of

18444, “des resolutions synthetiques de toutes les contradictions”, and

what he actually means is that he was seeking the way, the way out of

contradiction recognized in all its pitilessness, out of the social

“antinomies” (as he says, transferring the term from Kant’s theory of

cognition to the sphere of sociolcogy).

For him, thesis and antithesis were categories not embodying themselves

in different historical epochs, but co-existimg; he took over only the

formalism of Hegel, but of Hegel the historian almost nothiing. Despite

his excursions into history Proudihon was not an historical thinker; his

thought was social-critical, and that was both hiis strength and his

limitation. To grasp the (contradiction which could, in any given social

reality, in fact be grasped was, for him, the intellectual prerequisite

for the discovery of “the way”. That is why he puts tendencies and

counter-tendencies side by side and refuses to elevate either of them

into an Absolute. “All ideas,” he writes in the Philosophy of Progress

(1851), “are false, i.e. contradictory and irrational, when you grant

them an exclusive and absolute meaning, or when you let yourself be

swept away by this meaning”; all tendencies towards exclusiveness,

towards immobility, tend towards degeneration. And just as no spiritual

factors may be regarded as reigning with absolute necessity, neither may

material ones be so regarded. Proudhon believes neither in blind

providence from below, which contrives the salvation of mankind out of

technical and material changes, nor in a free-ranging human intellect,

which contrives systems of absolute validity and enjoins them on

mankind. He sees humanity’s real way in the deliverance from false

faiths in absolutism, from the dominion of fatality. “Man no longer

wishes to be mechanized. He strives towards ‘defataliza-tion’.” Hence

the “universal antipathy to all Utopias whose essence is political

organization and a social credo”, by which Proudhon — in 1858 — means

Owen, Fourier and the Saint-Simonist Enfantin, and also Auguste Comte.

Proudhon teaches that no historical principle can be adequately summed

up in any system of ideas; every such principle needs interpretation and

may be interpreted well or ill, and the interpretations influence,

directly or indirectly, the historical fate of the principle. It must,

however, be noted as an additional complication that in no age is any

one principle all-powerful. “All principles,” writes Proudhon in his

posthumous work Casarism and Christianity, “are contemporaneous in

history as they are in reason.” It is only that they have different

strengths in relation to one another at different epochs. At a time when

a principle is struggling for hegemony it is important that it should

enter man’s consciousness and work on his will in its true essence and

not in a distorted form. The “social age” announced with the French

Revolution — an age preceded at the outset, naturally, by a period of

transition, the “era of Constitutions”, just as the Augustan epoch

preceded the Christian: both of them working a renewal, but not a

renewal that goes to the heart of existence — this social age is

characterized by the predominance of the economic principle over those

of religion and government. This principle it is that “in the name of

socialism is stirring up a new revolution in Europe which, once it has

brought about a federative Republic of all the civilized states, will

organize the unity and solidarity of the human species over the whole

face of the earth”. It is important to-day to understand the economic

principle in its true nature so as to guard against fatal conflicts

between it and a travesty of it which usurps its ideas.

As I have said Proudhon did not merely continue the evolutionary line of

“utopian” socialism, he began it again from the beginning, but in such a

way that everything anterior to him appeared completely remodelled. More

especially he did not set out at the point where Saint-Simon stopped;

rather he posed Saint-Simon’s demand for an economy based on and

conditioned by its groupings, in an altogether new and more

comprehensive way that goes much deeper into social reality. Saint-Simon

started from the reform of the State, Proudhon from the transformation

of society. A genuine reconstruction of society can only begin with a

radical alteration of the relationship between the social and the

political order. It can no longer be a matter of substituting one

political regime for another, but of the emergence, in place of a

political regime grafted upon society, of a regime expressive of society

itself. “The prime cause of all the disorders that visit society,” says

Proudhon, “of the oppression of the citizens and the decay of nations,

lies in the single and hierarchical centralization of authority.... We

need to make an end of this monstrous parasitism as soon as possible.”

We are not told why and since when this need has become so pressing, but

we can easily remedy this when we realize two things. First: so long as

society was richly structured, so long as it was built up of manifold

communities and communal units, all strong in vitality, the State was a

wall narrowing one’s outlook and restricting one’s steps, but within

this wall a spontaneous communal life could flourish and grow. But to

the extent that the structure grew impoverished the wall became a

prison. Second: such a structurally poor society awoke to

self-consciousness, to consciousness of its existence as a society in

contrast to the State, at the time of the French Revolution, and now it

can only expect a structural renewal by limiting all not-social

organizations to those functions which cannot be accomplished by society

itself, — while on the other hand the proper management of affairs grows

out of the functioning society and creates its own organs. “The

limitation of the State’s task is a matter of life and death for

freedom, both collective and individual.” It is obvious that Proudhon’s

basic thought is not individualistic. What he opposes to the State is

not the individual as such but the individual in organic connection with

his group, the group being a voluntary association of individuals.

“Since the Reformation and especially since the French Revolution a new

spirit has dawned on the world. Freedom has opposed itself to the State,

and since the idea of freedom has become universal people have realized

that it is not a concern of the individual merely, but rather that it

must exist in the group also.” In the early writings of Proudhon a sort

of individualism still predominates, but already he knows that “through

monopoly mankind has taken possession of the globe, and through

association it will become its real master”. In the course of

development, however, individualism beat an increasingly rapid retreat

(despite the toleration of individual peasant property) before an

attitude in which the problematical relationship between personality and

totality was balanced by the largely autonomous group — the local

community or commune — living on the strength of its own interior

relationships. Although the structural point of view as such is never

expressly stated in Proudhon we notice that he comes nearer and nearer

to it: his anti-centralism turns more and more to “communalism” and

federalism (which indeed, as he says in a letter of 1863, had been

boiling in his veins for thirty years), that is, it becomes increasingly

structural. Advanced centralization should, he writes in i860, vanish

“once it is replaced by federal institutions and communal customs”. What

is remarkable here is the connection between the new arrangements to be

created — the “institutions”, and the community — forms to be retained —

the “customs”.

Just how powerfully Proudhon felt the amorphous character of present-day

society we may learn best, perhaps, from his attitude to the question of

universal suffrage. “Universal suffrage,” he says in his essay The

Solution of the Social Problem (1848), “is a kind of atomism by means of

which the legislator, seeing that he cannot let the people speak in

their essential oneness, invites the citizens to express their opinions

per head, viritim, just as the Epicurean philosopher explained thought,

will and understanding by combinations of atoms.” As Proudhon said in

his speech to the National Assembly in 1848, universal suffrage needs an

“organizing principle”. This principle can only rest on the organization

of society in groups. “The retention of natural groups,” writes Proudhon

in 1863, “is of the greatest importance for the exercise of electoral

power; it is the essential condition of the vote. Without it there is no

originality, no frankness, no clear and unequivocal meaning in the

voices.... The destruction of natural groups in elections would mean the

moral destruction of nationality itself, the negation of the thought of

the Revolution.” The amorphous basis of elections “aims at nothing less

than to abolish political life in towns, communes and departments, and

through this destruction of all municipal and regional autonomy to

arrest the development of universal suffrage”. In such circumstances the

body of the nation is but an agglomeration of molecules, “a heap of dust

animated from without by a subordinating, centralist idea. In our search

for unity, unity itself has been sacrificed”. Only as an expression of

associated groups will universal suffrage, which is now “the strangling

of public conscience, the suicide of the people’s sovereignty”, become

an intelligent, moral and revolutionary force. Provided, of course, that

“the various spheres of service are balanced and privilege abolished”.

Proudhon by no means fails to recognize that “the real problem to be

solved for federalism is not political, but economic”. “In order to make

the confederation indestructible,” he says, “economic right must be

declared the foundation of federative right and of all political order.”

The reform of economic right must follow from the answer to two

questions which the workers’ Societies have to face: whether labour can

be self-financing as regards its undertakings as capital is now, and

whether the ownership and control of the undertakings can be collective.

“The whole future of the workers,’ writes Proudhon in a curious book,

The Stockjobber’s Handbook (1853), “depends on the answer to these

questions. If the answer is in the affirmative a new world will open out

before humanity; if in the negative, then let the proletariat take

warning! Let them commend themselves to God and the Church — there is no

hope for them this side of the grave.” Proudhon’s sketch of the

affirmative answer is “Mutualism” in its mature form. “Mutuality,

reciprocity exists,” he writes, “when all the workers in an industry,

instead of working for an entrepreneur who pays them and keeps their

products, work for one another and thus collaborate in the making of a

common product whose profits they share amongst themselves. Extend the

principle of reciprocity as uniting the work of every group, to the

Workers’ Societies as units, and you have created a form of civilization

which from all points of view — political, economic and aesthetic — is

radically different from all earlier civilizations.” This is Proudhon’s

solution to the problem, and he formulates it as follows: “All

associated and all free.” But in order that this may be so the

association must not become a system imposed from above; rather must

people associate in Workers’ Societies (in the sense of “foci of

production”) only in so far as — Proudhon writes in 1864 — “the demands

of production, the cheapness of the product, the needs of consumption

and the security of the producers themselves require it”. By associating

in this manner the workers are only following “la raison des choses”

itself, and consequently they “can preserve their freedom in the very

heart of the society”. Thinking like this it was inevitable that

Proudhon should turn in 1848 against the State-financed “social

workshops” demanded by Louis Blanc (as later by Lassalle). He sees in

them only a new form of centralization. It would mean, he says, a number

of large associations “in which labour would be regimented and

ultimately enslaved through a State policy of brotherhood, just as it is

on the point of being enslaved now through the State policy of

capitalism. What would freedom, universal happiness, civilization have

gained? Nothing. We would merely have exchanged our chains and the

social idea would have made no step forward; we would still be under the

same arbitrary power, not to say under the same economic fatalism”. Here

Proudhon is expressing the view which we find twenty years later in

theoretical form in Gierke’s great work. “Only free association,” says

Gierke, “can create communities in which economic freedom persists. For

those organisms which spring from individual initiative and from the

creative powers of their members enhance the life of each individual

member simultaneously with the newly established life of the whole.”

Communist centralism thus appeared to Proudhon as a variant of

absolutism elaborated to a monstrous and ruthless degree of perfection.

This “dictatorial, authoritarian, doctrinaire system starts from the

axiom that the individual is subordinate, in the very nature of things,

to the collectivity; from it alone does right and life come to him; the

citizen belongs to the State as the child to his family, he is in its

power and possession, and he owes it submission and obedience in all

things”. Just as we can understand from this standpoint that Marx (in a

passage intended for the polemic but not actually incorporated in it)

said of Proudhon that he was “incapable of comprehending the

revolutionary movement”, so it is from this standpoint also that we can

understand why Proudhon, in an entry in his diary, described Marx as

“the tapeworm of socialism”. In the communist system common ownership is

to bring about the end of all property, personal as well as parochial

and communal; universal association is to absorb all special

associations, and collective freedom is to devour all corporative,

regional and private freedoms. Proudhon defines the political system of

centralist communism, in 1864, in words which are worth pondering: “A

compact democracy having the appearance of being founded on the

dictatorship of the masses, but in which the masses have no more power

than is necessary to ensure a general serfdom in accordance with the

following precepts and principles borrowed from the old absolutism:

indivisibility of public power, all-consuming centralization, systematic

destruction of all individual, corporative and regional thought

(regarded as disruptive), inquisitorial police.” Proudhon thinks that we

are not far removed from pure centralist communism in politics and

economics, but he is persuaded that “after a final crisis and at the

summons of new principles a movement will begin in the reverse

direction”.

The book in which these words occur — The Political Capacity of the

Working Classes — was completed only shortly before Proudhon’s death. He

attributed especial importance to it as setting forth the “idea of a new

democracy” and wrote it, as he says, under the inspiration of the

“Manifesto of the Sixty” — the electoral declaration (1861) of a group

of workers whose ideas for the most part came very near to Proudhon’s

own. This manifesto was the fourth in the series of four socialist

“Manifestos”; the first being the Manifeste des Egaux of Babeuf, the

second that of the Fourierist Considerant, the third the “Communist

Manifesto” — and it was the first to emerge from the proletariat itself.

In his declaration, in which Proudhon hails the “awakening of socialism”

in France and the “unveiling of corporate consciousness” in the

working-class, he demands inter alia the setting up of a chambre

syndicale, but not one which, as some people had proposed in a “strange

confusion of thought” (here Saint-Simon’s idea turns up again), was to

be composed of workers and work-givers; “what we demand is a Chamber

composed exclusively of workers elected by the free vote of all — a

Chamber of Labour”. This demand bears clear witness of the development

of the new social thinking from Saint-Simon to Proudhon.

By advancing from the idea of social reconstruction to the idea of

structural renewal, Proudhon took the decisive step. The “industrial

constitution” of Saint-Simon does not signify a new structure, but

“federalism” does.

Proudhon naturally distinguishes two modes of structure, which

interpenetrate: the economic structure as a federation of work-groups,

which he calls “agrarian-industrial federation”, and the political

structure, which rests on the decentralization of power, the division of

authority, the guarantee of the maximum degree of autonomy to the

communes and regional associations, and the widest possible replacement

of bureaucracy by a looser and more direct control of affairs arising

from the natural group. Proudhon’s “Constitutional Science” can be

summed up in three propositions. It is necessary —

To form moderately sized and moderately autonomous groups and to unite

them by an act of federation;

To organize the government in each federated State according to the

law of the division of organs. That is to say: inside the Public

Authority to divide everything that can be divided, to define everything

that can be defined, to allocate among different organs and

functionaries everything that has been so divided and defined, to leave

nothing undivided, and to surround the Public Authority with all the

conditions of publicity and control;

Instead of allowing the federated States or the provincial and

municipal authorities to merge into a central authority, to limit the

competence of the latter to the simple tasks of general initiative,

mutual assurance and supervision.

The life of a society finds fulfilment in the combination of persons

into groups, of groups into associations.

“Just as a number of people by their common exertions give rise to a

collective strength which is superior in quality and intensity to the

sum of their respective strengths, so a number of workgroups associated

in a relationship of mutual exchange will generate a potency of a higher

order,” which can be regarded specifically as “the social potential”.

Mutualism — the building up of an economy on reciprocity of service, and

federation — the building up of a political order on the brotherhood of

groups — are only two aspects of the same structure. “Through the

grouping of individual strengths and the interdependence of the groups

the whole nation will become a body.” And a real brotherhood of man can

be constituted from the various peoples, as a federation of federations.

Proudhon treated the problem of decentralization more particularly in

his Theory of Taxation (1861). He says that he is not unaware of the

fact that political centralization offers many advantages, but it is too

costly. People regard it as obvious not merely because it flatters their

collective vanity but also because “in nations as in children reason

seeks unity in all things, simplicity, uniformity, identity and

hierarchy as well as size and mass”, and this is why centralization —

the type of all the ancient kingdoms — became an effective method of

discipline. “People like simple ideas and are right to like them.

Unfortunately the simplicity they seek is only to be found in elementary

things; and the world, society and man are made up of insoluble

problems, contrary principles and conflicting forces. Organism means

complication, and multiplicity means contradiction, opposition,

independence. The centralist system is all very well as regards size,

simplicity and construction; it lacks but one thing — the individual no

longer belongs to himself in such a system, he cannot feel his worth,

his life, and no account is taken of him at all.” But the conception of

and demand for a public system in which the individual can belong to

himself, feel his worth and his life, a system that takes account of him

as an individual, does not just float about in the boundless realm of

abstraction — it is bound to the facts and tendencies of our social

reality. In the modern constitutional State “the various groups need no

direction in a great many of their activities; they are quite capable of

governing themselves with no other inspiration than conscience and

reason”. In any State organized in accordance with the principles of

modern law there occurs a progressive diminution of directive action — a

decentralization. And a corresponding development can be discerned on

the economic side. The development of technics in our age (Proudhon had

already drawn attention to this in 1855 in his book on the reform of the

railways, but it was only long after his death, with the mechanization

of communications and the prospective electrification of production,

that the matter became topical) tends to make the concentration of

population in the big cities unnecessary; “the dispersion of the masses

and their redistribution is beginning”. The political centre of gravity

must gradually shift from the cities to “the new agricultural and

industrial groupings”.

But Proudhon is by no means of the opinion that the process of

decentralization is prospering and maturing in all fields. On the

contrary: in the field of politics he sees in the conscious will of man

a counter-movement of the gravest import. “A fever of centralization,”

he writes in 1861, “is sweeping over the world; one would say that men

were weary of the vestiges of freedom that yet remain to them and were

only longing to be rid of them.... Is it the need for authority that is

everywhere making itself felt, a disgust with independence, or only an

incapacity for self-government?” Only the creative, restructuring powers

that reign in the depths of man can avail against this “fever”, this

grave sickness of the human spirit. The expression of these powers is

“the idea” of which Proudhon says at the end of a political treatise in

1863 that it “exists and is in circulation”, but that, if it is to be

realized, it must “issue from the bowels of the situation”.

At that time, when his insight was at its height, Proudhon was far from

assuming that this situation was imminent. We know from some of his

letters of i860 how he pictured the immediate future. “We should no

longer deceive ourselves,” he wrote. “Europe is sick of thought and

order; it is entering into the era of brute force and contempt of

principles.” And in the same letter: “Then the great war of the six

great powers will begin.” A few months later: “Carnage will come and the

enfeeblement that will follow these blood-baths will be terrible. We

shall not live to see the work of the new age, we shall fight in the

darkness; we must prepare ourselves to endure this life without too much

sadness, by doing our duty. Let us help one another, call to one another

in the gloom, and practise justice wherever opportunity offers.” And

finally: “To-day civilization is in the grip of a crisis for which one

can only find a single analogy in history — that is the crisis which

brought the coming of Christianity. All the traditions are worn out, all

the creeds abolished; but the new programme is not yet ready, by which I

mean that it has not yet entered the consciousness of the masses. Hence

what I call the dissolution. This is the cruellest moment in the life of

societies.... I am under no illusions and do not expect to wake up one

morning to see the resurrection of freedom in our country, as if by a

stroke of magic.... No, no; decay, and decay for a period whose end I

cannot fix and which will last for not less than one or two generations

— is our lot.... I shall witness the evil only, I shall die in the midst

of the darkness.” But the thing is “to do our duty”. In the same year he

had written to the historian Michelet: “It will only be possible to

escape by a complete revolution in our ideas and our hearts.

We are working for the revolution, you and I; that will be our honour

before posterity, if they remember us.” And eight years previously he

had replied thus to a friend who had suggested emigration to America:

“It is here, I tell you, here under the sabre of Napoleon, under the rod

of the Jesuits and the spy-glass of the secret service, that we have to

work for the emancipation of mankind. There is no sky more propitious

for us, no earth more fruitful.”

Like Saint-Simon, though in far greater detail and with far more

precision, Proudhon brought the problem of a structural renewal of

society to the fore without treating it as such. And just as Saint-Simon

failed to face the question of the social units which would serve as the

cells of a new society, so Proudhon left it open in all essentials,

though he came much closer to it. But in the first case there were

contemporaries, and in the second followers, who made this very problem

the principal object of their research and planning.

That Proudhon did not study it more intensively has its chief reason in

his suspicions of “association” as a State-prescribed uniform panacea

for all the ills of society, in the sense proposed by Louis Blanc:

“social workshops” in industry as well as in agriculture, established,

financed and controlled by the State. It must be noted that Louis

Blanc’s proposals — if not in intention, at least in character — are

socially structural; from the “solidarity of all workers in the same

shop” he goes on to the “solidarity of shops in the same industry” and

thence to the “solidarity of different industries”. Also, he sees the

agricultural commune as being built up on the basis of combined

production and consumption. “To meet the needs of all,” he says in his

Organization of Labour (1839), “it is necessary to pool the products of

the work of all,” this is the form in which he sees the immediate

possibility of a “more radical and more complete” application of “the

system of fraternal association”. Proudhon’s suspicions were directed,

as said, against a new “raison d’Etat”; hence, against uniformity,

against exclusiveness, against compulsion. The co-operative form seemed

to him more applicable to industry than to agriculture, where he was

concerned for the preservation of the peasantry (note that in all the

permutations of his thinking he holds fast to one principle in this

connection, that the land lawfully belongs to him who cultivates it)

and, when applied to industry, only in those branches whose nature the

co-operative form suited, and for certain definite functions. He refuses

to equate a new ordering of society with uniformity; order means, for

him, the just ordering of multiformity. Eduard Bernstein is quite right

when he says that Proudhon denied to the essentially monopolist

Co-operative what he conceded to the mutualist one. Proudhon had a

profound fear of everything coming “from above”, everything imposed on

the people and decked out with privileges. In this connection he feared

the proliferation of new collective egoisms, for these seemed to him

more perilous than individual egoisms. He saw the danger that threatens

every Producer Go-operative working for a free market: that it will be

seized with the spirit of capitalism, the ruthless exploitation of

opportunities and eventualities. His doubts were cogent. They were

rooted in his basic view which made justice the criterion of true

socialism. (According to him there are two ideas: freedom, and unity or

order, and “one must make up one’s mind to live with both of them by

seeking a balance between them”. The principle that permits this is

called “justice”.) But the structural form of the coming society

announced by Proudhon, the form in which the balance of freedom and

order is attained and which he calls federalism, required him not merely

to concern himself — as he did — with the larger units to be federated

(that is, the various nations, but the smaller ones also whose

federative combination would in reality alone constitute the “nation”.

Proudhon did not fulfil this requirement. He could only have fulfilled

it had he sought in it and from it the answer to his own doubts, which

is to say, only if he had directed his best thought to the problem of

how to promote and organize “association” in such a way that-the danger

inherent in it would be, if not exorcized, at least appreciably

diminished. Because he did not do this sufficiently well — important as

was the step taken in this direction by his principle of mutualism — we

find here no adequate answer to our question: “What are the units which

will federate in a new and genuine popular order?”, or, more precisely:

“How must the units be constituted so that they can federate into a

genuine popular order, a new and just social structure?” Thus Proudhon’s

socialism lacks one essential. For we cannot but doubt whether existing

social units, even where the old community-forms remain, can still,

being what they are, combine in justice; also whether any new units will

ever be capable of it unless this same combination 01 freedom and order

governs and shapes their inception.

V . KROPOTKIN

This is where Kropotkin comes in. Born at a time — a hundred years ago —

when Proudhon was just beginning his struggle against the inequity of

private property, against property as “theft”, he consciously takes up

Proudhon’s legacy so as to amplify and elaborate it. At the same time he

simplifies it, though often in a fruitful and stimulating way. He

simplifies Proudhon by mitigating the dazzle of contradictory

principles, and that is something of a loss; but he also translates him

into the language of history, and that is a gain. Kropotkin is no

historian; even where he thought historically he is a social geographer,

a chronicler of the states and conditions on earth; but he thinks in

terms of history.

Kropotkin simplifies Proudhon first of all by setting up in the place of

the manifold “social antinomies” the simple antithesis between the

principles of the struggle for existence and mutual help. He undertakes

to prove this antithesis biologically, ethnologically and historically.

Historically he sees these principles (probably influenced very strongly

by Kireyewski’s picture of historical duality in 1852) crystallizing on

the one hand into the coercive State, on the other into the manifold

forms of association such as the County Commune, the parish, the guild,

the corporation and so on right up to the modern Co-operatives. In an

over-elaborate and historically under-substantiated formulation written

in 1894, Kropotkin puts the antithesis thus: “The State is an historical

growth that slowly and gradually, at certain epochs in the life and

history of all peoples, displaces the free confederations of tribes,

communities, tribal groups, villages and producers’ guilds and gives

minorities terrible support in enslaving the masses — and this

historical growth and all that derives from it is the thing we are

fighting against.” Later (in his book Modern Science and Anarchy, a

complete French edition of which appeared in 1913) he found a more

correct and historically a more justifiable formulation. “All through

the history of our civilization,” he writes, “two contrary traditions,

two trends have faced one another: the Roman tradition and the national

tradition; the imperial and the federal; the authoritarian and the

libertarian. And once more, on the eve of social revolution, we find

these two traditions face to face.” Here, probably under the influence

of Gierke, who called the two opposing principles domination and free

association, there is a hint, bound up with Kropotkin’s historical

insight, that the universal conflict of the two spiritual forces

persists inside the social movement itself: between the centralist and

the federalist forms of socialism.

Certainly Kropotkin’s conception of the State is too narrow; it is not a

question of identifying the centralist State with the State in general.

In history there is not merely the State as a clamp that strangles the

individuality of small associations; there is also the State as a

framework within which they may consolidate; not merely the “great

Leviathan” whose authority, according to Hobbes, is based on “terror”,

but also the great nourishing mother who carefully folds her children,

the communities, to her bosom; not merely the machina mackinarum that

turns everything belonging to it into the components of some mechanism,

but also the communitas communitatum, the union of the communities into

community, within which “the proper and autonomous common life of all

the members” can unfold. On the other hand, Kropotkin was more or less

right when he dated the inception of the modern centralist State — which

he confused with the State as such — from the sixteenth century; from

the time when “the downfall of the free cities” was sealed “by the

abolition of all forms of free contract”: the village communities, the

Societies of Artisans, the fraternities, the confederacies of the Middle

Ages. “With some certainty we may say,” writes the legal historian

Maitland, “that at the end of the Middle Ages a great change in men’s

thought about groups of men was taking place.” Now “the Absolute State

faces the Absolute Individual”. In Gierke’s words “the sovereign State

and the sovereign individual fought to define their natural and lawful

spheres of existence; all intermediate associations were degraded to

merely legalistic and more or less arbitrary formations and at last

completely exterminated”. In the end nothing remained but the sovereign

State which, in proportion to its mechanization, devoured everything

living. Nothing organic could resist “the rigidly centralized directive

mechanism which, with its enormous expenditure of human intelligence,

could be operated at the touch of a button”, as Carl Schmitt, the

ingenious interpreter of totalitarianism, calls the Leviathan. Those for

whom the important thing is not so much the security of individuals (for

which purpose the Leviathan is deemed indispensable) as the preservation

of the substance of community, the renewal of communal life in the life

of mankind — are bound to fight against every doctrine that would defend

centralism. “There is no more dangerous superstition,” says the church

historian Figgis, “than that political atomism which denies all power to

societies as such, but ascribes absolutely unlimited competence over

body, soul and spirit to the grandiose unity of the State. It is indeed

‘the great Leviathan made up of little men’ as in Hobbes’ title-page,

but we can see no reason to worship the golden image.” In so far as

Kropotkin did battle not with State-order itself but with the centralist

State-apparatus, he has powerful allies in the field of science. In

scientific circles it may perhaps be maintained against “pluralism” that

the modern State, in so far as it is pluralist rather than totalitarian,

has the appearance of a “compromise between social and economic

power-groups, an agglomeration of heterogeneous factors, parties,

interests, concerns, trades-unions, churches, etc.” (Carl Schmitt.) But

that says nothing against a socialistic rebuilding of the State as a

community of communities, provided that the communities are real

communities; for then all the various groups Schmitt mentions would

either not exist or be quite different from what they are now, and the

fusion of the groups would not be an agglomeration but, in Landauer’s

words, “a league of leagues”.

Any element of compulsive order still persisting would only represent

the stage of development attained by man at the time; it would no longer

represent the exploitation of human immaturity and human contrasts.

Contrasts between individuals and between groups will probably never

cease, nor indeed should they; they have to be endured; but we can and

we must strive towards a state of things where individual conflicts

neither extend to large wholes which are not really implicated, nor lend

themselves to the establishment of absolute centralist suzerainty.

As in his inadequate distinction between the excessive and the

legitimate State, or the superfluous and the necessary State, so in

another important respect Kropotkin’s view, although perceiving many

historical relationships unnoticed by Proud-hon, is not realistic

enough. He says on one occasion that in his (Kropotkin’s) praise of the

medieval commune he might perhaps be accused of having forgotten its

internal conflicts, but that he had by no means done so. For history

showed that “these conflicts were themselves the guarantee of free life

in the free city”, that the communities grew and were rejuvenated

through them.

Further, that in contrast to the wars of States, these inter-communal

conflicts were concerned with the struggle for and maintenance of the

individual’s freedom, with the federative principle, the right to unite

and to act in unison, and that therefore “the epochs when the conflict

was fought out in freedom without the weight of existing authority being

thrown into either of the scales, were the epochs of greatest spiritual

development”. This is substantially right and yet one all-important

point has not been sufficiently grasped.

The danger of collective egoism, as also that of schism and oppression,

is hardly less in an autonomous community than in the nation or party,

particularly when the community participates as a co-partner in

production. A telling example of this is to be found in the internal

development of the “mining communities”, that is, the Producer

Co-operatives of mine-workers in the German Middle Ages. Max Weber has

shown in a scholarly exposition that in the first stage of this there

was an increasing expropriation of the owners; that the community became

the managing director and shared out the profits while observing as far

as practicable the principle of equality; but that a differentiation

among the workers themselves thereupon set in. For as a result of

increasing demand the new arrivals were no longer accepted into the

community, they were “non-union men”, hired labour, and the process of

disintegration thus initiated continued until purely capitalist

“interested parties” permeated the personnel of the mining-community and

the union finally became a capitalistic instrument which itself

appointed the workers. When we read to-day (for instance in Tawney’s

book The Acquisitive Society) how the workers can “freeze out” the

owners from industrial undertakings by making them superfluous through

their own control of production; or how they can limit the interest of

the owners to such an extent that the latter become mere rentiers with

no share in the profits and no responsibility — precisely, therefore,

what had happened in the German mines seven hundred years ago — then the

historical warning comes very close to us and commands us to have a

care, to build the checks on collective egoism into the new order of

society. Kropotkin is not blind to this danger; for instance, he points

out ( Mutual Aid, 1902) that the modern Co-operative Movement which,

originally and in essence, had the character of mutual aid, has often

degenerated into “share-capital individualism” and fosters “co-operative

egoism”.

Kropotkin realized very clearly that, as Proudhon had already indicated,

a socialistic community could only be built on the basis of a double

intercommunal bond, namely the federation of regional communes and trade

communes variously intercrossing and supporting one another. To this he

sometimes added as a third principle, communal groupings based on

voluntary membership. He sketches a picture of the new society most

vividly in his autobiography (1899), in that passage where he speaks of

the basic views of the anarchist-communist “Jura-Federation” founded by

Bakunin, in which he played an active part in 1877 and in the years

immediately following. From the documents of the Jura-Federation itself

no comparable formulation is indeed known to us, and it is to be assumed

that Bakunin’s ideas, which were never other than cursorily sketched,

becoming in the course of years intertwined with those of Proudhon, only

attained maturity in Kropotkin’s own mind. “We remark in the civilized

nations,” he writes in his autobiography, “the germ of a new social form

which will supplant the old.... This society will be composed of a

number of societies banded together for everything that demands a common

effort: federations of producers for all kinds of production, of

Societies for consumption; federations of such Societies alone and

federations of Societies and production groups, finally more extensive

groups embracing a whole country or even several countries and composed

of persons who will work in common for the satisfaction of those

economic, spiritual and artistic needs which are not limited to a

definite territory. All these groups will unite their efforts through

mutual agreement.... Personal initiative will be encouraged and every

tendency to uniformity and centralization combated. Moreover this

society will not ossify into fixed and immovable forms, it will

transform itself incessantly, for it will be a living organism

continually in development.” No equalization, no final fixation — that

is Kropotkin’s basic idea, and it is a healthy one. What is aspired to

is, as he says in 1896, “the fullest development of individuality

combined with the highest development of free association in all its

aspects, in all possible degrees and for all conceivable purposes: an

ever-changing association bearing in itself the elements of its own

duration and taking on the forms which at any moment best correspond to

the manifold endeavours of all.” And he adds with emphasis in 1913: “We

conceive the structure of society to be something that is never finally

constituted.”

Such a structure means mobilizing the social and political spontaneity

of the nation to the greatest possible degree. This order, which

Kropotiun calls Communism (a term usurped by that “negation of all

freedom” so bitterly attacked by Proudhon) and which may be called more

correctly Federal Communalism, “cannot be imposed — it could not live

unless the constant, daily collaboration of all supported it. In an

atmosphere of officialdom it would suffocate. Consequently it cannot

subsist unless it creates permanent contacts between everybody for the

thousand and one common concerns; it cannot live unless it creates

regional and autonomous life in the smallest of its units — the street,

the house-block, the district, the parish.” Socialism “will have to find

its own form of political relationships.... In one way or another it

will be more ‘of the people’; will have to be closer to the forum than

parliamentary government is. It will have to depend less on

representation, more on self-government”. We see particularly clearly

here that Kropotkin is ultimately attacking not State-order as such but

only the existing order in all its forms; that his “anarchy”, like

Proudhon’s, is in reality “anocracy” ( !”#!$%! ); not absence of

government but absence of domination. “If I may express myself so,”

Proudhon had written in a letter of 1864, “anarchy is a form of

government or constitution in which the principle of authority, police

institutions, restrictive and repressive measures, bureaucracy,

taxation, etc., are reduced to their simplest terms.” This is at bottom

Kropotkin’s opinion too.

As the important words “ less representation” and “ more

self-government” show, he also knows that when it comes to our real will

for a “restructuring” of society, it is not a question of manipulating

an abstract principle but only of the direction of realization willed;

of the limits of realization possible in this direction in any given

circumstances — the line that defines what is demanded here and now,

becomes attainable.

He knows that tremendous things are willed and how deeply they reach

into our hearts: “All the relations between individuals and between the

masses have to be corrected”; but he also knows that this can only be

done if social spontaneity is roused and shown the direction in which it

has to work.

That a decisive transformation of the social order as a whole cannot

ensue without revolution is self-evident for Kropotkin. So it was for

Proudhon. In the book that Marx attacked as “petty bourgeois” Proudhon

knew well enough that the mighty task he set the working-classes —

namely to “bring forth from the bowels of the people, from the depths of

labour a greater authority, a mightier fact, which will draw capital and

the State into its orbit and subdue them” — cannot be fulfilled without

revolution. Proudhon saw in revolutions, as he said in a toast to the

Revolution of 1848, “the successive declarations of human justice”, and

the modern State he held to be “counter-revolutionary in nature and in

principle”. What he contested (in his famous letter to Marx) was that

“no reform was possible at present without a coup de main” and that “we

were obliged to use revolutionary action as a means of social reform”.

But he divined the tragedy of revolutions and came to feel it more and

more deeply in the course of disappointing experiences. Their tragedy is

that as regards their positive goal they will always result in the exact

opposite of what the most honest and passionate revolutionaries strive

for, unless and until this has so far taken shape before the revolution

that the revolutionary act has only to wrest the space for it in which

it can develop unimpeded.

Two years before his death Proudhon remarks bitterly: “It is the

revolutionary struggle that has given us centralization.” This view was

not unfamiliar to Kropotkin. But he believed that it was sufficient to

influence the revolutionary force by education so as to prevent the

revolution from ending in a new centralization “every bit as bad or

worse”, and thus enabling “the people — the peasants and the urban

workers — to begin the really constructive work themselves”. “The point

for us is to inaugurate the social revolution through communism.” Like

Bakunin, Kropotkin misses the all-important fact that, in the social as

opposed to the political sphere, revolution is not so much a creative as

a delivering force whose function is to set free and authenticate — i.e.

that it can only perfect, set free, and lend the stamp of authority to

something that has already been foreshadowed in the womb of the

pre-revolutionary society; that, as regards social evolution, the hour

of revolution is not an hour of begetting but an hour of birth —

provided there was a begetting beforehand.

Of course there are in Kropotkin’s teaching fundamental elements which

point to the significance of pre-revolutionary structure-making. As in

his book on mutual aid he traces the vestiges of old community-forms in

our society and compares them with examples of existing, more or less

amorphous solidarity, so in his book Fields, Factories and Workshops

(1898, enlarged edition 1912) he makes, on purely economic and

industrial-psychological grounds, a weighty contribution to the picture

of a new social unit fitted to serve as a cell for the formation of a

new society in the midst of the old. As against the progressive

over-straining of the principles of division of labour and excessive

specialization, he sets the principle of labour-integration and the

alliance of intensive agriculture with decentralized industry. He

sketches the picture of a village based on field and factory alike,

where the same people work in the one as in the other alternately

without this in any way entailing a technological regress, rather in

close association with technical developments and yet in such a way that

man enters into his rights as a human being. Kropotkin knows that such

an alteration cannot be “completely carried through” in a society like

ours, nevertheless he plans not merely for tomorrow but for to-day as

well. He stresses the fact that “every socialistic attempt to alter the

present relations between capital and labour will come to grief if it

disregards the trend towards integration”; but he also stresses that the

future he wishes to see “is already possible, already realizable”.

From there it is only a step to demanding that an immediate beginning be

made with the restructuring of society — but that step is decisive.

VI . LANDAUER

Landauer’s step beyond Kropotkin consists primarily in his direct

insight into the nature of the State. The State is not, as Kropotkin

thinks, an institution which can be destroyed by a revolution. “The

State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a

mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other

relationships, by behaving differently.” Men stand to one another to-day

in a “statual” relationship, that is, in one which makes the coercive

order of the State necessary and is represented by it and in it. Hence

this order can only be overcome to the extent that this relationship

between men is replaced by another. This other relationship Landauer

calls “People”. “It is a connexion between people which is actually

there; only it has not yet become bond and binding, is not yet a higher

organism.” To the extent that people, on the basis of the processes of

production and circulation, find themselves coming together again as a

People and “growing together into an organism with countless organs and

members”, Socialism, which now lives only in the minds and desires of

single, atomized people, will become reality — not in the State “but

outside, without the State”, and that means alongside the State. This

“finding themselves together” of people does not, as he says, mean the

founding of something new but the actualization and reconstitution of

something that has always been present — of Community, which in fact

exists alongside the State, albeit buried and laid waste. “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.” This being so, 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, begin differently and develop differently

according to the state of technics; it depends on people and their

spirit. “Socialism is possible and impossible at all times; it is

possible when the right people are there to will and do it; it is

impossible when people either don’t will it or only supposedly will it,

but are not capable of doing it.”

From this glimpse into the real relationship between State and Community

some important things ensue.

We see that, practically speaking, it is not a question of the abstract

alternative “State or No-State”. The Either-Or principle applies

primarily to the moments of genuine decision by a person or a group;

then, everything intermediate, everything that interposes itself, is

impure and unpurifying; it works confusion, obscurity, obstruction. But

this same principle becomes an obstruction in its turn if, at any given

stage in the execution of the decision reached, it does not permit less

than the Absolute to take shape and so devalues the measures that are

now possible. If the State is a relationship which can only be destroyed

by entering into another relationship, then we shall always be helping

to destroy it to the extent that we do in fact enter into another.

To grasp the subject fully we must go one step further. As Landauer

pointed out later, “State” is status — a state, in fact. People living

together at a given time and in a given space are only to a certain

degree capable, of their own free will, of living together rightly; of

their own free will maintaining a right order and conducting their

common concerns accordingly. The line which at any time limits this

capacity forms the basis of the State at that time; in other words, the

degree of incapacity for a voluntary right order determines the degree

of legitimate compulsion. Nevertheless the de facto extent of the State

always exceeds more or less — and mostly very much exceeds — the sort of

State that would emerge from the degree of legitimate compulsion. This

constant difference (which results in what I call “the excessive State”)

between the State in principle and the State in fact is explained by the

historical circumstance that accumulated power does not abdicate except

under necessity. It resists any adaptation to the increasing capacity

for voluntary order so long as this increase fails to exert sufficiently

vigorous pressure on the power accumulated. The “principial” foundations

of the power may have crumbled, but power itself does not crumble unless

driven to it. Thus the dead can rule the living. “We see,” says

Landauer, “how something dead to our spirit can exercise living power

over our body.” The task that thus emerges for the socialists, i.e. for

all those intent on a restructuring of society, is to drive the factual

base-line of the State back to the “principial” base-line of socialism.

But this is precisely what will result from the creation and renewal of

a real organic structure, from the union of persons and families into

various communities and of communities into associations. It is this

growth and nothing else that “destroys” the State by displacing it. The

part so displaced, of course, will only be that portion of the State

which is superfluous and without foundation at the time; any action that

went beyond this would be illegitimate and bound to miscarry because, as

soon as it had exceeded its limits it would lack the constructive spirit

necessary for further advance. Here we come up against the same problem

that Proudhon had discovered from another angle: association without

sufficient and sufficiently vital communal spirit does not set Community

up in the place of State — it bears the State in its own self and it

cannot result in anything but State, i.e. power-politics and

expansionism supported by bureaucracy.

But what is also important is that for Landauer the setting up of

society “outside” and “alongside” the State is essentially “a discovery

of something actually present, something that has grown”. In reality a

community does exist alongside the State, “not a sum of isolated

individual atoms but an organic cohesion that only wants to expand and,

out of many groups, form a great arch”. But the reality of community

must be roused, must be summoned out of the depths where it lies buried

under the incrustations of the State.

This can only happen if the hard crust that has formed on mankind, if

their own inner “statehood” is broken open and the slumbering,

immemorial reality aroused beneath. “Such is the task of the socialists

and of the movements they have started among the peoples: to loosen the

hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so

that what truly lives yet now seems dead may emerge and grow into the

light.”

Men who are renewed in this way can renew society, and since they know

from experience that there is an immemorial stock of community that has

declared itself in them as something new, they will build into the new

structure everything that is left of true community-form. “It would be

madness,” Landauer writes in a letter to a woman who wanted to abolish

marriage, “to dream of abolishing the few forms of union that remain to

us! We need form, not formlessness. We need tradition.” He who builds,

not arbitrarily and fruitlessly, but legitimately and for the future,

acts from inner kinship with age-old tradition, and this entrusts itself

to him and gives him strength. It will now become clear why Landauer

calls the “other” relationship which men can enter into instead of the

ordinary State-relationship, not by any new name but simply “People”.

Such a “People” comprehends also the innermost reality of “Nationhood” —

what remains over when “Statehood” and politicization have been

superseded: a community of being and a being in manifold community.

“This likeness, this equality in inequality, this peculiar quality that

binds people together, this common spirit, is an actual fact. Do not

overlook it, you free men and socialists; socialism, freedom and justice

can only be accomplished between those who have always been united;

socialism cannot be established in the abstract, but only in a concrete

multiplicity that is one with the harmony of the peoples.” The true

connexion between Nation and socialism is discovered here: the closeness

of people to one another in mode of life, language, tradition, memories

of a common fate — all this predisposes to communal living, and only by

building up such a life can the peoples of the earth constitute

themselves anew. “Nothing but the rebirth of all peoples out of the

spirit of regional community can bring salvation.”

And Landauer understands “regional community” quite concretely, in the

reappearance — if only in a rudimentary state — of the traditional

community-forms and in the possibility of preserving them, renewing and

expanding them. “The radical reformer will find nothing to reform, now

or at any other time, except what is there. Hence, now and at all times

it is well for the regional community to have its own boundaries; for

part of it to be communal land, for the other parts to be family

property for house, yard, garden and field.” Landauer is counting here

on the long memories of communal units. “There is so much to which we

could add whatever outward forms of life still contain living spirit.

There are village communities with vestiges of ancient communal

property, with peasants and labourers who remember the original

boundaries that have been in private possession for centuries; communal

institutions embracing agricultural work and the handicrafts.” To be a

socialist means to be livingly related to the life and spirit of the

community; to keep on the alert; to examine with impartial eye whatever

vestiges of this spirit yet lurk in the depths of our uncommunal age;

and, wherever possible, to bind the newly created forms firmly to the

forms that endure. But it also means: to guard against all rigid

delineation of ways and methods: to know that in the life of man and

human communities the straight line between two points is often the

longest; to understand that the real way to socialist reality is

revealed not merely in what “I know” and what “I plan”, but also in the

unknown and unknowable; in the unexpected and the not to be expected;

and, so far as we can, to live and act accordingly at all times. “We

know absolutely no details,” says Landauer in 1907, “about our immediate

way; it may lead over Russia, it may lead over India. The only thing we

know is that our way does not lead through the movements and struggles

of the day, but over things unknown, deeply buried, and sudden.”

Landauer said once of Walt Whitman, the poet of heroic democracy whom he

translated, that, like Proudhon (with whom in Landauer’s opinion he had

many spiritual affinities), Whitman united the conservative and the

revolutionary spirit — Individualism and Socialism. This can be said of

Landauer too.

What he has in mind is ultimately a revolutionary conservation: a

revolutionary selection of those elements worthy to be conserved and fit

for the renovation of the social being.

Only on these assumptions can we understand Landauer as a revolutionary.

He was a man from south-western Germany, of the Jewish middle class, but

he came much nearer to the proletariat and the proletarian way of life

than Marx, also a south-west German of the Jewish middle class. Again

and again Marxists have condemned his proposals for a socialist Colony

as implying a withdrawal from the world of human exploitation and the

ruthless battle against it, to an island where one could passively

observe all these tremendous happenings. No reproach has ever been

falser. Everything that Landauer thought and planned, said and wrote —

even when it had Shakespeare for subject or German mysticism, and

especially all designs whatsoever for the building of a socialistic

reality — was steeped in a great belief in revolution and the will for

it. “Do we want to retreat into happiness?” he wrote in a letter (1911).

“Do we want our lives for ourselves? Do we not rather want to do

everything possible for the people, and long for the impossible? Do we

not want the whole thing — Revolution?” But that long-drawn struggle for

freedom which he calls Revolution can only bear fruit when “we are

seized by the spirit, not of revolution, but of regeneration”; and the

individual revolutions taking place within that long “Revolution” seem

to Landauer like a fire-bath of the spirit, just as in the last analysis

revolution is itself regeneration. “In the fire, the ecstasy, the

brotherliness of these militant movements” says Landauer in his book The

Revolution, which he wrote in 1907, at my request, “there rises up again

and again the image and feeling of positive union through the binding

quality, through love — which is power; and without this passing and

surpassing regeneration we cannot go on living and must perish.” It is

important, however, to recognize without illusion that “although Utopia

is prodigally beautiful — not so much in what it says as in how it says

it — the end which revolution actually attains is not so very different

from what went before”. The strength of revolution lies in rebellion and

negation; it cannot solve social problems by political means. “When a

revolution,” Landauer continues, speaking of the French Revolution,

“ultimately gets into the terrible situation that this one did, with

enemies all round it inside and out, then the forces of negation and

destruction that still live on are bound to turn inwards and against

themselves; fanaticism and passion turn to distrust and soon to

blood-thirstiness, or at least to an indifference to the added terrors

of killing; and before long terror by killing becomes the sole possible

means for the rulers of the day to keep themselves provisionally in

power.” Thus it happened (as Landauer, his view unchanged, wrote ten

years later about the same revolution) that “the most fervent

representatives of the revolution thought and believed in their finest

hours — no matter to what strange shores they were ultimately flung by

the raging waves — that they were leading mankind to a rebirth; but

somehow this birth miscarried and they got in each other’s way and

blamed each other because the revolution had allied itself to war, to

violence, to dictatorship and authoritarian oppression — in a word, to

politics”. Between these two statements Landauer, writing in July, 1914,

on the threshold of the first World War, expressed the same critical

insight in a particularly topical form. “Let us be under no illusion,”

he says, “as to the situation in all countries to-day. When it comes to

the point, the only thing that these revolutionary agitations have

served is the nationalist-capitalist aggrandisement we call imperialism;

even when originally tinctured with socialism they were all too easily

led by some Napoleon or Cavour or Bismarck into the mainstream of

politics, because all these insurrections were in fact only a means of

political revolution or nationalist war but could never be a means of

socialist transformation, for the sufficient reason that the socialists

are romantics who always and inevitably make use of the means of their

enemies and neither practise nor know the means of bringing the new

People and the new humanity to birth.” But already in 1907 Landauer,

basing himself on Proudhon, had drawn the obvious conclusion from his

views. “It will be recognized sooner or later that, as the greatest of

all socialists — Proudhon — has declared in incomparable words, albeit

forgotten to-day, social revolution bears no resemblance at all to

political revolution; that although it cannot come alive and remain

living without a good deal of the latter it is nevertheless a peaceful

structure, an organizing of new spirit for new spirit and nothing else.”

And further: “Yet it is the case, as Gottfried Keller says, that the

last triumph of freedom will be dry. Political revolution will clear the

ground, literally and in every sense of the word[3]; but at the same

time those institutions will be preparing in which the confederation of

industrial societies can live, the confederation destined to release the

spirit that lies captive behind the State.” This preparation, however,

the real “transformation of society, can only come in love, in work and

in stillness”. Hence it is obvious that the spirit that is to be

“released” must already be alive in people to an extent sufficient for

such “preparation”, so that they may prepare the institutions and the

revolution as “clearing the ground” for them. Once again Landauer refers

to Proudhon. In the revolutionary epoch of 1848 Proudhon had told the

revolutionaries: “You revolutionaries, if you do that you will make a

change indeed.” Disappointed, he had other things to do afterwards than

repeat the catchwords of the revolution. “Everything comes in time,”

says Landauer, “and every time after the revolution is a time before the

revolution for all those whose lives have not got bogged in some great

moment of the past.” Proudhon went on living, although he bled from more

than one wound; he now asked himself: “ ‘ If you do that,’ I said — but

why have you not done it?” He found the answer and laid it down in all

his later works, the answer which in our language runs: “Because the

spirit was not in you.”

Again, we are indebted to Landauer rather than to Kropot-kin for one

vital clarification. If political revolution is to serve social

revolution three things are necessary. Firstly: the revolutionaries must

be firmly resolved to clear the ground and make the land available[4] as

communal property, and thereafter to develop it into a confederation of

societies. Secondly: communal property must be so prepared in

institutions as to ensure that it can be developed along those lines

after the ground has been cleared. Thirdly: such preparations must be

conducted in a true spirit of community.

The significance of this third item, the “spirit”, for the new

society-to-be is something that none of the earlier socialists

recognized as profoundly as did Landauer. We must realize what he means

by it — always assuming of course that we do not understand spiritual

reality merely as the product and reflection of the material world, as

mere “consciousness” determined by the social “being” and explicable in

terms of economic-technical relationships. It is rather an entity sui

generis that stands in close relation to the social being, without,

however, being explicable at any point in terms of the latter.

“A degree of high culture is reached,” says Landauer, “when the various

social structures, in themselves exclusive and independent of one

another, are all filled with a uniform spirit not inherent in or

proceeding from these structures, but reigning over them purely in its

own right. In other words: such a degree of culture arises when the

unity pervading the various forms of organization and the

supra-individual formations is not the external bond of force, but a

spirit dwelling in the individuals themselves and pointing beyond

earthly and material interests.” As an example Landauer cites the

Christian Middle Ages (truly the sole epoch in the history of the West

comparable in this respect with the great cultures of the Orient). He

sees the Middle Ages as characterized not by this or that form of social

life, such as the County Commune, the guilds, corporations and

trade-confraternities, the city-leagues, nor even by the feudal system,

the churches and monasteries and chivalric orders — but by this

“totality of independent units which all interpenetrate” to form “a

society of societies”. What united all the variously differentiated

forms and “bound them together at the apex into a higher unity, a

pyramid whose point was not power and not invisible in the clouds, was

the spirit streaming out of the characters and spirits of individual men

and women into all these structures, drawing strength from them and

streaming back into the people again”.

How can we invoke this spirit in a time like ours, “a time of

un-spirituality and therefore of violence; unspirituality and therefore

mighty tension within the spirits of individuals; individualism and

therefore atomization, the masses uprooted and drifting like dust; a

time without spirit and therefore without truth?”

It is “a time of decay, and therefore of transition”. But because this

is so, in such a time and only in such a time will the spirit be

conjured to reappear; such conjurations are the revolutions. What,

however, makes room for the spirit is the attempt at realization. “Just

as the County Communes and numerous other instruments of stratification

and unification were there before the spirit filled them and made them

what they have meant to Christendom; and just as a kind of walking is

there before the legs develop, and just as this walking builds and

fashions the legs — so it will not be the spirit that sends us on our

way, but our way that will bring the spirit to birth in us.” But this

road leads “those who have perceived how impossible it is to go on

living as they are, to join together and put their labour at the service

of their needs. In settlements, in Societies — despite all privation”.

The spirit that animates such people helps them along their common way,

and on this way and on it alone can it change into the new spirit of

community. “We socialists want to give spirit the character of reality

so that, as unitive spirit, it may bring mankind together. We socialists

want to render the spirit sensible and corporeal, we want to enable it

to do its work, and by these very means we shall spiritualize the senses

and our earthly life.” But for this to happen the flame of the spirit

must be carefully tended in the settlements lest it go out. Only by

virtue of living spirit are they a form of realization; without it they

become a delusion. “But if the spirit lives in them it may breathe out

into the world and suffuse all the seats of co-operation and association

which, without it, are but empty shells, gaols rather than goals. We

want to bring the Co-operatives, which are socialist form without

socialist content, and the trades-unions, which are valour without avail

— to Socialism, to great experiments.” “Socialism,” says Landauer in

1915, “is the attempt to lead man’s common life to a bond of common

spirit in freedom, that is, to religion.” That is probably the only

passage where Landauer, who always eschewed all religious symbolism and

all open avowals of religion, uses the word “religion” in this positive

and binding sense — uses it to express the thing he craves: a bond of

common spirit in freedom.

This state of affairs should not wait on our expectations; it should be

“attempted” and a beginning be made.

In his striving for “common spirit” Landauer knows that there is no room

for this without the land, i.e. that it can only have room to the extent

that the soil once more supports man’s communal life and work. “The

struggle of socialism is the struggle for the soil.” However, if the

great upheaval is to occur in the “conditions of soil-ownership “ (as it

is called in the twelve Articles of the Socialist League founded by

Landauer), “the workers must first create, on the basis of their common

spirit — which is the capital of socialism — as much socialist reality,

and exemplify it, as is possible at any time in proportion to their

numbers and their energy.” Here a beginning can be made. “Nothing can

prevent the united consumers from working for themselves with the aid of

mutual credit, from building factories, workshops, houses for

themselves, from acquiring land; nothing — if only they have a will and

begin.” Such is the vision of the community, the archetype of the new

society, that floats before Landauer’s eyes; the vision of the socialist

village. “A socialist village, with workshops and village factories,”

says Landauer in 1909, continuing Kropotkin’s thought, “with fields and

meadows and gardens, with livestock large and small, and poultry — you

proletarians of the big cities, accustom yourselves to this thought,

strange and odd as it may seem at first, for that is the only beginning

of true socialism, the only one that is left us.” On these seemingly

small beginnings (on whether they arise or not), depends the revolution

and whether it will find something worth fighting for — something which

the hour of revolution itself is unable to create. But whether it finds

this something and secures its full development, on this depends in its

turn whether socialist fruit will ripen on revolutionary fields apart

from the usual political crop.

Although, therefore, there is no beginning, no seed for the future other

than what people now living under the rule of capitalism can achieve in

their life together, in a common life based on common production and

consumption, despite all the weariness, misery and disappointment — yet

Landauer is far from regarding these results as the final form of

realization. Like Proudhon and Kropotkin he, too, has little faith in

hitching the demands of socialism to the dreams, visions, plans and

deliberations of men living to-day.

He knows well enough “the strange circumstance that this precarious

beginning, this ‘Socialism of the Few’ — the settlement — bears many

resemblances to the hard and toilsome communism of a primitive economy”.

Nevertheless the “essential thing” for him is “to accept this

communist-looking state not as an ideal but as a necessity for the sake

of socialism, as a first stage — because we are the beginners”. From

there the road will lead “as quickly as may be” to a society, in

oudining which Landauer blends the ideas of Proudhon and Kropotkin: “a

society of equalitarian exchange based on regional communities, rural

communities which combine agriculture with industry.” But even here

Landauer does not see the absolute goal, only the immediate objective

“so far as we can see into the future”. All true socialism is relative.

“Communism goes in search of the Absolute and can naturally find no

beginning but that of the word. For the only absolute things, detached

from all reality, are words.”

Socialism can never be anything absolute. It is the continual becoming

of human community in mankind, adapted and proportioned to whatever can

be willed and done in the conditions given. Rigidity threatens all

realization, what lives and glows to-day may be crusted over to-morrow

and, become all-powerful, suppress the strivings of the day after.

“Everywhere, wherever culture and freedom are to dwell in unison, the

various bonds of order must complement one another, and the fixity of

the whole must bear in itself the principle of dissolution.... In an age

of true culture the order of private property, for instance, will bear

in itself, as a revolutionary, dissolvent and re-ordering principle, the

institution of seisachtheia [5] or Year of the Jubilee.” True socialism

watches over the forces of renewal. “No final security measures should

be taken to establish the millennium or eternity, but only a great

balancing of forces, and the resolve periodically to renew the

balance.... ‘Then may you cause trumpets to be blown throughout the

land!’ The voice of the spirit is the trumpet.... Revolt for

constitution; reform and revolution the one rule valid for all time;

order through the spirit the one intention — these were the great and

holy things in the Mosaic order of society. We need them again, we need

redirection and convulsion through the spirit, which has no desire to

fix things and institutions in their final forms, but only to declare

itself everlastingly. Revolution must become the accessory of our social

order, the corner-stone of our constitution.”

VII . EXPERIMENTS

With the same over-simplification that labelled the early socialists

“utopian”, people called the two great waves of the Co-operative

Movement that agitated the bulk of the working population of England and

France in 1830 and 1848, “romantic” — and with no greater justification

in so far as this word implies dreaminess and unreality of outlook.

These waves were no less expressions of the deep-seated crises

accompanying the mechanization of modern economy than were the political

movements proper — Chartism in England and the two Revolutions in

France. But, as distinct from the latter, which wanted to alter the

whole hierarchy of power, the Co-operative Movements wanted to begin

with the creation of social reality, without which no amount of

tinkering with legal relationships can ever lead to socialism.

They have been accused of rating man’s share in the desired

transformation too high and the share of circumstance too low; but there

is no way of taking the measure of man’s potentialities in a given

situation that has to be changed, except by demanding the extraordinary.

The “heroic” forms of the Co-operative Movement credited their members

with a loyalty and readiness for sacrifice which, in the long run at any

jate, they were unable to meet; but that does not prove in the least

that loyalty and readiness for sacrifice, present though they may be in

exceptional periods of political upheaval, cannot be found to a

sufficient degree in the daily round of economic life. It is easy to

scoff and say that the initiators of the heroic Cooperative Movements

“put the ideal man in the place of the real one”; but the “real” man

approximates most closely to the “ideal” just when he is expected to

fulfil tasks which he is not up to, or thinks he is not up to — not of

the individual alone is it true that “he grows to his higher purposes”.

And finally, it depends on the goal, the consciousness of it and will

for it. The heroic epoch of the modern Co-operative looked to the

transformation of society, the epoch of technics looks essentially to

the economic success of each individual co-operative undertaking. The

first has come to grief, but that does not condemn the goal and the way

towards it; the second has great successes to record, but they do not

look at all like stages on the way to the goal. A champion of the

bureaucratized co-operative system expresses himself thus on its origin:

“Let us give our fullest admiration to those humble and faithful souls

who were guided by the burning torch of social conviction.... But let us

acknowledge that heroism is not in itself a condition of soul fitted to

bring about economic results.” True enough; but let us also acknowledge

that economic results are not in themselves fitted to bring about a

restructuring of human society.

As regards the three chief forms of co-operation (apart from the Credit

Co-operatives), to wit, Consumer Co-operatives, Producer Co-operatives,

and Full Co-operatives[6] based on the union of production and

consumption — let us compare a few dates taken from the two epochs of

this movement.

The 1830 epoch: 1827 saw the first English Consumer Co-operative in the

modern sense founded under the influence of the ideas of Dr. William

King; 1832 the first French Producer Co-operative set up according to

the plans of Buchez; in between the experimental “settlements” of Owen

and his adherents — the American experiment and the English ones.

The 1848 epoch: first the Consumer Co-operative of the Rochdale weavers,

then Louis Blanc’s “national workshops” and the like, finally, by way of

travesty, the tragi-comic “Icaria” project of Cabet (who was a real

Utopian in the negative sense, a social constructionist without the

slightest understanding of human fundamentals) on the banks of the

Mississippi. Of these no more will be said here — as attempts to realize

“utopian” Socialism — than is deemed desirable for the purpose of this

book.

King and Buchez were both doctors and both, in contrast to Owen — whose

war against religion was one of the main tasks of his life — practising

Christians, one Protestant, one Catholic. This is not without

significance. For Owen socialism was the fruit of reason, for King and

Buchez it was the realization of the teachings of Christianity in the

domain of public life. Both held, as Buchez says, that the moment had

come “to mould the teachings of Christianity into social institutions”.

This basic religious feeling profoundly influenced the whole outlook of

the two men; with King, who was in sympathy with the Quakers and worked

together with them, it influenced the very tone of his words —

everywhere we feel an unabstract, immediate, upwelling concern for his

fellow-men, their life and soul.

King has justly been called in our own day — once he was rescued from

oblivion — the first and greatest of the English theoreticians of the

Co-operative Movement. But over and above this he had the gift of the

simple word, which made plain to everybody the essential nature of the

things he spoke of. In the whole literature of the Co-operatives I know

nothing that gives such an impression of the “popular” and the

“classical” alike as do the twenty-eight numbers of the magazine called

The Co-operator, which King wrote and brought out between 1828 and 1830

for the instruction of those who were actively spreading his ideas.

He had a depth and clarity of social perception like none of his

contemporaries, with the exception of the more scientific, but also more

abstract, William Thompson. He starts from work as “the root of the

tree, to whatever size it may ultimately grow”. Work is “in this sense

everything”. The working classes “have the monopoly of this article”. No

power on earth can rob them of it, for all power is “nothing more than

the power to direct the labour of the working classes”. What they lack

is capital, that is, disposal of the machines and the possibility of

maintaining themselves whilst working them. But “all capital is made out

of labour”, and it is “nothing in itself”. It has to unite with labour

in order to be productive. This union is now achieved by capital “buying

and selling the labourer like a brute”. True union, “the natural

alliance”, can only be brought about by the working-classes themselves,

only they do not know it. Their sole hope of achieving it is to get

together, co-operate, make common capital, become independent. King

gives passionate expression to the thought already uttered by Thompson

before him, of co-operation as the form of production peculiar to

labour. “As soon as ever the labourers unite upon a labour principle

instead of a capital principle, they will make the dust fly in all

directions... and it is great odds but this dust will blind some of the

masters.” If the workers get together they can acquire the tools they

need — the machines — and themselves become, in their Co-operatives, the

subject of production. But they can also acquire the land. King says

clearly that he sees only a beginning in the Consumer Co-operatives,

that his goal, like Thompson’s, is the Full Co-operative. As soon as

they can dispose of sufficient capital the “Society”, that is, the

Co-operative Society, “may purchase land, live upon it, cultivate it

themselves and produce any manufactures they please, and so provide for

all their wants of food, clothing, and houses. The Society will then be

called a Community.” King calls upon the trades-unions to purchase land

with their savings and settle their unemployed members on it in

communities producing above all for their own needs. These communities

will embrace not merely the specific interests and functions of their

members but their life as well, in so far as they want and are able to

live it in common. But the life-community, even if it can only come to

full reality in the Full Co-operative, should already exist potentially

in the relations of the members of the Consumer Co-operative to one

another. King is thinking not of a bare impersonal solidarity but of a

personal relationship, generally latent yet ready at any time to become

actual, a “sympathy that would act with new energies, and rise

occasionally even to enthusiasm”. Hence only members capable of such a

relation are admitted. The basic law of co-operative means, for King,

the establishment of genuine relations between man and man. “When a man

enters a Co-operative Society, he enters upon a new relation with his

fellow men; and that relation immediately becomes the subject of every

sanction, both moral and religious.” It is obvious that this ideal, this

“heroic” demand could not be upheld in succeeding years, when membership

of the Co-operatives increased with their growing mechanization and

bureaucratization; but seen from the standpoint of social re-structure,

this is the cause of the inadequacy of these “partial” Cooperatives.

When William King suspended publication of The Co-operator in 1830,

three hundred Societies had come into being under the influence of his

teachings. These for the most part did not live long because of the

“spirit of selfishness” reigning in them, as one of the leaders told the

Congress of 1832. The crucial stage of the consumer-based Co-operatives

did not begin until 1844, when in the grave industrial crisis which had

once again descended upon England shortly after the collapse of a

strike, a little group of flannel-weavers and representatives of other

trades met in the city of Rochdale to ask one another: “What can we do

to save ourselves from misery?” There were not a few among them who

thought that each man must begin with himself — and indeed that is

always right in all circumstances, for without it nothing can ever

succeed; only one must know that it is merely a part of what has to be

done, albeit an important part. And because they did not know this they

proposed to renounce the pleasures of alcohol, and they naturally failed

to convince their comrades. (How important none the less the proposal

seemed can be seen from the fact that subsequently, in the Statutes of

the “Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale”, the erection of a Temperance Hotel

was mentioned on the agenda of the Society.) And again there were some,

members of the Chartist Movement which aimed at altering the

Constitution and seizing power, who proposed that they should ally

themselves to political action so as to win for Labour its due share in

legislation; but the movement had passed its peak and they had learned

that although the political struggle was necessary it was not enough.

Some of Owen’s adherents who were among those assembled declared that

there was no hope for them in England any more and that they must

emigrate and build a new life for themselves abroad (thinking perhaps of

the possibility of new experimental Settlements in America); but that

too was rejected, for the predominant feeling was: “doing” means doing

here, means not fleeing before the crisis but enduring it with what

strength one has. This strength was little enough, yet a few of the

weavers who were fairly familiar with the teachings of William King

pointed out that they could put their strengths together and then

perhaps a power would be there with which they could do something. So

they decided to “co-operate”.

The tasks the Society set itself were put very high, without the authors

of the statutes being accused of overbold imagination. These tasks were

ranged in three stages. The first, the Consumer Co-operative, was

regarded as something to be organized at once. The second, the Producer

Co-operative, comprising the common building of houses for the members,

the common production of wares and the common cultivation of allotments

by unemployed comrades, was likewise a prospect for a not far distant

future, though not the immediate future. The third stage, the

Co-operative Settlement, was removed still further by the proviso “as

soon as practicable”: “as soon as practicable this Society shall proceed

to arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and

government; or, in other words, to establish a self-supporting Home

Colony of united interests or assist other Societies in establishing

such Colonies.” It is amazing how the practical intuition of the

flannel-weavers of Rochdale grasped the three essential fields of

co-operation. In the first field, the Consumer Co-operative, their

simple and effective methods (among which the distribution of profits

among members according to the relative volume of purchases proved to be

particularly persuasive) blazed a new trail. In the field of production

they made a number of advances with increasing success, particularly in

corn-milling but also in the field of spinning and weaving; yet it is

characteristic of the whole problem (to be discussed later) of

co-operative activity in production that, in the steam spinning-mills

constructed by the Equitable Pioneers, only about half the workers were

members of the Society, and hence stockholders, and that these

immediately put through the principle of rewarding work with payment but

of distributing the profit exclusively among the stockholders as “

entrepreneurs and owners of the business”, as the important

co-operationist Victor Aime Huber, who repeatedly visited Rochdale in

its early days, remarks in his monograph on the Pioneers. They did not,

however, get down to the third, the greatest and decisive task, of

realizing the Co-operative Colony based on joint production and

consumption.

One element in the Rochdale institution deserves our particular

attention. That is the co-operation between the Co-operatives, the

working together of several co-operative groups and institutes, which

was undertaken by the “Pioneers” themselves and, later, in conjunction

with them. “The principle of Federalism,” says the Rumanian scholar

Mladenatz in his History of the Co-operative Theories, obviously basing

himself on Proudhon, “derives quite naturally from the idea itself,

which is the foundation of the cooperative system. Just as the

Co-operative Society unites people for the common satisfaction of

certain needs, so the various co-operative cells unite one with another

by applying the principle of solidarity for the common exercise of

certain functions, particularly those of production and supply.” Here we

again meet the arch-principle of restructuring, although naturally the

consumer associations as such, i.e. Cooperatives which only combine

certain interests of people but not the lives of the people themselves,

do not appear suited to serve as cells of a new structure.

The modern Consumer Co-operative which has become so great a reality in

the economic life of our time derives from the ideas of “utopian”

socialism. In William King’s plans there is a clearly discernible

tendency to reach the great socialist reality through the creation of

small socialist realities which keep on expanding and confederating

continually. But King recognized at the same time, and with the utmost

clarity, the nature of the technological revolution that had started in

his day. He recognized the cardinal significance of the machine and

approved it; he rejected all assaults on machines as “folly and

criminality”.

But he also recognized that the inventors, who are workers too, destroy

themselves and their comrades with their “wonderful inventions”, because

“by selling these inventions to their masters they work against

themselves, instead of keeping them in their own hands and working with

them”. For this it is necessary, of course, that the workers should

constitute themselves co-operatively in their Societies. “The workmen

have ingenuity enough to make all the machinery in the world, but they

have not yet had ingenuity enough to make it work for them. This

ingenuity will not be dormant much longer.” Consequently co-operative

organization of consumption is, for King, only a step towards the

co-operative organization of production, but this in its turn is only a

step towards the co-operative building of life as a whole.

In the hundred years since its inception the Consumer Co-operative has

conquered a considerable portion of the civilized world, but the hopes

that King set on its internal development have not yet been fulfilled.

Consumer Societies may in many places, and sometimes to a very great

extent, have turned to production for their own needs, and there exists,

as Fritz Naphtali rightly stresses, a tendency to penetrate more and

more deeply into production and guide it in the direction of “basic”

production. But we have hardly come any nearer to an organic alliance of

production and consumption in a comprehensive communal form, although we

already have notable examples of large Consumer Societies — or groups of

the same for individual branches of production — organizing themselves

into Producer Co-operatives, or assimilating existing ones; but that is

only technical organization, not the fulfilment of genuine co-operative

thought. And just as little has the confederation of local societies,

even where this has occurred on a large scale, preserved a genuine

federative character; in these cases the small Societies have mostly, as

was reported several decades ago, changed from independent foci of

social solidarity into mere organs of membership, and their stores into

mere branches of the organization as a whole. The technological

advantages of such centralization are obvious; the trouble is that there

was no authority at hand to try to salvage as much autonomy in the

individual Societies as was compatible with technological requirements,

although people did try here and there — for instance in Switzerland —

to counteract the progressive “de-souling” and de-substantiation of the

Societies by planned decentralization. But for the most part the running

of large co-operative institutions has become more and more like the

running of capitalist ones, and the bureaucratic principle has

completely ousted, over a very wide field, the voluntary principle, once

prized as the most precious and indispensable possession of the

Co-operative Movement. This is especially clear in countries where

Consumer Societies have in increasing measure worked together with the

State and the municipalities, and Charles Gide was certainly not far

wrong when he called to mind the fable of the wolf disguised as a

shepherd and voiced the fear that, instead of making the State

“co-operative”, we should only succeed in making the Cooperative

“static”. For the spirit of solidarity can in truth only remain alive to

the extent that a living relationship obtains between human beings.

Tonnies thought that in their transition to communal buying and then to

producing for their own needs the Consumer Societies would “lay the

foundations of an economic organization that would stand in open

opposition to the existing social order”, and that in theory “the

capitalist world would therefore be lifted off its hinges”. But “theory”

can never become reality so long as the life-forms of capitalism

permeate co-operative activity.

Buchez, who came shortly after King and who planned and inspired the

founding of Producer Cooperatives in France, is likewise a “utopian”

socialist at bottom. “The Communist reform that is everywhere in the

air,” he writes in his magazine L’Europeen in 1831, “should be

implemented by the association of workers.” For Buchez — who, although a

Catholic, graduated in the school of Saint-Simon where he was in

sympathy with the radical socialist Bazard — production is everything

and the organization of consumption not even a stage. In his opinion the

Producer Go-operative — by which he, with less understanding of

technological developments than King, means manual workers rather than

modern industrial workers — leads directly to the socialist order. “The

workers of a particular trade unite, put their savings together, raise a

loan, produce as they think best, repay the borrowed capital despite

great privations, ensure that each man gets equal pay, and leave the

profits in the common funds, with the result that the co-operative

workshop becomes a little industrial community.” Une petite communaute

industnelle — here Buchez comes close to King’s idea that a Society can

become a Community, save that he prematurely ascribes this character to

the Producer Co-operative as such, whereas King’s deeper insight

envisaged such a possibility only for the Full Co-operative. Buchez

concludes with the simple, all too simple, formula: “Let all the workers

do this and the social problem will be solved.” He knew well enough that

the great problem of ownership of the land was not solved by it in the

least, so he devised the makeshift slogan: “The land for the peasants,

the workshop for the workers” without appreciating the question of the

social reform of agriculture in its true import; the problem of evolving

a Full Co-operative, the all-important problem of social re-structure,

was hidden from him, though not from King. On the other hand Buchez

recognized with astounding acuteness most of the dangers that threaten

the socialist character of the Producer Co-operative from within, one

above all, the increasing differentiation inside the Cooperative in its

initial stages between those comrades who have founded it and the

workers who come afterwards — a differentiation which lends the

Co-operative, though it plead socialism never so energetically, the

incontestable stamp of an appendage to the capitalist order. To

eliminate this danger Buchez built two counter-measures into the

modified programme he published after his first practical experiences of

1831: firstly the “social capital” accruing at any time from the putting

by of a fifth of the profits was to remain the inalienable, indivisible

property of the Society, which was itself to be declared indissoluble

and was to replenish itself continually by taking on new members; and

secondly, the Society might not employ outside workers as wage-earners

for longer than one year, after which time it was bound to accept new

comrades according to its requirements (in a sample contract published

in 1840 in the journal of the Buchezites, L’Atelier, the term was

reduced to a trial period of three months). To the first of these points

Buchez says that, but for this capital the Society “would resemble all

the other trade societies; it would be useful only to the founders and

harmful to all who had taken no part in the beginning, for in the hands

of the former it would ultimately become an instrument of exploitation”.

As has rightly been said, this programme aimed at the creation of a

capital which would finally absorb “the industrial capital of the whole

country and thus realize the appropriation of all the means of

production through Workers’ Cooperatives”. Here, too, we find that

“utopian” element again; but, which is the more practical in the last

analysis: to try to create social reality through social reality, with

its rights defended and extended by political means, or to try to create

by the magic wand of politics alone? Naturally enough the two rules were

only followed very irregularly by the Societies founded under Buchez’

influence, and after twenty years the principle of indivisible capital

was made so questionable that those who remained true to it had to wage

a hard and virtually fruitless fight for it, as for the principle

whereby the conditions of property would be changed and capital would

come under the rule of work — a principle that had to be upheld if the

Go-operative was to benefit the whole of the working-class and not

merely “the few fortunate founders who, thanks to it, had become

rentiers instead of wage-earners”. And just about this time, 1852, we

read of similar experiences in England in a report of the Society for

the Promotion of Working-men’s Associations.

But from all of them, from the analogous experiences in the Middle Ages

as also from similar experiences in the history of the Consumer

Societies, there is no other conclusion to be drawn save that the

internal problems of the Co-operatives and the dominance of the

capitalist principle that still persists in them can be overcome, albeit

gradually, only in and through the Full Co-operative.

It is likely that Louis Blanc was influenced by Buchez’ thought; but he

differs from him on decisive points.

At the same time the important thing is not that he demanded, as

Lassalle did later for his Worker-Producer Co-operatives, State help for

the “social workshops” he wanted to found, since “what the proletariat

lacks in order to free itself is tools, and it is the government’s job

to deliver them”. That was, of course, a deep-seated error, indeed a

contradiction in terms, since a government representative of a definite

State-order cannot very well be urged to call institutions into being

which are destined (such was Blanc’s express meaning) to abolish that

order. It was only logical, therefore, that the anti-socialist majority

in the Provisional Government of 1848 should first replace Blanc’s plan

by a caricature and then play havoc even with this; but as regards the

nature of the social reform he planned this demand of Blanc’s was not

absolutely essential. Far more significant is the fact that Blanc’s

social programme was itself centralist in thought: he wanted each large

industry to constitute itself as a single association by grouping itself

round a central workshop. He gave this basically Saint-Simonistic

thought a federalist tinge by demanding that the solidarity of all the

workers in one workshop should be continued in the solidarity of all the

workshops in one branch of industry and finally completed in the

solidarity of all the branches of industry; but what he called

solidarity was in actual fact more like solidification into centralist

management with monopoly status. Well might Blanc be anxious to attack

“the cowardly and brutal principle” of competition, as he once called it

in the National Assembly, at the root; that is, to prevent collective

competition from emerging in the place of individual competition. And

this is indeed the chief danger, apart from internal differentiation,

that threatens the Producer Co-operative. A good example of the

widespread incidence of this danger is afforded by a letter written by

one of the leaders of the Christian-Socialist Co-operative movement in

England at that time, in which he says of the Producer Co-operatives

founded by this movement that they were “actuated by a thoroughly

mercenary competitive spirit” and “aimed merely at a more successful

competition than is possible under the present system”. This danger was

recognized by Buchez and his adherents; but they refused to combat it

with monopolies which seemed to them even more dangerous, because

monopoly meant for them the paralysis, the end of all organic

development. According to their proposals competition between the

Co-operatives was rather to be organized and regulated by means of a

league of the Co-operatives themselves. Here free federation opposes

planned amalgamation.

But we have to acknowledge that the federalist idea crops up again and

again with Blanc and bursts the centralist strait-jacket, particularly

of course after the failure of his State plan. He gives a twist to

Buchez’ plan for reserve funds by intending it to “realize the principle

of mutual help and solidarity between the various social workshops”. But

as soon as he proceeds from the plan for State initiative to the

planning of free Co-operatives he sees no other way of reaching this

goal except the way of federation, beginning with the Co-operatives

already existing; these are to come to an understanding with one another

and name a Central Committee which shall organize throughout the country

“the most important of all subscriptions — the subscription to abolish

the proletariat”. Such words are midway between the sublime and the

ridiculous; but the call to the proletariat for self-abolition through

co-operation implies a certain practical seriousness which is not

without significance for the time that followed. And towards the end of

1849 we see Blanc expressing his approval of the Union des associations

fraternelles, which arose out of the federation of more than a hundred

Co-operatives and realized his enemy Proudhon’s idea of the mutualite du

travail; backing himself up, of course, by saying that on the agenda of

the Union there was talk of “centralizing business-matters of general

interest”. Everywhere in Blanc we come across thoughts which belong to

the living tradition and context of “utopian” socialism. He sees the

Producer Co-operative emerging into the Full Co-operative in the future,

just as King saw the Consumer Co-operative merging into it; in which

respect, just as the Union des associations fraternelles praised by him

aimed at establishing, as a federation, “agricultural and industrial

colonies” on a large scale, so he was aiming at the creation of Communal

Home Colonies. His starting-point is the technological necessity for

large-scale concerns: “We must inaugurate a system of large-scale

concerns for agriculture by linking them up with association and common

ownership,” and he wants if possible to transplant industry to the

country and “wed industrial work to agricultural”. Here, too,

Kropotkin’s idea of a “division of labour in time”, of the union of

agriculture, industry and handicraft in a modern village-community, is

anticipated.

Despite the early suppression of the Co-operative Federations by the

Reaction, numerous new Producer Cooperatives came into being in France

during the following years; even doctors and chemists united on a

co-operative basis (in these cases there could obviously be no question

of genuine Producer Cooperatives, since there is no place for communal

work here). The enthusiasm for Co-operatives outlasted the Revolution.

Even the persecution and dissolution of many of the Co-operatives after

the coup d’etat was unable to check the movement. The real danger

threatening them here as in England came from within: their

capitalization, their gradual transformation into capitalist or

semi-capitalist societies. Forty years after the enthusiastic efforts,

beginning about 1850, of the English Christian Socialists to create a

wide net ofWorkers’ Producer Co-operatives which “rejected any notion of

competition with each other as inconsistent with the true form of

society”, Beatrice Webb stated that with the exception of a few

Cooperatives which had remained more or less true to the ideal of a

“brotherhood of workers” — most of which, however, had become

questionable at one point or another — all the rest “exhibit an amazing

variety of aristocratic, plutocratic and monarchical constitutions”. And

fifty years after Louis Blanc there was a thoroughly typical (in this

respect) Producer Co-operative in France, that of the spectacle-makers,

which, apart from a small number of associes and approximately as many

adherents, employed ten times as many wage-earners. Despite this,

however, we can find perfect examples of the inner battle for socialism

everywhere. Sometimes there is something tragic about them, but equally

something prophetic. The Producer Co-operative has rightly been called

“the child of sorrows and the darling” of all those “who expect the

Co-operative Movement to produce something essential for the salvation

of mankind”; but it is readily understandable from the facts that a

champion of the Consumer Co-operative Societies should call the Producer

Co-operatives which work for the open market “thoroughly unsocialistic

in spirit and in essence”, because “producers, set up by and for

themselves, always and in all circumstances have separatist,

individualist or cliquish interests”. Apart, however, from the

exaggeration inherent in such an assertion, Producer Co-operatives above

all should never be “set up by and for themselves”. Two great principles

should together guard against this: the combination of production and

consumption in the Full Co-operative, and Federalism.

The development of the Consumer Co-operative follows the straight line

of numerical progression; a considerable portion of civilized mankind

(characteristically enough, outside America) is organized to-day, from

the consumption side, on co-operative lines. On the other hand the

development of the Producer Cooperatives (I speak here only of the

Producer Co-operative in the strict sense, not of the many partial, in

the main agricultural associations which aim merely at making production

easier or more intensive), can be represented as a zig-zag line which,

on the whole, shows hardly any upward trend. New ones are always coming

into being, but again and again most of the more vigorous ones pass over

into the sphere of capitalism; there is hardly any continuity. The Full

Co-operative, however, is in different case; its development, so far as

there is one, looks like a cluster of small circles between which there

is generally no real connexion. Consumer and Producer Co-operatives were

based on an extensive movement which spread to locality after locality;

Colonies in the Full Co-operative sense have always had something

sporadic, improvised, lacking in finality about them. In contrast to the

others they also lacked what Franz Oppenheimer has termed “the power of

remote effect”. Not but what some of them got themselves talked about;

but their power of attraction was individualistic, they did not call new

community-cells into being.

In the history of Co-operative Colonies, neither in Europe (with the

exception of Soviet Russia, where, however, the essential basis of free

will and autonomy does not exist) nor with few exceptions in America is

there any indication of a federative tendency. Consumer Co-operatives

have continually and increasingly federated; Producer Co-operatives in

the true sense have done so discontinuously, now on the increase, now on

the decrease; communal Colonies in general not at all. Their fate is at

odds with their will: originally they did not want to become isolated,

but they did become isolated; they wanted to become working models, but

they only became interesting experiments; they wanted to be the dynamic

and dynamitic beginnings of a social transformation, but each had its

end in itself. The cause of this difference between the Consumer and

Producer Co-operative on the one hand and Full Co-operative on the other

seems to me ultimately to lie in an essential difference of

starting-point. The former grew out of given situations which were

roughly the same in a whole chain of places and factories, so that from

the start there was a germ of reciprocal influence in the experiments

undertaken to get the situation in hand, and hence the germ of their

federation. In addition the plans that inspired the founding of these

Co-operatives did not derive from one all-embracing thought, but from a

question addressed, as it were, to the planners by the situation itself.

We can accurately follow this process with King and Buchez, because both

were federalists at the outset; Buchez even had a federative association

in mind for the trades-unions he had proposed. In both cases the plans

were directed towards remedying a given state of distress, and they bore

a local character in so far as they sought to solve the problems of this

emergency at the point where these problems brought themselves to bear.

Such plans may be called topical in the precise sense of being locative,

inasmuch as they were of their own nature related to definite

localities, the very ones in which the problems arose. The identity of

the problems in different places led at once to the possibility of

federative union, right up to gigantic formations like some associations

of Consumer Co-operatives to-day.

It is a fundamentally different story with the generality of “colonial”

Full Co-operatives. Here, time after time, with greater or lesser

independence of the situation but always without real reference to given

localities and their demands, we see the “idea” dictating its decrees,

preparing its plans somewhere up in the clouds and then bringing them

down to earth. No matter how speculative these plans are in origin and

therefore thoroughly schematic as with Fourier; no matter how much they

are based on definite experiences and empirical assumptions as with

Owen, they will never answer the questions put by a given situation, but

will proceed to create new situations irrelevant to the locality and its

local problems. This becomes peculiarly evident where Settlements in

foreign countries are concerned: emigration is not organized and

regulated along socialistic lines, no such thing; rather the impulse to

emigrate is associated with a new impulse, namely, the will to have a

share in the realization of a social project; and this will is all too

frequently coerced into the dogmatism of some organization felt and

believed to be the only right one, the only just and true organization,

the binding claims of which sometimes stand in opposition to the free

play of relationships between members. (Community of sentiment is hardly

ever sufficient to establish community of life; for this a deeper and

more vital bond is required.) The Settlement that remains faithful to

dogma is threatened with paralysis; one that increasingly rebels against

it, with fragmentation; and both lack the corrective, modifying power of

insight into conditions. Wherever dogma reigns supreme, isolation of the

Settlement is the sole result; the exclusiveness of “the only right

form” precludes union even with like-minded establishments, for in every

single one of them the “faithful” are completely obsessed with the

absolute character of their unique achievement. But equally, wherever

dogma retreats, the economic and spiritual seclusion of the Settlement,

especially in a strange country, succumbs to the same fate — isolation,

lack of connective power, ineffectuality. None of these things would be

so important if some great educative force, sustained by a vigorous

upsurge of life and fate, could assure to the communal will a lasting

victory over the residue of egoism that inevitably goes with it, or

rather raise this egoism to a higher form. But usually it is only the

case that collective egoism, i.e. egoism with a clear conscience,

emerges in place of individual egoism; and if the latter always

threatens to disintegrate the inner cohesion of the community, the

former, which is often tainted with dogmatism, prevents the growth of

any real communal education as between one community and another,

between the community and the world.

Most of the known experimental Settlements came to grief or petered out

— and not, as some think, the communist ones alone. Here we must exempt

the individual efforts of various religious sects, efforts whose

vitality can only be understood in terms of a particular group’s faith

and as the partial manifestation of this faith; it is characteristic

that the federative form makes its appearance here and here alone, as,

for instance, with the Russian sect of the Dukhobors in Canada or the

“Hutterite Brothers”. It is, therefore, unjust of Kropotkin to trace the

collapse of the experimental communist Settlements to the fact that they

were “founded on an uprush of religiosity, instead of seeing in the

commune simply a mode of consumption and production economically

ordered”. For it is precisely where a Settlement comes into being as the

expression of real religious exaltation, and not merely as a precarious

substitute for religion, and where it views its existence as the

beginning of God’s kingdom — that it usually proves its powers of

endurance.

Among the causes which Kropotkin adduces for the collapse of most of the

Settlements two are worthy of particular note, though at bottom they are

one and the same: isolation from society and isolation from each other.

He is in error when he imputes the cause to the smallness of the

Commune, thinking, as he says, that in such a Commune its members would

acquire a distaste for one another after a few years of living together

so closely: for, among the Settlements that have lasted at all, we find

small ones as well as large ones. But he is right to demand federation

to make up for the smallness of the groups. The fact that federation

enables members to pass from one settlement to another (which is of

crucial importance for Kropotkin), is in reality only one among its many

favourable results; the vital thing is federation itself, the

complementing and helping of each group by the others, the stream of

communal life flowing between them and gathering strength from each. No

less important, however, is the fact that the Settlements stand in some

relation, if a varying one, to society at large — not merely because

they need a market for their surplus production, not merely because

youth, as Kropotkin points out, does not tolerate being cut off, but

because the Settlements must, in so far as they do not possess that

specifically Messianic faith, influence the surrounding world in order

to live at all. Whoever bears a message must be able to express it, not

necessarily in words, but necessarily in his being.

To a query coming from Settlement circles Kropotkin once answered with

an open letter to all Settlement-minded groups stressing the fact that

any commonwealth worthy the name must be founded on the principle of

association between independent families that join forces. What he meant

was that even the individual group must spring from a union of the

smallest communal units, federatively. If the federative movement is to

extend beyond the group, space is needed: “The experiment,” he says in

his book Modern Science and Anarchy, “must be made on a definite

territory.” He adds that this territory must comprise both town and

country. Once more economic motifs have to be geared to the great social

motif; genuine community-life means the full play of all the functions

and interaction between them, not restriction and seclusion. But it is

not enough, as Kropotkin seems to assume that it is, for a town “to make

itself into a commune”; if it confronts the finely articulated

federation of villages as an unco-ordinated and socially amorphous

entity, it is bound to exert rather a negative influence in the long

run. It has to co-ordinate itself, convert itself as a federation into

societies in order to engage in really fruitful intercourse with the

villages.

Already we can see significant moves in this direction in the “planned

economy” theories of our time, the result, mostly, of technical and

managerial considerations.

From their long and instructive history we can only give here one

characteristic example of the problematical career of the many

experimental Settlements to date — Owen’s first establishment in this

kind, the only one that was his own work: New Harmony in Indiana. He

bought the property from the sect of “Separatists” that had immigrated

from Germany; after twenty years of work they had managed to make it

produce a few blossoms. Members were accepted unselectively; the

important German political economist Friedrich List noted at the time in

his American Diary: “The elements don’t seem to be of the best.” In the

beginning the Constitution of the new community was based on complete

equality between members, for which reason it was also called “The

Community of Equality”. Two years later, after a number of separate

groups had branched off, an attempt had to be made to transform the

community into an association of little societies. But this and similar

plans for conversion failed. When Owen, returning from a journey to

England, saw the Settlement again after it had lasted three years, he

had to confess that “the attempt to unite a number of strangers not

previously educated for the purpose, who should live together as a

common family, was premature”, and that “the habits of the individual

system” die hard. By selling one part of the land in lots and leasing

another in the same way — the experiment cost him a fifth of his fortune

— he replaced the Society by a complex of Settlements run on private

capitalist lines, only giving them this piece of advice by the way: “To

unite their general labour, or to exchange labour for labour on the

terms most beneficial for all, or to do both or neither, as their

feelings and apparent interests may influence them.”

Here we have an example of a Settlement that came to grief not on dogma

— despite his definite plans Owen did not commit himself on this point —

but rather on the lack of any deep, organic bond between its members.

As an example of the opposite we may cite the development of Cabet’s

“Icaria”. Undertaken as an attempt to realize a dilettante but

successful Utopian novel, born after terrific disappointments and

privations and, like Owen’s Settlement, the former property of a sect —

this time that of the Mormons — the Settlement, during the half-century

from its beginnings right up to its final ramifications, underwent

schism after schism. First of all there was a schism because Cabet (a

temperamental and honestly enthusiastic man, but mediocre) made a bid

for dictatorship in the form of dogmatic planning, a bid which kindled a

civil war of vituperation and fisticuffs. Of the two groups to which the

schism gave rise, the first crumbled into nothing after Cabet’s death;

in the second a new schism sprang up between the “Young” and the “Old”,

the “young” championing the dogmatic plan to abolish, for instance, the

little gardens that surrounded the houses where the members could pluck

not only flowers but fruit as well. Here indeed was a deplorable

“remnant of individualism”. The affair — after being judicially decided

— resulted in the division of the Settlement, the part that contained

buildings put up by the “Old” with their own hands being allotted to the

“Young”. The part remaining to the “Old” lasted another twenty years and

then died of “senile decay”. The economic forces were strong enough to

survive, but the power of belief was extinguished. “We were so few and

so like the people outside,” writes a female member, “that it was not

worth the effort to live in the community.” The “Young” Settlement was

even shorter-lived. After all kinds of difficulties they moved to

California, but under the new organization the principle of private

ownership took a significant place, so that the Settlement has not

unjustly been compared with a joint-stock company; it soon disbanded

itself, the appreciation of land-values being a determining factor,

perhaps. So the career of Icaria runs in a strange sequence of dogmatism

and opportunism. “We had a furious will to succeed,” wrote one of the

members several years later, “but the garment we wore was too heavy for

us and too long, it trailed at times in the mud; by which I mean to say

that the Old Adam in us, or the beast, inadequately repressed, made a

violent appearance.” But it was not the beast at all, it was only the

specifically human species of egoism.

Let us look, finally, at the three chief kinds of “Society” from the

point of view of social restructure.

By far the most powerful of them historically, the Consumer Co-operative

Society, is least suited in itself to act as a cell of social

reconstruction^ It brings people together with only a minimal and highly

impersonal part of their total being. This part is not, as might be

supposed at first glance, consumption. Common consumption as such has a

great power to unite people; and, as we know from ancient times, there

is no better symbol of communal life than the banquet. But the Consumer

Co-operative is concerned not with consumption proper but with purchases

for consumption. Common purchasing as such lays no very significant

demands on the individuals participating in it, unless it be in

exceptional times when it is a question of common care and

responsibility for a common task, as in the “heroic” age of the

Co-operative Movement or in the crises since then, when private persons

came forward in a spirit of sacrifice to alleviate the distress of the

many. Similarly, as soon as common purchasing becomes a business,

responsibility for which passes to the employees, it ceases to unite

people in any significant sense. The bond becomes so loose and

impersonal that there can be no question of communal cells and their

association in a complex organic structure, even if the co-operative

organization of this or that branch of production is linked up with the

Co-operative’s warehouses. I find this view expressed with great clarity

in a book by the Irish poet George William Russell (“A. E.”), The

National Being; a book written with true patriotism and dealing with the

social reconstruction of Ireland. He says: “It is not enough to organize

farmers in a district for one purpose only — in a credit society, a

dairy society, a fruit society, a bacon factory, or in a co-operative

store.

All these may be and must be beginnings; but if they do not develop and

absorb all rural business into their organization they will have little

effect on character. No true social organism will have been created. If

people unite as consumers to buy together they only come into contact on

this one point; there is no general identity of interest. If

co-operative societies are specialized for this purpose or that — as in

Great Britain or on the Continent — to a large extent the limitation of

objects prevents a true social organism from being formed. The latter

has a tremendous effect on human character. The specialized Society only

develops economic efficiency. The evolution of humanity beyond its

present level depends absolutely on its power to unite and create true

social organisms.” That precisely is what I understand by an organic

restructuring of society.

The Producer Co-operative is better suited in itself than the Consumer

Co-operative to take part in a restructuring of this sort, i.e. to

function as the cell of a new structure. Common production of goods

implicates people more profoundly than a common acquisition of goods for

individual consumption; it embraces much more of their powers and their

lifetime. Man as producer is by nature more prepared to get together

with his kind in an eminently active way than man as consumer; and is

more capable of forming living social units. This is true of the

employer, if and in so far as he draws more strength from the

association for the discharge of his productive activity than he did and

ever could as an individual. But it is particularly true of the

employed, because only in and through the association does he draw any

strength at all — the question is whether he will become vitally

conscious of this opportunity and believe in its practical prospects.

But as we have seen, he succumbs very easily, indeed almost with a kind

of fatality, to the desire to get others to work for him. If the

Consumer Co-operative adapts itself outwardly, in a technical and

managerial sense, to the capitalistic pattern, the Producer Co-operative

does so inwardly in a structural and psychological sense. At the same

time the latter is itself more amenable to a genuine, not merely

technical, federation; but just how little the paramount importance —

from the point of view of restructure — of small organic units and their

organic-federative growth was recognized (even in those circles most

enthusiastic for the regeneration of society by means of Producer

Co-operatives), we actually saw two decades ago in the English Guild

Socialist Movement. On the one hand the bold step was conceived of

converting the State into a dual system: multiform, co-ordinated

representation of producers, and uniform, mass-representation of

consumers. But on the other hand, there soon manifested itself a

Saint-Simonistic tendency aiming at “national” (i.e. embracing a whole

branch of industry) guilds for “the regimentation into a single

fellowship of all those employed in any given industry”, which proved

much stronger than the tendency to form “local” guilds, i.e. small

organic units and their federation. If the principle of organic

restructuring is to become a determining factor the influence of the

Full Co-operative will be needed, since in it production and consumption

are united and industry is complemented by agriculture. However long it

may take the Full Co-operative to become the cell of the new society, it

is vitally important for it to start building itself up now as a

far-reaching complex of interlocking, magnetic foci. A genuine and

lasting reorganization of society from within can only prosper in the

union of producers and consumers, each of the two partners being

composed of independent and homogeneous co-operative units; a union

whose power and vitality for socialism can only be guaranteed by a

wealth of Full Co-operatives all working together and, in their

functional synthesis, exercising a mediatory and unifying influence.

For this it is necessary, however, that in place of all the isolated

experiments (condemned in the nature of things to isolation) that have

made their appearance in the course of more than a hundred years of

struggle, there should emerge a network of Settlements, territorially

based and federatively constructed, without dogmatic rigidity, allowing

the most diverse social forms to exist side by side, but always aiming

at the new organic whole.

VIII. MARX AND THE RENEWAL OF SOCIETY

We have seen that it is the goal of Utopian socialism so-called to

substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible, moreover a

society that is “genuine” and not a State in disguise. The prime

conditions for a genuine society can be summed up as follows: it is not

an aggregate of essentially unrelated individuals, for such an aggregate

could only be held together by a “political”, i.e. a coercive principle

of government; it must be built up of little societies on the basis of

communal life and of the associations of these societies; and the mutual

relations of the societies and their associations must be determined to

the greatest possible extent by the social principle — the principle of

inner cohesion, collaboration and mutual stimulation. In other words:

only a structurally rich society can claim the inheritance of the State.

This goal can be attained neither by a change in the order of

government, i.e. those who dispose of the means of power, alone; nor by

a change in the order of ownership, i.e. those who dispose of the means

of production, alone; nor yet by any laws and institutions governing the

forms of social life from outside, alone — nor by a combination of all

these. All these things are necessary at certain stages of the

transformation, with the restriction, of course, that no coercive order

shall result which would standardize the whole and not tolerate the

emergence of those elements of spontaneity, internal dynamism and

diversity so indispensable to the evolution of a genuine society. What,

however, is essential, so essential that all these phases should only

subserve its full implementation, is the growth of the genuine society

itself, partly from already existing societies to be renewed in form and

meaning, partly from societies to be built anew. The more such a society

is actually or potentially in being at the time of the changes, the more

it will be possible to realize socialism as an actuality in the changed

order, that is, to obviate the danger of the power-principle — be it in

political or economic form or both — finding entry again, and of the

human relations — the real life of society — remaining, underneath the

changed surface of laws and institutions, as hopelessly out of joint and

askew as ever they were under the capitalist regime. Those changes in

the economic and political order inevitably imply, as regards the

realization of socialism, the necessary removal of obstacles, but no

more and no less.

Without such a change the realization of socialism remains nothing but

an idea, an impulse and an isolated experiment; but without the actual

re-structuring of society the change of order is only a facade. It is

not to be supposed that the change comes first and the re-structuring

afterwards; a society in transformation may well create for itself the

instruments it needs for its maintenance, for its defence, for the

removal of obstacles, but changed power-relations do not of themselves

create a new society capable of overcoming the power-principle.

“Utopian” socialism regards the various forms of Co-operative Society as

being the most important cells for social re-structure; and the more

“Utopianism” clarifies its ideas the more patently does the leading role

seem to fall to the Producer-cum-Gonsumer Cooperative. The Co-operative

is not an end in itself for the “Utopian”, not even when a large measure

of socialism has been successfully realized within it; the point is

rather to produce the substance which will then be released by the new

order, established in its own right so as to unify the multifarious

cells. Genuine “utopian” socialism can be termed “topical” socialism in

a specific sense: it is not without topographical character, it seeks to

realize itself in a given place and under given conditions, that is,

“here and now”, and to the greatest degree possible here and now. But it

regards the local realization (and this has become increasingly clear as

the idea has developed) as nothing but a point of departure, a

beginning, something that must be there for the big realization to join

itself on to; that must be there if this realization is to fight for its

freedom and win universal validity; that must be there if the new

society is to arise out of it, out of all its cells and those they make

in their likeness.

Let us, at this juncture, put the decisive questions of means and ends

to Marx and Marxism.

Right from his earliest socialistic formulations up to the full maturity

of his thought Marx conceived the end in a way that comes very close to

“utopian” Socialism. As early as in August, 1844, he was writing (in his

essay Critical Glosses): “Revolution as such — the overthrow of existing

power and the dissolution of the old conditions — is a political act.

But without Revolution socialism cannot carry on. Socialism needs this

political act in so far as it needs destruction and dissolution. But

when its organizing activity begins, when its ultimate purpose, its soul

emerges, socialism will throw the political husk away.” We must read

this in conjunction with the following passage written earlier on in the

same year ( On the Jewish Question):

“Only when man has recognized and organized his ‘forces prOpres’ as

social forces [it is therefore not necessary, as Rousseau thinks, to

change man’s nature, to deprive him of his ‘forces propres’ and give him

new ones of a social character] and, consequently, no longer cuts off

his social power from himself in the form of political power [i.e. no

longer establishes the State as the sphere of organized rule] only then

will the emancipation of mankind be achieved.” Since Marx is known even

in his early days to have regarded politics as obviously nothing but the

expression and elaboration of class-rule, politics must accordingly be

abolished with the abolition of the latter: the man who is no longer

“sundered from his fellow-man and from the community” is no longer a

political being. This, however, is not regarded as the first consequence

of some post-revolutionary development. Rather, as is clearly stated in

both the above passages, Revolution as such, i.e. Revolution in its

purely negative, “dissolvent” capacity, is the last political act. As

soon as the organizing activity begins on the terrain prepared by the

overthrow, as soon as the positive function of socialism starts, the

political principle will be superseded by the social. The sphere in

which this function is exercised is no longer the sphere of the

political rulership of man by man. Marx’s dialectical formulation leaves

no doubt as to what the sequence of events actually is in his opinion:

first the political act of social revolution will annihilate not merely

the Class State, but the State as a power-formation altogether, whereas

the political revolution was the very thing that “constituted the state

as a public concern, that is, as the real State”. On the other hand,

“the organizing activity” will begin, i.e. the reconstruction of

society, only after the complete overthrow of existing power — whatever

organizing activity preceded the Revolution was only organization for

the struggle. From this we can see with the greatest clarity what it is

that connects Marx with “utopian” socialism: the will to supersede the

political principle by the social principle, and what divides him from

it: his opinion that this supersession can be effected by exclusively

political means — hence by way of sheer suicide, so to speak, on the

part of the political principle.

This opinion is rooted deep in Marx’s dialectical view of history, which

found classical formulation fifteen years later in the preface to his

book A Critique of Political Economy.

Yet, in the concluding section of his polemic against Proud-hon, we

encounter what appears to be a not inconsiderable limitation. “The

working-class,” he says, “will, in the course of its development (dans

le cours de son developpement), replace the old bourgeois society by an

association which will exclude classes and their antagonisms, and there

will no longer be any political power in its proper sense (il n’y aura

plus de pouvoir politique, proprement dit), since political power is

nothing but the official sum (le resume officiel) of the antagonisms

obtaining in bourgeois society.” “No political power in its proper

sense” — that means: no political power in the sense of an expression

and elaboration of class-rule, which is quite self-evident if class-rule

really has been abolished. Let us leave aside for the moment the

question which obviously never entered into Marx’s field of vision,

namely, whether in those circumstances the proletariat would really be

the “last” class, with whose accession to power class-rule would

collapse altogether, that is, whether a new social differentiation would

not arise within the victorious proletariat itself, one which, even

though the class-designation might not apply, might very well lead to a

new system of domination. There still remains, however, the no less

momentous question as to the nature and extent of political power in the

“improper” sense, that is to say, the political power that no longer

rests on class-rule but persists after the classes have been abolished.

Might it not be possible for such power to make itself no less felt,

indeed more felt, than that based on class-rule, especially so long as

it was a matter of “defending the Revolution” — so long, in fact, as

humanity as a whole had not abolished class-rule, or even, perhaps, so

long as humanity had not adopted the view or the realization of

socialism prevailing in that particular State in which the victory of

the proletariat had been won? But the thing that concerns us most of all

is this: so long, in such a State or States, as this fixed point of view

prevails, and prevails with all the technique and instruments of power

at the disposal of our age, how can that spontaneity, that free social

form-seeking and form-giving, that unfettered power of social

experimentation and decision so indispensable to the realization of

socialism and the emergence of a socialist form of society — how can

they possibly get to work? By omitting to draw a clear line of

demarcation between power in its proper and improper senses Marx opens

the door to a type of political principle which, in his opinion, does

not and cannot exist: a type which is not the expression and elaboration

of class-rule, but is rather the expression and elaboration of

power-tendencies and power-struggles not characterized by class, on the

part of groups and individuals. Political power in the improper sense

would accordingly be “the official sum of antagonisms” either within the

proletarian class itself or, more precisely, within the nation in which

“class-rule has been abolished”.

His impressions of the problematical revolution of 1848 served to

sharpen Marx’s critical attitude to experiments in social re-structure.

If the “little experiments, inevitably abortive” had already been

censured in the Manifesto, now (in the report The Class War in France of

1850) “doctrinaire socialism” was accused of “wishing away the

revolutionary conflict of the classes and the need for it by means of

petty artifices and gross sentimentalities”, and (in the Eighteenth

Brumaire of 1852) the French proletariat was reprobated for having

partly committed itself to “doctrinaire experiments, exchange-banks and

workers’ associations”, and thus to a “movement which, having given up

the struggle to overthrow the old world despite all the means at its

disposal, prefers to seek its own salvation behind society’s back,

privately, inside the narrow framework of its existence, and which will

thus necessarily come to grief”.

Marx’s faith in the impending revolution was still unshaken at that

time, but his confidence in an impending World Revolution in the full

sense of the word began to waver. In 1858 he wrote to Engels: “The

difficult question for us is this. On the continent the Revolution is

imminent and will immediately assume a socialist form. But will it not

necessarily be crushed in this small corner of the earth [meaning the

continent of Europe!], seeing that over a far greater area the movement

of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant?”

His doubts seem to have deepened still more in the following years. On

the other hand he became more and more impressed with the significance

of the extra-revolutionary political struggle. After another six years

this was worked out inter alia in the “Inaugural Address to the

International Workers’ Association”. Having praised the Ten-Hour-Law as

the “triumph of a principle”, he went on to call the rise of the

Co-operative Movement “a still greater triumph for the political economy

of labour over the political economy of capital”. The value of these

great social experiments, he said, could not be over-estimated; for the

workers, who had set up co-operative factories without any help at all,

had thereby proved that wage-labour “is destined to give way to

associated labour”. The co-operative system, however, if it was to free

the masses, needed “developing on a national scale and consequently

promoting by national means”, hence precisely what Louis Blanc and

Lassalle had hoped and striven for. But such a thing would not be

conceded by the big landed proprietors and the capitalists of their own

free will. “Therefore,” he ends, it is “the great duty of the working

class” to seize political power. We must give this word “therefore” our

full attention. Labour is to win political power in the parliaments in

order to sweep the obstacles out of the way of the Go-operative

Movement. Marx is here ascribing a central significance to co-operation,

and in particular to the Producer Co-operatives. Although it is

stressed, as also in Resolutions Marx drew up for the Geneva Congress of

1866, that the Co-operative Movement was not capable of remodelling

capitalist society of itself, it is none the less acknowledged as the

proper way to remodel it, save that for this to succeed the acquisition

of State power by the workers was essential. At this point Marx comes

remarkably close to re-structural thinking in practice without accepting

it in principle. Worthy of mention in this connection is the fact that

he clearly recognizes the danger of the Co-operatives degenerating into

ordinary bourgeois joint-stock companies, and even recommends the right

remedy: that all the workers employed should receive the same share.

But less than three months before the opening of the Geneva Congress for

which he drew up this Resolution, Marx wrote to Engels about the

tendencies expressed by the French in a debate of the General Council of

the International: “Proudhonized Stirnerism. Splitting everything up

into little ‘groupes’ or ‘communes’ and then making a ‘company’ of them,

but not a State.” It is here that the undercurrent of State Centralism

creeps unmistakably into Marx’s ideas if only by implication. The

federalism of Proudhon he is attacking has not the slightest wish to

split everything up into communes, it only wants to confer relatively

extensive autonomy on the existing communes and combine them in units,

whose own combination would represent a more organic form of community

than the existing State. As against this Marx once more holds fast to

the State as such.

But now, another five years later, a revolutionary event exerted a new

influence on Marx’s views, an event stronger than any preceding it and

tending in another direction: the Paris Commune. In one of his most

significant writings, the address to the General Council of the

International on the civil war in France, he sketched a picture of the

growth, activities and aims of the Commune. The historical reliability

of this picture has been disputed, but that does not concern us here:

the picture is a confession and one that is of great importance for our

theme, which is the variations in Marx’s views concerning the evolution

of a new society.

What distinguished the Commune in Marx’s eyes toto genere from all

earlier endeavours, “its true secret”, is that it was “essentially a

working-class government”. That is to be understood literally: Marx

means a government not merely appointed by the working-class but also

actually and factually exercised by it. The Commune is “the

self-government of the producers”. Born of universal suffrage and

elected by the Parisians themselves, representation of this kind,

consisting as it does of members who can be replaced at any time and who

are bound by the definite instructions of their electors — such

representation “should not be a parliamentary but a working body,

executive and legislative at the same time”. The same form of

organization was to be provided for every commune in France right down

to the smallest village. The provincial communes were to administer

their common affairs in the district parliament and the district

assemblies in their turn were to send deputies to the national

delegation. In place of centralized State-power originating from the era

of absolute monarchy, “with its omnipresent organs”, there would

consequently emerge a largely decentralized community. “The few, but

important, functions, still left over for a Central Government were to

be transferred to communal, i.e. strictly answerable officials.” The

decentralization, however, would not be a fragmentation but a

reconstitution of national unity on an organic basis, and would mean a

reactivating of the nation’s forces and therefore of the national

organism as a whole. “The communal constitution would have rendered up

to the body social all the powers which have hitherto been devoured by

the parasitic excrescence of the ‘State’, which battens on society and

inhibits its free movement. By this deed alone it would have brought

about the regeneration of France.” It is obvious that Marx is speaking

here not of certain historical State-forms but of the State in general.

By becoming something “self-evident” local self-government renders

State-power “superfluous”. Never did any “utopian” Socialist express

himself more radically on this point.

But the political structure of the Commune is, for Marx, only a prelude

to the real and decisive thing — the great social transformation to

which, with its plans and its dispositions, it would inevitably have led

had it not been destroyed. He sees in the Commune “the finally

discovered political form, in whose sign the economic liberation of

labour can march forward”. The Commune wanted “to make individual

property a truth, by converting the means of production, land and

capital into the mere tools of free and associated labour”, and labour

amalgamated in Producer Co-operatives at that. “If Co-operative

production,” Marx cries, “is not to remain a snare and a delusion, if it

is to oust the capitalist system, if the Co-operatives as a whole are to

regulate national production according to a common plan and thereby take

it under their own control — what else would that be, gentlemen, but

Communism, and a Communism that is possible?” That is, a communism that

proves its possibility in the teeth of the widespread notion of its

“impossibility”. A federalism of communes and Co-operatives — for that

is precisely what this picture sketches — is thus acknowledged by Marx

as genuine communism. To be sure, he still sets his face against all

“Utopianism”.

The working-class “has no cut-and-dried Utopias to introduce by a

plebiscite”. The communal and cooperative system which it wants to build

up into a new community and a new society, is not a contrivance of the

mind: only out of the reality of the association of old and new

generations, the reality that is gradually emerging from the nation

itself, out of these things alone can the working-class build its work

and its house. “It has no ideals to realize, it has only to set free

those elements of the new society which have already developed in the

womb of the collapsing bourgeois society.” Here we have that notion of

“development” again, dating from 1847; but this time it is completely

unequivocal and indubitably meant in the sense of a pre-revolutionary

process, one, moreover, whose nature consists in the formation of small,

federable units of men’s work and life together, of communes and

Co-operatives, in respect to which it is the sole task of the Revolution

to set them free, to unite them and endow them with authority. This

certainly accords at all points with the famous formula given in the

Critique of Political Economy twelve years previously, as regards the

new and higher conditions of production which, however, will never

supplant the old “until the material conditions for their existence have

been gestated in the womb of the old society itself”. But it is nowhere

hinted in the report of the General Council that the Paris Commune

miscarried because the gestation had not been completed. And the

“elements of the new society” that had developed in the womb of the old,

collapsing one — they were for the most part those very Cooperatives

which had been formed in France under the influence of “utopian”

socialism, just as the political federalism of the communes Marx

described had been formed under the influence of Proudhon. These

Co-operatives it was that were characterized as “little experiments,

inevitably abortive” in the Communist Manifesto; but had the Commune

triumphed — and everything in the Report indicates that it could have

triumphed but for this or that particular circumstance — then they would

have become the cell-substance of the new society.

From this standpoint — i.e. of Marxist politics of revolution —

statements like the following one by Engels in 1873 can therefore be

understood: “Had the autonomists been content to say that the social

organization of the future would admit authority only within the bounds

unavoidably set by the conditions of production themselves, then we

could have agreed with them.” As if Proudhon had not time and again

emphasized the necessity of constantly setting boundaries between

possible decentralization and necessary centralization!

Another time (1874) Engels says — adhering strictly to the formulation

Marx gave in the Report of the Commission set up by the Hague Congress

in 1872 to examine the activities of the Bakuninists — that all

socialists were agreed that the State would wither away as a result of

the social Revolution-to-be, and political authority with it; but that

the “anti-authoritarians” were wrong to demand “that the political State

should be abolished at a blow before the social conditions producing it

were abolished”. “They demand,” Engels continues, “that the first act of

the social revolution should be the abolition of authority.” In actual

fact no prudent anti-authoritarian socialist had ever demanded anything

but that the revolution should begin by curing the hypertrophy of

authority, its proliferation, and from then on concentrate on reducing

it to proportions that would correspond to the circumstances given at

any time. Engels answers the alleged demand as follows: “Have you ever

seen a revolution, gentlemen? A revolution is certainly the most

authoritarian thing there is.” If that means that the revolutionary

struggle as such must proceed under far-sighted leadership and strict

discipline, so much cannot be doubted; but if it means that in the

revolutionary epoch (of which nobody can say when it will end), the

whole population is to be limitlessly determined in all branches of its

life and thought by one central authoritarian will, then it is

inconceivable how such a stage can ever evolve into socialism.

Four years after his paper on the Commune Marx, in a letter sharply

criticizing the programme sketched for the Unification Congress of

Gotha, set out afresh his misgivings about the Co-operatives, with the

obvious political intent of bringing one of the chief points in the

programme of the Lassallites into question and thus undermining the

possibility of any compromise with them. Certainly Marx was only setting

his face against the “establishment of Co-operative Societies with State

aid”, though allowing Co-operative Production to stand as the socialist

goal; but expressions like “specific miracle-cure”, “sectarian movement”

and even “reactionary workers” in connexion with Buchez’ programme are

clear enough. Despite that, however, the paragraph dealing with Producer

Associations financed out of State Credit was accepted by the Congress.

But nothing affords us a deeper insight into Marx’s ambivalent attitude

to the question of the internal transformation of society and the

conditions for it than his correspondence with Vera Zasulitch in 1881.

The publication of these documents by Ryazanov is therefore particularly

valuable, because they acquaint us with Marx’s drafts, some of them very

detailed, for his answering letter; as published the drafts run to more

than 900 lines, with innumerable deletions, emendations, amplifications;

the letter itself runs only to about 40.

Vera Zasulitch, “the woman of the moment, the woman with a mission,” as

Stepniak calls her, had written to Marx from Geneva to ask him, as

author of Capital, the first volume of which was “enjoying great

popularity in Russia” and was also playing a part particularly in

discussions on the agrarian question and the Russian village community —

to ask him what he thought about the prospects of the village community

in the future. It was, she said, “a question of life and death” for the

Russian Socialist Party, and on it also depended the personal fate of

the revolutionary Socialists. For, either the village communities, once

free of the excessive taxes and tributes as well as of the Government’s

arbitrary dealings, were capable in themselves of developing in a

socialist direction, i.e. of gradually organizing the production and

distribution of goods on a collective basis, in which case the

revolutionary Socialist would have to “devote all his powers to the

freeing of the communities and their development” — or else, as many

people who called themselves Marxists declared, basing themselves on

Marx, the village community was an “archaic form” condemned by history

and scientific socialism alike to perdition. In that case the

Socialists, who would seek in vain to calculate in how many decades the

land would pass out of the hands of the Russian peasants into those of

the bourgeoisie and in how many centuries capitalism in Russia might

conceivably reach a stage of development similar to that in Western

Europe, would have to restrict themselves to propaganda among the urban

workers, propaganda which “will continue to pour into the masses of the

peasants who, as a result of the dissolution of the village community,

will be thrown on to the streets of the great cities in their search for

wages”. One can see that as a matter of fact it is nothing less than the

decision whether or not the work of the Socialists in Russia could have

any assured future for the next few generations. Must Russia go the way

of Western Europe where, with the rise of Advanced Capitalism, the

“archaic” forms of community necessarily dissolve of themselves, and is

there no alternative but to prepare a class-conscious core of urban

proletariat for the still distant time of industrialization? On the

other hand if there exists, by reason of her special agrarian

institutions, a special way for Russia, quite apart, as it were, from

the general dialectics of history, a way by which to imbue the

traditional pattern of communal ownership and production with Socialist

spirit; if one could, by developing this pattern from within and

obtaining a better position for it externally, create an organic social

reality which would ripen into the Revolution, and, liberated by the

latter and established in full freedom and right, which would thereupon

constitute itself as the backbone of the new society — if all this, then

there is indeed a great and immediate constructive-revolutionary task

which may lead quite soon, perhaps, to the realization of socialism. The

decision as to which of the two was the historical truth was left in

Marx’s hands.

His exertions to give the right answer are of a thoroughness and

scrupulosity worthy of admiration. Already before this he had occupied

himself with the same knotty problem, and now he attacked it afresh with

especial intensity. Again and again we see him cancelling one

formulation of great delicacy and precision only to seek another still

more adequate. Although but a series of fragmentary sketches these notes

seem to me the most important attempt that has been made to grasp

synthetically the theme of the Russian village community.

Owing to the paucity of historical material the village community is

still one of the least understood departments of ethnic sociology,

within which the Russian type, whose development is extremely poorly

documented, forms a perplexing chapter. In accordance with the

prevailing scientific opinion of his time, Marx was inclined to

attribute a very early origin to it. To-day we are wont to regard it as

rather late in origin and as an outcome of Russia’s fiscal policy. But

this is surely not the final word. Research will, I think (as important

works of our own day indicate) establish that Marx was not so wrong as

people assume and that the fiscal system did not create new social

forms, but made use of old ones. But here we have to concern ourselves

not so much with historical inquiry as with an inquiry into the

socialist prospects of the village community, as Marx saw them.

Marx declared in his drafts, in connexion with a remark of the

ethnologist Morgan, that the present crisis of capitalism would end by

modern society returning to a higher form of the archaic type of

communal ownership and production, that is, by its going over to the

communist pattern. Hence we were not to let the word “archaic” alarm us

— for in this direction lay the golden opportunity for the Russian

village community. It had a big advantage over all other archaic

communities of the same type: it alone in Europe had maintained itself

on a wide national scale. It would not, therefore, as had been the fate

of communal ownership in Western Europe, disappear with social progress.

Rather, it might “gradually slough off its primitive characteristics and

develop as the direct basis of collective production on a national

scale”.

Marx points out that he had, in his “Capital”, confined the “historical

fatality” of the accumulation of capital which progressively

expropriates all property accruing from personal labour, expressly to

Western Europe. Since the land in the hands of the Russian peasants had

never been their private property, such a line of development was

inapplicable to them. Instead, one needed simply to replace the

Government institution of the Volost, which “links a fair number of

villages together”, by a “peasant assembly elected by the commune itself

and serving as the economic and administrative organ of their

interests”. The transition from work in allotments to full co-operative

work would easily be accomplished then, in which connexion Marx stresses

the familiarity of the peasants with the communal work-contracts of the

Artel [7] as an added inducement to this. The inevitable economic need

for such a process would make itself felt as soon as the village

community, freed of its burdens and with more land at its disposal, was

in normal circumstances; and as for the necessary material conditions,

Russian society, having lived so long at the expense of the peasant,

surely owed him the requisite wherewithal for such a transition. It is

clear that Marx is thinking of a change that can actually be

accomplished in the circumstances given. But on the other hand he draws

emphatic attention to a peculiarity of the Russian village community

which afflicts it with impotence and makes all historical initiative

impossible for it. By this he means its isolation; it is a “localized

microcosm”, and no connexion exists between the life of one commune and

that of the others. In other words, what Marx is really missing without

consciously making use of the idea, is the trend towards federation.

This peculiarity, he says, is not to be found everywhere as the

characteristic of this type of community; but “wherever it is found it

has given rise to a more or less centralized despotism over the

communes”. Only by means of a general revolt can the isolation of the

Russian village community be broken. Its present state is (for reasons

which Marx does not specify) economically untenable; “for the Russian

communes to be saved a Russian revolution is needed”. But the revolution

must come in time and it must “concentrate all its powers on securing

the free rise of the village community”. Then the latter will soon

develop “comme element regenerateur de la societe russe et comme element

de superiorite sur les pays asservis par le regime capitaliste”.

In the short letter that Marx actually sent to Vera Zasulitch, a single

sentence follows the reference to the relevant passages in his Capital.

The sentence runs: “The analysis given in my Capital offers, therefore,

no reasons either for or against the viability of the village commune;

however, the special study I have devoted to it and the material for

which I have sought in the original sources convince me that the commune

is the mainstay of social regeneration in Russia, but that, if it is to

function as such, one must first of all eliminate the injurious

influences which work upon it from all sides, and then secure for it the

normal conditions of spontaneous development.”

The basis of the argument is so enormously compressed that even the

message it manages to convey can hardly be grasped in its proper

significance. Evidently this process of compression was inevitable,

since in the drafts the pros and cons confronted one another in such a

manner as to be irreconcilable in fact if not in appearance. In theory

Marx affirmed the possibility of a pre-revolutionary development of the

commune in the direction desired, but in practice he made its

“salvation” dependent on the timely appearance of the revolution. Here

as elsewhere the determining factor is clearly the political element:

the fear lest constructive work should sap the strength of the

revolutionary impetus. Since, however, the political element in Marx was

not offset by any insight into the significance of social re-structure,

the pros and cons had ultimately to be replaced by a sentence which

could hardly appear to Vera Zasulitch as an answer to her fateful

question. Even in his own lifetime Marx, as Tonnies says, was something

of an oracle who, on account of the ambiguity of his answers, was often

petitioned in vain. At any rate Vera Zasulitch, in the answer to her

question as to whether the revolutionary socialist should devote all his

strength to the freeing and developing of the communes, could have heard

no “yes” echoing out of Marx’s letter, which for her was of the highest

authority.

Not long afterwards she wrote (in the preface to the Russian translation

of Engels’ Evolution of Socialism from Utopia to Science, published in

1884) a few passages on the village community which draw the conclusion

from Marx’s oracle: that the gradual liquidation of communal ownership

was inevitable; that Russia’s immediate future belonged to capitalism,

but that the socialist revolution in the West would put a term to

capitalism in the East as well, “and then the remnants of the

institution of communal ownership would render a great service to

Russia”. In his Foreword to the Russian translation (also by Vera

Zasulitch) of the Communist Manifesto in 1882, Engels had given a

somewhat different answer to the question he himself formulated

obviously under the influence of ^larx. “Can the Russian village

community,” he asked, “which is already an extremely corrupt form of the

original communal ownership of land, pass over direct to a higher,

communist form of ownership — or must it first of all go through the

process of liquidation familiar to us in the historical development of

the West?” His answer (as usual, less equivocal and more massive than

Marx’s, but also less regardful of the profundity of the problem) is as

follows: “Should the Russian Revolution become the signal for a workers’

revolution in the West, so that both complement one another, then the

Russian communal ownership of to-day might serve as the starting-point

for communist development.” Later he seems to have grown more sceptical,

but he avoided (so Gustav Mayer reports) “getting involved in the

internal struggles between those Russian Socialists who trusted more to

the peasants and those who trusted more to the rise of an industrial

proletariat”.

As against Eduard Bernstein, who rightly pointed out the similarity

between the programme of the Paris Commune as reported by Marx and

Proudhon’s federalism, Lenin declared emphatically that Marx was a

centralist and that his statements in the Civil War in France show “no

trace of a deviation from centralism”.

Stated in such general terms this view is untenable. When Marx says that

the few functions “which will then remain for centralization” should be

handed over to communal officials, he means without a doubt:

decentralize as many State-functions as possible and change those that

must remain centralized into administrative functions, not, however,

only after some post-revolutionary development lasting an indefinite

time, but inside the revolutionary action itself — thus realizing what,

according to Engels’ well-known criticism of the draft to the Erfurt

programme, “every French department, every parish possessed: complete

self-administration”. Nevertheless, Lenin was not wrong; Marx always

remained a centralist at heart. For him the communes were essentially

political units, battle-organs of the revolution. Lenin asks, “If the

proletariat were to organize itself absolutely freely into communes, and

were to unite the activities of these communes in a common front against

Capital ... would that not be ... proletarian centralism?” Of course it

would, and to this extent Lenin and not Bernstein is Marx’s faithful

interpreter. But that is true merely of the revolution as such, which —

in the sense of Marx’s definition of the commune — is not a

“development” spread out over several generations, but a coherent

historical act, the act of smashing capitalism and placing the means of

production in the hands of the proletariat. But in the French programme

for the communes each individual commune with its “local

self-government” is by no means a mere cog in the great apparatus of

revolution, or, to put it less mechanically, not merely an isolated

muscle within the revolutionary exertions of the body politic — on the

contrary it is destined to outlast the upheaval as an independent unit

equipped with the maximum of autonomy. During the act the commune’s

particular will merges spontaneously in the great impulse of the whole,

but afterwards it is to acquire its own sphere of decision and action,

so that the really vital functions are discharged “below” and the

general administrative functions “at the top”. Each commune is already

invested in principle with its own proper powers and rights within the

revolutionary process, but it is only after the accomplishment of the

common act that they can come into actuality. Marx accepted these

essential components of the commune-idea but without weighing them up

against his own centralism and deciding between them. That he apparently

did not see the profound problem that this opens out is due to the

hegemony of the political point of view; a hegemony which persisted

everywhere for him as far as concerned the revolution, its preparation

and its effects. Of the three modes of thinking in public matters — the

economic, the social and the political — Marx exercised the first with

methodical mastery, devoted himself with passion to the third, but —

absurd as it may sound in the ears of the unqualified Marxist — only

very seldom did he come into more intimate contact with the second, and

it never became a deciding factor for him.

To the question of the elements of social re-structure, a fateful

question indeed, Marx and Engels never gave a positive answer, because

they had no inner relation to this idea. Marx might occasionally allude

to “the elements of the new society which have already developed in the

womb of the collapsing bourgeois society”, and which the Revolution had

only “to set free”; but he could not make up his mind to foster these

elements, to promote them and sponsor them. The political act of

revolution remained the one thing worth striving for; the political

preparation for it — at first the direct preparation, afterwards the

parliamentary and trades unionist preparation — the one task worth

doing, and thus the political principle became the supreme determinant;

every concrete decision about the practical attitude to such

re-structural elements as were actually present, in the process of

formation or to be constituted anew, was reached only from the

standpoint of political expediency. Naturally, therefore, decisions in

favour of a positive attitude were tepid, uncoordinated and ineffectual,

and finally they were always cancelled out by negative ones.

A characteristic example of the purely political way in which the

spiritual leaders of the movement treated the social structures most

important for the re-shaping of society, is afforded by Engels’ attitude

to the Cooperatives. In 1869 (in his preface to the new impression

edited by Wilhelm Liebknecht of the paper on the German Peasant War) he

had declared: “The agricultural day-labourers can only be redeemed from

their misery if the chief object of their work, the land itself, is

converted into communal property and cultivated by Co-operatives of

Landworkers for the common good.” From this fundamental premise he seems

to draw a perfectly practical conclusion, when he writes to Liebknecht

in 1885 to the effect that the Social-Democratic party of the German

Reichstag should say to the Government: “Give us guarantees that the

Prussian domains, instead of being leased out to big leaseholders or

peasants incapable of living without day-labour, will be leased to

Workers’ Co-operatives; that public works will be commissioned to

Workers’ Co-operatives instead of to capitalists — well and good, we

will do the rest. If not, not.” All these, Engels adds, are things that

can be introduced at a day’s notice and got going within a year, and are

only blocked by the bourgeoisie and the Government. This sounds like

genuine demands to be fought for. But in 1886 Engels is demanding of

Bebel that the party should propose socialistic measures such as these

on the ground that they would conduce to the overthrow of capitalist

production; which, therefore, would be a practical impossibility for

that Government as for any other bourgeois Government. Here the

tactical-propagandist character of the demands is laid bare: the

Co-operative principle is merely made use of, not propounded in all

seriousness as something simply to be striven and fought for. The

tactical application would not be so bad if only the fundamental thing

were put boldly and clearly in words: but that is not the case. I cannot

help seeing Lassalle’s belief — shortsighted as it was — in the

practical possibility of Cooperatives with Government aid, as the more

socialistic attitude.

As another example of how the leaders’ lack of principle on the subject

of re-structure led to the sterility of the movement in this respect, I

will again give a characteristic sequence of resolutions passed by the

Party held to be the most knowledgeable in Marxist matters — the German

Social Democrats — anent their relations to the Co-operative. In the

Gotha Unification programme of 1875 (concerning the draft of which Marx

had voiced his misgivings as mentioned above) it had been demanded that

Producer Co-operatives should be set up for industry and agriculture “of

such scope that they would result in the socialist organization of all

Labour”. This was a clear avowal of the re-structural principle, as

appeared to be necessary for union with the Lassallites. But in the

Erfurt programme of 1891 nothing more was heard of it — which is not to

be explained solely by the failures of the Worker and Producer

Cooperatives founded in the meantime, but principally by this same lack

of fundamental directive, and at the Berlin Party Congress of 1892 it

was decided that the Party “could only approve the founding of

Co-operatives in so far as they were designed to enable comrades, on

whom disciplinary punishment had been inflicted in the political or

trades-union struggle, to live a decent social life, or in so far as

they served to facilitate agitation”; for the rest, “the Party was

opposed to the founding of Co-operatives”. This is refreshingly

outspoken. But in the resolution of the Hanover Party Congress in 1899

it was stated that the Party was neutral as regards the founding of

Industrial Co-operatives, that it saw in the founding of such

Co-operatives a suitable means of educating the working-class to the

independent control of their affairs, but that it attributed to the

Cooperatives “no decisive significance in the matter of freeing the

working-class from the chains of wage-slavery”. Yet in Magdeburg in 1910

the Consumer. Co-operatives were not merely acknowledged as effectively

supporting the class-struggle, it was also declared that Co-operative

activity in general was “an effective complement to the political and

trades-union struggle to raise the position of the working-class”.

This zig-zag line may well serve as a symbol of the tragic

mis-development of the Socialist Movement.

With all the powerful forces of propaganda and planning it had gathered

the proletariat about itself; in the political and economic field it had

acted with great aggressive aplomb in attack and defence, but the very

thing for which, ultimately, it had made propaganda and planned and

fought — the evolution of the new social form — was neither the real

object of its thought nor the real goal of its action. What Marx praised

the Paris Commune for, the Marxist movement neither wanted nor achieved.

It did not look to the lineaments of the new society which were there

for all to see; it made no serious effort to promote, influence, direct,

co-ordinate and federate the experiments that were in being or about to

be; never by consistent work did it of its own accord call any

cell-groups and associations of cell-groups of living community into

existence. With all its great powers it lent no hand to shaping the new

social life for mankind which was to be set free by the Revolution.

IX. LENIN AND THE RENEWAL OF SOCIETY

Just as the principle of the renewal of society from within, by a

regeneration of its cell-tissue, found no fixed place derivable from the

idea itself, in Marx’s doctrine, so there was no place for it in the

most tremendous attempt of our time to realize this doctrine through the

admirable but highly problematical application of conscious human will.

In both cases this negative fact can, as we have seen, be justified as

regards the pre-revolutionary era by saying that under the reign of

capitalism no social regeneration whatsoever, even if only fragmentary,

could be accomplished; but as regards the post-revolutionary era it is

stated in both cases that it would be “utopian” to outline the

appropriate forms of this regeneration.

“Utopia,” Engels writes in 1872, “arises when, ‘from the existing

conditions’, people undertake to prescribe the form wherein this, that

or the other contradiction in existing society will be resolved.” “In

Marx,” says Lenin, “you will find no trace of Utopianism in the sense of

inventing the ‘new’ society and constructing it out of fantasies.” But

useless as such fantasy-pictures indeed are, it is also of vital

importance to let the idea to which one clings dictate the direction

towards which one may actively strive. The socialist idea points of

necessity, even in Marx and Lenin, to the organic construction of a new

society out of little societies inwardly bound together by common life

and common work, and their associations. But neither in Marx nor Lenin

does the idea give rise to any clear and consistent frame of reference

for action. In both cases the decentralist element of re-structure is

displaced by the centralist element of revolutionary politics.

In both cases the operative law is that strictly centralist action is

necessary to the success of the revolution, and obviously there is no

small truth in this; what is wanting is the constant drawing of lines of

demarcation between the demands of this action and — without prejudicing

it — the possible implementation of a decentralized society; between

what the execution of the idea demands and what the idea itself demands;

between the claims of revolutionary politics and the rights of an

emergent socialist life.

The decision always falls — in the theory and directives of the movement

with Marx, in the practice of revolution and the reordering of the State

and economics with Lenin — essentially in favour of politics, that is,

in favour of centralization. A good deal of this can certainly be

attributed to the situation itself, to the difficulties which the

Socialist movement had to face and the quite special difficulties faced

by the Soviet regime; but over and above that a certain conception and a

certain tendency subsequently came to the fore which we may find in Marx

and Engels and which thereafter devolved upon Lenin and Stalin: the

conception of one absolute centre of doctrine and action from which the

only valid theses and the only authoritative decrees can issue, this

centre being virtually a dictatorship masked by the “dictatorship of the

proletariat” — in other words: the tendency to perpetuate centralist

revolutionary politics at the cost of the decentralist needs of a

nascent socialist community. It was easy for Lenin to give way to this

tendency because of the situation itself, which clearly pointed to the

fact that the Revolution had not yet reached its end. The contradiction

between Marx’s demand for the supersession of the political by the

social principle on the one hand and the incontestible persistence of it

on the other, is disguised and justified by the alleged incompleteness

of the revolution; but this does not, of course, take into account the

circumstance that for Marx socialism was to slough off its political

skin the moment “its organizing activity begins”. Here there lurks a

problem which in its turn is masked by nothing less than the

materialistic interpretation of history: according to this view,

politics is merely the exemplification and expression of the

class-struggle, and with the abolition of the class-state the ground

will consequently be cut from under the political principle. The

life-and-death struggle of the sole valid doctrine and sole programme of

action against all other versions of socialism cannot pass itself off as

unpolitical; it must, therefore, brand every other kind of socialism as

bogus, as a vestige of bourgeois ideologies; for so long as any other

version of socialism exists the Revolution cannot yet be at an end,

obviously, and the political principle cannot yet have been superseded

by the social, although the organizing activity has already begun.

Political power “in the improper sense” can indeed become far more

comprehensive, ruthless and “totalitarian” in its centralist pretensions

than political power “in its proper sense” ever was. This is not to say

that Lenin was a centralist pure and simple: in certain respects he was

less so than Marx and in this he was closer to Engels; but in his

thought and will the revolutionary-political motif dominated as with

Marx and Engels and suppressed the vital social motif which requires

decentralized community-living, with the result that this only made

itself felt episodically.

The upshot of all this was that there was no trace in the new

State-order of any agency aiming at the liquidation of State centralism

and accumulation of power. How such a liquidation was ever to take place

by degrees in the absence of such an agency is inconceivable. Lenin once

remarked, in 1918: “What Socialism will be we just don’t know. When has

any State begun to wither away?” And in history there is indeed no

example, however small, to which one could refer. To achieve this for

the first time in the world’s history one would have needed to set about

it with a tremendously vital and idealistic store of decentralizing

energy. No such thing happened. That under these circumstances a

voluntary renunciation of accumulated power and a voluntary liquidation

of centralization would ever take place has not unjustly been

characterized (by a Socialist) as a belief in miracles.

The doctrine of the “withering away” of the State after the social

revolution was elaborated by Engels from Marx’s for the most part very

tentative adumbrations. It would not be unprofitable to bring his chief

utterances on this subject together in chronological sequence. In 1874

he declared that the State, “as a result of the social revolution of the

future, would vanish” because all public functions would simply be

changed from political into administrative ones. In 1877 he said more

precisely that the proletariat, by converting the means of production

into State property, would abolish the State as State and that,

moreover, this same seizure of the means of production would “at once be

its last independent act as a State”, that it would then “fall asleep”

or “wither away of itself”. In 1882 there follows the eschatological

interpretation of this “at once”: there would be the “leap of humanity

out of the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom”; nothing could

be more outspoken than this. Now, however, a remarkable retreat ensues.

After Marx’s death we hear no more of this “at once” from Engels’ lips.

When he announces in 1884 that the whole machinery of State will be

relegated to the Museum of Antiquities, the date of this singular

proceeding is no longer the moment when the means of production have

been nationalized, but evidently a much later moment, and evidently the

proceedings will be long-drawn, for the authority which undertakes that

relegation to the Museum is now “Society, which will organize production

anew on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers” —

a task only inaugurated, naturally, by the unique act of

nationalization. This accords with the formula in the Communist

Manifesto about “the course of development”, a formula which Engels

recalls here; save that there the formula speaks of the concentration of

production “in the hands of associated individuals” as being the result

of a development in whose train public power would lose its political

character. In 1891 Engels retreats still further, so far indeed that no

additional retreat is necessary or even possible. The proletariat, he

says, victorious in the struggle for mastery, will not be able to avoid

“at once paring down the worst aspects of the State, until a new

generation grown up in new, free social conditions is capable of putting

aside the whole paraphernalia of State.” Engels says this in his

Foreword to the new edition of Marx’s Civil War in France, in which the

latter had written twenty years previously that the working-class “will

have to go through long struggles, a whole series of historical

processes which will completely transform men and circumstances alike”.

In his Foreword Engels transposes this conception to the

post-revolutionary period. But by so doing the cogency of that “at once”

is enormously weakened. Not only is it no longer the case that the

proletariat will abolish the State as State with the nationalization of

the means of production, but also it will, to begin with and right up to

the coming of age of the “new generation”, merely “pare down” the worst

aspects of the State. And yet in that same book Marx had said of the

Constitution of the Paris Commune that, had the Commune triumphed, it

would have given back to the social body all the powers which hitherto

“the parasitic excrescence of the State” had eaten up; consequently he

had laid the main stress on the change brought about by the workings of

the Commune — hence on the “at once”. But now Engels in his Foreword

retreats far beyond this. No doubt certain historical experiences were

to blame; but that Engels let himself be influenced by them so

profoundly is due to the fact that neither with him nor with Marx was

there any uniform and consistent ideal aiming at the re-structuring of

society or at preparations for the abolition of the State, or any strong

and steadfast will for decentralizating action. It was a divided

spiritual inheritance into which Lenin entered: socialist revolutionary

politics without socialist vitality.

As is well known, Lenin tried to overcome the problematical nature of

Engels’ doctrine by pointing out with great emphasis that “the

abolition” referred to the bourgeois State but that “the withering away”

referred to the “remains of the proletarian State system after the

Socialist revolution”. Further, that since the State as (in Engels’

definition) a “special repressive power” was necessary at first for the

suppression of the bourgeoisie, it was also essential as the

dictatorship of the proletariat, as the centralized organ of its power.

That Lenin hit off Marx’s (and Engels’) intention is indisputable; he

rightly quotes the passage in which Marx, in 1852, had characterized

this dictatorship as being the transition to a classless society. But

for the Marx of 1871 with his enthusiasm for the Commune it was certain

that a decentralization would simultaneously be preparing itself in the

midst of the centralism necessary for revolutionary action; and when

Engels called the nationalization of the means of production an

abolition of the State “as State”, he meant the all-important process

that would be worked out to the full immediately after the completion of

the revolutionary act.

Lenin praises Marx for having “not yet, in 1852, put the concrete

question as to what should be set up in place of the State machinery

after it had been abolished”. Lenin goes on to say that it was only the

Paris Commune that taught Marx this. But the Paris Commune was the

realization of the thoughts of people who had put this question very

concretely indeed. Lenin also praises Marx for having “held strictly to

the factual basis of historical experience”. But the historical

experience of the Commune became possible only because in the hearts of

passionate revolutionaries there lived the picture of a decentralized,

very much “deStated” society, which picture they undertook to translate

into reality. The spiritual fathers of the Commune had just that ideal

aiming at decentralization which Marx and Engels did not have, and the

leaders of the Revolution of 1871 tried, albeit with inadequate powers,

to begin the realization of that ideal in the midst of the revolution.

As to the problem of action Lenin starts off with a purely dialectical

formula: “So long as there is a State there is no freedom. Once there is

freedom there will be no more State.” Such dialectics obscures the

essential task, which is to test day by day what the maximum of freedom

is that can and may be realized today; to test how much “State” is still

necessary to-day, and always to draw the practical conclusions. In all

probability there will never — so long as man is what he is — be

“freedom” pure and simple, and there will be “State”, i.e. compulsion,

for just so long; the important thing, however, is the day to day

question: no more State than is indispensable, no less freedom than is

allowable. And freedom, socially speaking, means above all freedom for

community, a community free and independent of State compulsion.

“It is clear,” says Lenin, “that there can be no talk of a definite time

when the withering away of the State will begin.” But it is not at all

clear. When Engels declares that, with the seizure of the means of

production, the State will in fact become representative of society as a

whole and will thereby make itself superfluous, it follows that this is

the time when the withering away must begin. If it does not begin then

it proves that the withering tendency is not an integral and determining

part of the revolutionary action. But in that case a withering away or

even a shrinking of the State cannot be expected of the Revolution and

its aftermath. Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

“The most pressing and topical question for politics to-day,” states

Lenin in September, 1917, “is the transformation of all citizens into

workers and employees of one big ‘syndicate’, namely, the State as a

whole.” “The whole of society,” he continues, “will turn into one office

and one factory with equal work and equal pay.” But this reminds us,

does it not, of what Engels said of the tyrannical character of the

automatic mechanism of a big factory, that over its portal should stand

written: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi ch’entrate. To be sure, Lenin sees

this factory discipline only as “a necessary stage in the radical

purging of society”; he thinks that it will pass as soon as “everybody

has learnt to manage society’s production by himself”, for from this

moment the need for any government whatever will begin to disappear. The

possibility that the capacity for managing production is unequally

distributed and that equal training may not be able to make up for this

natural deficiency, never seems to have entered Lenin’s head.

The thing that would meet the human situation much more would be the

de-politicization of all the functions of management as far as

practicable; that is, to deprive these functions of all possibility of

degenerating into power-accretions. The point is not that there should

be only managers and no managed any more — that is more Utopian than any

Utopia — but that management should remain management and not become

rulership, or more precisely, that it should not appropriate to itself

more rulership than the conditions at any time make absolutely necessary

(to decide which cannot, of course, be left to the rulers themselves).

Lenin wanted, it is true, one far-reaching change to take place

“immediately”: immediately after they had wrested political power the

workers were to “smash the old apparatus of bureaucracy, raze it to its

foundations, leave not one stone upon another”, and replace it by a new

apparatus composed of these same workers. Time and again Lenin

reiterates the word “immediately”. Just as the Paris Commune had done,

so now such measures shall “immediately” be taken as are necessaiy to

prevent the new apparatus from degenerating into a new bureaucracy,

chief among them being the ability to elect and dismiss officials and,

in Marx’s language, to hold them “strictly answerable”. This fundamental

transformation is not, in contradistinction to all the others, to be

left to the process of “development”, it is supposed to be implicit in

the revolutionary action itself as one of its most momentous and

decisive acts. A “new, immeasurably higher and incomparably more

democratic type of State-apparatus” is to be created “immediately”.

On this point, therefore, Lenin held an immediate change in the social

structure to be necessary. He realized that in its absence, despite all

the formidable interventions, the new institutions, the new laws and new

power-relationships, at the heart of the body politic everything would

remain as of old. That is why, although he was no adherent of any

general decentralist tendency, he was such an emphatic advocate of this

demand for immediate change which, as far as the Paris Commune was

concerned, had been an organic part of the decentralist order of society

and which can only be fulfilled in a society pressing towards the

realization of this order. As an isolated demand it has not been

fulfilled in Soviet Russia. Lenin himself is reported to have said with

bitterness at a later phase: “We have become a bureaucratic Utopia.”

And yet a beginning had been made with structural transformation, not

indeed on Lenin’s initiative, although he recognized its importance if

not all its potential structural qualities — a peculiarly Russian

beginning akin to the proposals of the Paris Commune and one that had

tremendous possibilities — namely the Soviets. The history of the Soviet

regime so far, whatever else it is, has been the history of the

destruction of these possibilities.

The first Soviets were born of the 1905 Revolution primarily as “a

militant organization for the attainment of certain objectives”, as

Lenin said at the time; first of all as agencies for strikes, then as

representative bodies for the general control of the revolutionary

action. They arose spontaneously, as the institutions of the Commune

did, not as the outcome of any principles but as the unprepared fruit of

a given situation.

Lenin emphasized to the anarchists that a Workers’ Council was not a

parliament and not an organ of self-administration. Ten years later he

stated that Workers’ Councils and similar institutions must be regarded

“as organs of revolt” which could only be of lasting value “in connexion

with the revolt”. Only in March, 1917, after the Sovietic pattern had

been, in Trotsky’s words, “almost automatically reborn” in Russia and

after the first reports of the victory of the revolution had reached

Lenin in Switzerland, did he recognize in the St. Petersburg Soviet “the

germ-cell of a workers’ government” and in the Councils as a whole the

fruit of the experiences of the Paris Commune. By this he still meant,

of course, first and foremost “the organization of the revolution”, that

is to say, of the “second real revolution” or “organized striking-force

against the counterrevolution”, just as Marx saw in the institutions of

the Commune above all the organs of revolutionary action; nevertheless

Lenin described the Councils, which he held to be of the same nature as

the Commune, as already constituting “the State we need”, that is, the

State “which the proletariat needs” or which is “the foundation we must

continue to build on”. What he demanded immediately after his arrival in

Russia was, in opposition to the opinion prevailing in the Workers’

Council itself, “a republic of Workers’, Landworkers’ and Peasants’

Deputy Councils throughout the country, from top to bottom”. In this

sense the Soviet that then existed was, in his view, “a step towards

Socialism”, just as the Paris Commune had been for Marx — but of course

only a political, a revolutionary-political step as that also had been

for Marx; an institution, namely, in which revolutionary thinking could

crystallize, the “revolutionary dictatorship, that is, a power supported

from below by the direct initiative of the masses and not by the law,

which was dispensed by a centralized State-power”; in other words,

“direct usurpation”. The devolution of power on the Soviets still meant

for Lenin not only no real decentralization but not even the incentive

to the formation of anything of the kind, since the political function

of the Soviets was not an integral part of a plan for a comprehensive,

organic order that should include society as well as its economy. Lenin

accepted the Councils as a programme for action but not as a structural

idea.

The utterance Lenin made the day after his arrival, at a meeting of the

Bolshevist members of the All-Russian Conference of Councils, is

characteristic: “We have all clung to the Councils, but we have not

grasped them.” The Councils, therefore, already had an objective

historical significance for him, quite independent of the significance

they had for themselves and for their own members. For the Mensheviks

and the social revolutionaries the Councils were what they had been for

the former in 1905 and what they in fact more or less were at the time

of Lenin’s arrival in Russia: organs for the control of Government,

guarantees of democracy. For Lenin and his adherents among the

Bolsheviks they were very much more — they were the Government itself,

the “only possible form of revolutionary Government”; they were, indeed,

the new emergent State — but no more than that. That the decentralist

form of this State in statu nascendi did not disturb Lenin is due to the

fact that the only thing to make active appearance in the Councils

Movement at this purely dynamic phase of the Revolution was the

undivided will to revolution.

The model of the Paris Commune was vitally important for Lenin both

because Marx had exemplified through it — and through it alone — the

essential features of a new State-order and because Lenin’s mind, like

that of all the leading Russian revolutionaries, had been lastingly

influenced by the revolutionary tradition of France as being the

“classic” of its kind. The influence of the great French revolution, the

habitual measuring of their own revolution by it and the constant

comparison of equivalent stages, etc., were themselves sufficient to

exercise a negative effect, particularly as regards the bias towards

centralism.

But Lenin did not apply the model afforded by the Commune to any general

understanding of history. The fact that (as Arthur Rosenberg rightly

stresses in connexion with Kropotkin and Landauer) whenever, in history,

the masses endeavoured to overthrow a feudal or a centralist

power-apparatus it always ended in these same Communelike experiments,

was either unknown to him or did not interest him; still less did he

grapple with the fact (although he once spoke of the Soviets being “in

their social and political character” identical with the State of the

Commune) that in all those experiments social decentralization was

linked up with political decentralization, if in differing degrees. For

him, the only decisive lesson of history was the conviction that

hitherto humanity had not brought forth a higher and better type of

government than the Councils. Therefore the Councils had to “take the

whole of life into their own hands”.

Naturally Lenin did not fail to realize that the Councils were in

essence a decentralist organization. “All Russia,” he says in April,

1917, “is already overspread by a network of local organs of

self-administration.”

The specific revolutionary measures — abolition of the police, abolition

of the standing army, the arming of the whole population — could also be

put into effect by local self-government; and that is the whole point.

But that these organs could and should come together as a lasting

organism based on local and functional decentralization after the

accomplishment of this task, is not so much as hinted at by a single

word, apparently not even by a thought. The setting up and strengthening

of self-administration has no ultimate purpose or object other than a

revolutionary-political one: to make a self-administration a reality

means “to drive the Revolution forwards”. Admittedly in this connexion a

social note is also struck, if only in passing: the village Commune —

which, it is said, means “complete self-administration” and “the absence

of all tutelage from above” — would suit the peasantry very well (that

“nine-tenths of the peasantry would be agreeable to it” was, be it noted

by the way, a fundamental error). But the reason for this follows at

once: “We must be centralists; yet there will be moments when the task

will shift to the provinces; we must leave the maximum of initiative to

individual localities.... Only our party can give the watchwords which

will really drive the Revolution forwards.” At first glance it does not

seem clear how this obligatory centralism can be compatible with the

complete self-administration mentioned above; on closer inspection,

however, we remark that this compatibility rests on the fact that the

guiding point of view is, purely and simply, the revolutionary-political

one or even the revolutionary-strategic one: in this case, too,

self-administration is only a component of the programme of action and

not the practical conclusion drawn from a structural idea. This more

than anything else enables us to understand why the programmatic demand

for “the absence of all tutelage from above” (a demand not envisaged for

any post-revolutionary development, but as something to be secured in

the midst of the revolution and destined to drive it forwards) turned so

rapidly into its exact opposite. Instead of the watchword, “We must be

centralists, yet there will be moments...”, a genuinely socialist

attitude would have put it the other way round: “We must be

decentralists, federalists, autonomists, yet there will be moments when

our main task will shift to a central authority because revolutionary

action requires it; only we must take care not to let these requirements

swamp its objective and temporal frame of reference.”

For a clearer understanding of the antagonism between centralism and the

above-mentioned “moments” we must realize that in the provinces, as

Lenin himself emphasized, “communes are being formed at a great rate,

particularly in the proletarian centres”, so that the revolution was

progressing “in the form of local communes”. The “watchwords”

corresponded to these facts. A watchword corresponding to this

description of the situation, such as “Local Communes, complete regional

autonomy, independence, no police, no officials, sovereignty of the

armed masses of workers and peasants” — such a watchword, appeal as it

might to the experience of the Paris Commune, was and remained a

revolutionary-political one; that is, it could not, of its own nature,

point beyond the revolution to a decentralized social structure;

centralism continued to be its fixed basis. We cannot help being

profoundly impressed when we read, in the same draft (of May, 1917),

from which I have quoted just now, of Lenin’s demand that the provinces

should be taken as a model and communes formed of the suburbs and

metropolitan areas; but once again no other raison d’itre is granted

them except to drive the Revolution forwards and to lay down a broader

basis for “the passing of the total power of the State to the Councils”.

(“We are now in the minority, the masses do not believe us as yet,” says

Lenin at about the same time.) Lenin is without a doubt one of the

greatest revolutionary strategists of all time; but the strategy of

revolution became for him, as the politics of revolution became for

Marx, the supreme law not only of action but of thinking as well. We

might say that precisely this was the cause of his success; it is

certain at any rate that this fact — together with a tendency to

centralism rooted very deeply in him as in Marx — was to blame for it if

this success did not ultimately contribute to the success of Socialism.

Nevertheless these words should not be construed to imply that I would

charge the Lenin of 1917 with not intending to permit the nascent power

of the Soviets to continue beyond the revolution. That would be

nonsensical; for did he not expressly say at the time, in his

significant Report on the Political Situation, of the State that would

arise when the Councils took the power into their own hands (a State

that “would no longer be a State in the accepted sense”), that although

such a Power had never yet maintained itself in the world for any length

of time, “the whole Workers’ Movement all over the world was going in

that direction?” What I complain of in Lenin is rather his failure to

understand that a fundamental centralism is incompatible with the

existence of such a Power beyond the Revolution’s immediate sphere of

action. It is noteworthy that Lenin says in the same Report that the

latter was a State-form “which represents the first steps towards

Socialism and is unavoidable in the first phases of socialist society”.

These words indicate, I think, that it was conceived of as being only a

stepping-stone to a higher, “socialist” centralism; and doubtless in the

field of economics so vitally important for any final remodelling of

society Lenin saw strict centralism as the goal. At that very meeting he

emphasized that “the French Revolution passed through a period of

municipal revolution when it settled down to local self-administration”,

and that the Russian revolution was going through a similar phase. It is

difficult not to think of the extreme centralism that followed this

period of the French Revolution.

Viewed from yet another angle Lenin’s doctrine of 1917 leads us to the

same result. “Private ownership of ground and of land must be

abolished,” he says. “That is the task that stands before us, because

the majority of the people are for it. That is why we need the Councils.

This measure cannot possibly be carried through with the old State

officials.” Such is the substance of the answer which Lenin gives in his

political Report to the question: “Why do we want power to pass into the

hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputy Councils?” Here the Marxist

respect for “circumstances” is carried to doubtful lengths: private

ownership of land is to be abolished not to build up Socialism but

simply and solely because the majority of the people want it; and the

Councils are necessary not to serve as cells of the new society but to

execute the measures demanded by the majority. I would like to assume

that we would do well not to take this argument of Lenin’s too

literally.

But only now does Lenin’s theory of the Councils enter the decisive

phase. The months in which he was preparing, from Finland, the

Bolshevist “special action”, “the Second Revolution”, were at the same

time those in which he based his thought as to the function of the

Councils primarily and in principle on Marx’s idea of the Commune (in

his well-known State and Revolution), and then expands it in practice,

with reference to the action he had prepared (in his most important

political essay Will the Bolshevists Maintain Power? ). The bulk of the

former was written in September at the time of the attempted

counter-revolution and its suppression — an attempt whose only effect

was to rouse the fighting spirit of the masses and bring them closer to

the radical Party; the second in the middle of October, when the

majority of the St. Petersburg and Moscow Soviets opted for this party

and, as a direct result of this, the call “All Power to the Soviets!”,

from being a revolutionary-political demand, became the slogan of the

impending attack.

Fired by these events, Lenin glorified in his essay the significance of

the Councils for the development of the revolution as never before. In

connexion with the statement made by the Menshevik leader Martov that

the Councils had been “called into being in the first days of the

revolution by the mighty outburst of genuine creative folk-power”, Lenin

says: “Had the creative folk-power of the revolutionary classes [this

latter term goes beyond Martov’s words and gives them a Bolshevist

twist] not produced the Councils, the proletarian revolution in Russia

would have been a hopeless affair.” Here the conception of the Councils

as an instrument for “driving the revolution forwards” struck its most

powerful historical note.

In this essay Lenin lists for the first time the various elements which

in his view give the Councils their fundamental importance. The sequence

in which he cites these elements is characteristic of his outlook.

Firstly, the “new State apparatus”, by substituting the Red Guard for

the standing Army, invests the people themselves with armed power.

Secondly, it establishes an indissolubly close and “easily controlled”

bond between the leaders and the masses.

Thirdly, by means of the principle of eligibility and dis-missibility,

it puts an end to bureaucracy.

Fourthly, by the very fact that it establishes contact with the various

professions [later Lenin puts it more precisely: professions and

productive units] it facilitates the weightiest reforms.

Fifthly, it organizes the Avant-garde, which shall raise up and educate

the masses.

Sixthly, by means of the tie between the Legislature and the Executive

it unites the advantages of Parliamentarianism with those of

non-parliamentary Democracy.

The first place is given to revolutionary power-politics; the second to

the organization of reforms; the third to the form of the State. The

question of the possible importance of the Councils for a reshaping of

the social structure is not even asked.

In Lenin’s view, however, it only became possible for the Councils to

master the tasks set them because the Bolsheviks had seized control in

and through the Councils and filled the new form with a concrete content

of action, whereas formerly they had been “reduced by the Social

Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks to chatter-boxes”, more, to “a body

rotting on its feet”. “The Councils,” Lenin continues, “can only really

develop, only display their talents and capabilities to the full, after

the seizure of supreme power, for otherwise they have nothing to do,

otherwise they are either simple germ-cells (and one cannot be a

germ-cell for too long) or a plaything.” This sentence is remarkable for

more than one reason. The simile of the germ-cells necessarily forces

the question on us as to whether in Lenin’s opinion the Councils might

not, by growth and association, ripen sufficiently to become the cells

of a renewed social organism; but evidently that is not Lenin’s opinion.

And then the expression “plaything” turns up again a few days later in a

curious connection, in Lenin’s theses for a Conference in St.

Petersburg, where we read: “The whole experience of the two revolutions

of 1905 and 1917 confirms that the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputy

Councils are only real as organs of revolt, as organs of revolutionary

force. Outside these tasks the Councils are a mere plaything.” This

makes it unmistakably plain what the important thing really is for

Lenin. He had, to be sure, to lay stress on the question of the hour;

but the exclusiveness with which he does so, brooking no thought

whatever of the Councils eventually becoming independent and permanent

entities, speaks a language that cannot be misunderstood. In addition

those phrases of 1915 (“organs of revolt” and “only in connexion with

the revolt”) recur almost word for word; whatever Lenin may have learnt

and thought about the Councils during those two years in which he became

essentially the historical Lenin, they still remained for him the means

to a revolutionary end. That the Councils might not merely exist for the

sake of the revolution, but that — and this in a far more profound and

primary sense — the revolution might exist for the sake of the Councils,

was something that simply never occurred to him. From this point of view

— by which I mean not Lenin as a person but the sort of mentality that

found an arch-exemplar in him — it is easy to understand why the

Councils petered out both as a reality and as an idea.

That Lenin’s slogan “All power to the Soviets!” was meant in nothing but

a revolutionary-political sense is forced upon us even more strikingly

when we come to the following exclamation in that essay: “And yet the

240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party are supposed to be incapable of

governing Russia in the interests of the poor and against those of the

rich!” So that “All power to the Soviets!” means little more at bottom

than “All power to the Party through the Soviets!” — and there is

nothing that points beyond this revolutionary- political, indeed

party-political aspect to something different, socialistic and

structural.

Soon afterwards Lenin asserts that the Bolsheviks are “centralists by

conviction, by the nature of the programme and the whole tactics of

their party”; hence centralism is expressly characterized as being not

merely tactical but a matter of principle. The proletarian State, we are

told, is to be centralist. The Councils, therefore, have to subordinate

themselves to a “strong Government” — what remains then of their

autonomous reality? It is true that they, too, are conceded a “special

centralism”: no Bolshevist has anything to say against their

“concentration into branches of production”, their centralization. But

obviously Lenin had no inkling that such “concentrations” bear a

socialist, socially formative character only when they arise

spontaneously, from below upwards, when they are not concentrations at

all but associations, not a centralist process but a federalist one.

In Lenin’s summons “To the People” ten days after the seizure of power

we read: “From now on your Councils are organs of State-power, fully

authorized to make all decisions.” The tasks that were assigned soon

afterwards to the Councils referred essentially to control. This was due

very largely to the situation itself, but the frame of reference was far

too small; the positive counterbalance was missing. Such petty powers

were not enough to enable the Councils “to display their talents and

capabilities to the full”. We hear Lenin repeating in March, 1918, at

the Party Congress his ideas about the new type of State “without

bureaucracy, without police, without a standing Army”, but he adds: “In

Russia hardly more than a beginning has been made, and a bad beginning

at that.” It would be a grave error to think that only the inadequate

execution of an adequate design was to blame: the design itself lacked

the substance of life. “In our Soviets,” he says by way of explanation,

“there is still much that is crude, incomplete”; but the really dire and

disastrous thing about it was that the leaders, who were not merely

political but spiritual leaders as well, never directed the Soviets

towards development and completion. “The men who created the Commune,”

Lenin goes on, “did not understand it.” This is reminiscent of his

utterance the day after his arrival in Russia: “We have clung to the

Councils, but have not grasped them.” The truth is that he did not

“understand” them even now for what they really were — and did not wish

to understand them.

In the same speech Lenin declared in answer to Bukharin, who had

demanded that an outline of the socialist order be included in the

programme, that “We cannot outline Socialism. What Socialism will look

like when it takes on its final forms we do not know and cannot say.” No

doubt this is the Marxist line of thought, but it shows up in the full

light of history the limitations of the Marxist outlook in its relation

to an emergent or would-be emergent reality: a failure to recognize

potentialities which require, if they are to develop, the stimulus of

the idea of social form. We may not “know” what Socialism will look

like, but we can know what we want it to look like, and this knowing and

willing, this conscious willing itself influences what is to be — and if

one is a centralist one’s centralism influences what is to be. Always in

history there exist, even if in varying degrees of strength, centralist

and decentralist trends of development side by side; and it is of vital

importance in the long run for which of the two the conscious will,

together with whatever power it may have acquired at the time, elects.

What is more, there is scarcely anything harder, or more rare, than for

a will invested with power to free itself from centralism. What more

natural or more logical than that a centralist will should fail to

recognize the decentralist potentialities in the forms it makes use of?

“The bricks are not yet made,” says Lenin, “with which Socialism will be

built.” Because of his centralism he could not know and acknowledge the

Councils as such bricks, he could not help them to become so, nor did

they become so.

Soon after the Party Congress Lenin stated in the first draft of the

Theses on the Immediate Tasks of Soviet Authority, in a section not

included in the final version: “We are for democratic centralism.... The

opponents of centralism are always pointing to autonomy and federation

as a means of combating the hazards of centralism. In reality democratic

centralism in no way precludes autonomy, rather it postulates the need

for it. In reality even federation [here Lenin only has political

federation in mind] in no way contradicts democratic centralism. In a

really democratic order, and all the more in a State built up on the

Soviet principle, federation is only a step towards a really democratic

centralism.” It is clear that Lenin has no thought of limiting the

centralist principle by the federalist principle; from his

revolutionary-political point of view he only tolerates a federal

reality so long as it resolves itself into centralism. The direction,

the whole line of thought is thus unequivocally centralistic. Nor is

there any essential difference when we come to local autonomy: it is

expedient to permit this to a certain degree and to grant it its terms

of action; only the line must be drawn at that point where the real

decisions and consequently the central instructions begin. All these

popular and social formations only have political, strategic, tactical

and provisional validity; not one of them is endowed with a genuine

raison d’etre, an independent structural value; not one of them is to be

preserved and fostered as a living limb of the community-to-be.

A month after Lenin had dictated his draft the “Left Communists” pointed

out how injurious it was for the seeds of Socialism that the form which

State administration was taking lay in the direction of bureaucratic

centralization, elimination of the independence of the local Soviets and

repudiation, in fact, of the type of “Commune-State” governing itself

from below — the very type, therefore, of which Lenin said in his speech

that the Soviet Authority actually was. There can be no more doubt

to-day as to who was right in assessing the situation and the trends to

come — Lenin or his critics. But Lenin himself knew it well enough

towards the end of his life. References to the Paris Commune become

fewer and fewer after that speech, until they cease altogether.

A year after the October Revolution, Lenin had stated that “the

apparatus of officialdom in Russia was completely shattered”, but at the

end of 1920 he characterized the Soviet Republic as “a Work-State with

bureaucratic excrescences”, and that, he said, “was the truth about the

transition”. The fact that in the years to come the proportion of

excrescences to the trunk from which they sprouted increased alarmingly,

and the buddings of the state of affairs to which the transition was

supposed to lead grew less and less, could not remain hidden from Lenin.

At the end of 1922 in the report Five years of Russian Revolution and

the World Revolution in Perspective which Lenin made to the Fourth

Congress of the Communist International, he says simply: “We have taken

over the old State apparatus.” He solaces himself with the assurance

that in a few years they will succeed in modifying the apparatus from

top to bottom. This hope was not fulfilled and could not be fulfilled

given Lenin’s assumptions: he was thinking in the main of training and

attracting new forces, but the problem was one of structure and not of

personnel; a bureaucracy does not change when its names are changed, and

even the best-trained graduates of the Soviet schools and Workers’

Faculties succumb to its atmosphere.

Lenin’s main disappointment was the continued existence of the

bureaucracy which, if not in its personnel, certainly in its ruthless

efficacy, once more proved stronger than the revolutionary principle. He

does not seem to have touched the deeper causes of this phenomenon, and

that is understandable enough. The October Revolution was a social

revolution only in the sense that it effected certain changes in the

social order and its stratification, in the social forms and

institutions. But a true social revolution must, over and above that,

establish the rights of society vis-a-vis the State. Although in respect

of this task Lenin pointed out that the withering away of the State

would be accomplished by way of a development whose duration could not

as yet be measured nor its manner imagined, yet, to the extent that this

development could be realized right now, he acknowledged the task as

determining the leaders’ immediate programme of action and called the

new State-form whose realization was to be tackled at once, the “Commune

State”. But the “Commune State” had been characterized clearly enough by

Marx as freeing economic society to the greatest possible extent from

the shackles of the political principle. “Once the communal order of

things,” he wrote, “had been introduced in Paris and in the centres of

second rank, the old centralized government would have had to give way

in the provinces also to the producers’ self-government.” This shifting

of the power of decision from the political to the social principle —

which had been worked out and given its ideal basis in France by the

social thinking from Saint-Simon to Proudhon — was proclaimed by Lenin

as the baseline for the organizing activity of the leaders, but in point

of fact it did not become such a base-line.

The political principle established itself anew, in changed guise,

all-powerful; and the perils actually threatening the revolution gave

him a broad justification. Let it remain undisputed that the situation

as it was would not have allowed of a radical reduction of the political

principle; what, however, would at any rate have been possible was the

laying down of a base-line in accordance with which, as changing

circumstances allowed, the power-frontiers of the social principle could

have been extended.

Precisely the opposite happened. The representatives of the political

principle, that is, mainly the “professional revolutionaries” who got to

the top, jealously watched over the unrestrictedness of their sphere of

action. It is true that they augmented their ranks with competent

persons recruited from the people and that they filled up the gaps as

they arose, but those who were admitted to the directorate bore the

stamp of the political principle on their very souls; they became

elements of the State substance and ceased to be elements of the social

substance, and whoever resisted this change could not make himself heard

at the top or soon ceased to want to. The power of the social principle

could not and dared not grow.

The beginnings of a “producers’ self-government” to which the revolution

spontaneously gave rise, above all the local Soviets, became, despite

the apparent freedom of expression and decision, so enfeebled by the

all-pervading Party domination with its innumerable ways visible and

invisible of compelling people to conform to the doctrine and will of

the Central Authority, that little was left of that “outburst of

creative folk-power” which had produced them. The “dictatorship of the

proletariat” is de facto a dictatorship of the State over society, one

that is naturally acclaimed or tolerated by the overwhelming mass of

people for the sake of the completed social revolution they still hope

to see achieved by this means. The bureaucratism from which Lenin

suffered, and suffered precisely because it had been his business to

abolish it (the “Commune State” being, for him, nothing less than the

debureaucratized State), is merely the necessary concomitant to the

sovereignty of the political principle.

It is worth noting that within the Party itself attempts were made again

and again to break this sovereignty.

The most interesting of them, because it sprang from the industrial

workers, seems to my mind to be the “Workers’ Opposition” of March,

1921, which proposed that the Central Organs for the administration of

the whole national economy of the Republic should be elected by the

united trades-associations of producers. This was not a Producers’

Government by any means but it was an important step towards it,

although lacking any real decen-tralist character. Lenin rejected this

“anarcho-syndicalist deviation” on the ground that a union of producers

could be considered by a Marxist only in a classless society composed

exclusively of workers as producers, but that in Russia at present there

were, apart from remnants of the capitalist epoch, still two classes

left — peasants and workers. So long, therefore, as Communism was still

aiming at perfection and had not turned all peasants into workers a

self-governing economy could not, in Lenin’s opinion, be considered. In

other words (since the completion of Communism coincides with the

complete withering away of the State): a fundamental reduction of the

State’s internal sphere of power cannot be thought of before the State

has breathed its last. This paradox has become the operative maxim for

the directorate of the Soviet Regime.

Only from this point of view can Lenin’s changing attitude to the

Co-operative System be grasped as a whole.

There is no point, however, in picking on the contradictions in a

critical spirit. Lenin himself emphasized in 1918, not without reason,

that always when a new class enters the historical arena as the leader

of society there comes unfailingly a period of experiment and

vacillation over the choice of new methods to meet the new objective

situation; three years later he even asserted that things had only

proved, “as always in the history of revolutions, that the movement runs

in a zigzag”. He failed to notice that though all this may be true of

political revolutions, yet when, for the first time in history on so

large a scale, the element of social change is added, humanity as a

whole (and this means the people to whom events happen as well as the

witnesses of them) longs despite all the experiments and vacillations to

be made aware of the one clear earnest of the future: the movement

towards community in freedom. In the case of the Russian Revolution

whatever else may have appeared to them in the way of portents nothing

of this kind ever became visible, and Lenin’s changing attitude to the

Co-operative system is one proof the more that such a movement does not

exist.

In the pre-revolutionary period Lenin regarded the Cooperatives existing

in bourgeois society as “miserable palliatives” only and bulwarks of the

petty bourgeois spirit. A month before the October Revolution, faced

with the tremendous economic crisis that was sweeping Russia, he put

forward among the “revolutionary-democratic” measures to be taken

immediately, the compulsory unification of the whole nation into

Consumer Co-operatives. The following January he wrote in the draft of a

decree: “All citizens must belong to a local Consumer Co-operative” and

“the existing Consumer Co-operatives will be nationalized”. In some

Party circles this demand was understood and approved as aiming at the

elimination of the Co-operatives, for they saw, as a Bolshevist

theoretician no doubt rightly expressed it, in the element of voluntary

membership the essential hallmark of a Co-operative. Lenin did not

intend it to be understood that way. True, the Co-operative as a small

island in capitalist society was, so he said, only “a shop”, but the

Co-operative which, after the abolition of private capital, comprises

the whole of society “is Socialism”, and it is therefore the task of the

Soviet authorities to change all citizens without exception into members

of a general State Co-operative, “a single gigantic Co-operative”. He

does not see that the Co-operative principle thereby loses all

independent content, indeed its very existence as a principle, and that

nothing remains but a necessarily centralist-bureaucratic

State-institution under a name that has become meaningless. The

realization of this programme was undertaken in the years immediately

following: all Cooperatives were merged under the leadership of the

Consumer Co-operatives, which were turned into what amounted to State

goods-distribution centres. As to immediate nationalization pure and

simple, even two years after he had formulated the “Tasks of the Soviet

Authority” Lenin was still holding back. He denounced those who were

outspoken enough to demand a single nexus of State organizations to

replace the Co-operatives. “That would be all right, but it is

impossible”, he said, meaning “impossible at present”.

At the same time he held fast in principle to the idea of the

Co-operative as such, which, he declared (recalling Marx and his own

attitude at the Copenhagen Congress of the International in 1910, where

he had stressed the possible socializing influence of the Co-operative

after the capitalists had been expropriated), might be a means of

building the new economic order. It was therefore a question, he said,

of finding new Co-operative forms “which correspond to the economic and

political conditions of the proletarian dictatorship” and which

“facilitate the transition to real socialist centralism”. An institution

the very essence of which is the germ and core of social

decentralization was in consequence to be made the building element of a

new close-meshed State centralism of “socialist” stamp. Obviously Lenin

was not proceeding from theoretical assumptions but from the practical

requirements of the hour which, as the world knows, were extremely grave

and necessitated the most strenuous exertions. When Lenin, in a

statement reminiscent of the postulates of the “Utopians” and

“Anarchists” — but naturally twisting their meaning into its exact

opposite — demanded the union of the Producer and Consumer

Co-operatives, he did so because of the need to increase the supply of

goods: the fitness of this measure being proved by the experience of the

last two years. A year later we hear him pc5lemicizing violently against

the Cooperatives, which in their old and still uncon-quered form were a

“bulwark of counter-revolutionary opinion”. In his famous treatise on

Taxation in Kind (spring, 1921) he points emphatically to the danger

that lurks in the co-operation of small producers: it inevitably

strengthens petty bourgeois capitalism. “The freedom and rights of the

Cooperatives,” he continues, “mean under present conditions in Russia,

freedom and rights for capitalism. It would be a stupidity or a crime to

close our eyes to this obvious truth.” And further: “Under Soviet power

Co-operative capitalism, as distinct from private capitalism, creates a

variant of State capitalism and is as such advantageous and useful to us

at present.... We must endeavour to guide the development of capitalism

into the channels of Co-operative capitalism.” This instructive warning

only expressed what, in those years of falsely so-called “War Communism”

(in October, 1921, Lenin himself spoke retrospectively of the mistake

that had been made by “our having resolved to take in hand the immediate

changeover to communist production and distribution”) had been the

guiding principle in practice.

But in the wake of the unfavourable outcome of extreme centralization

and in connexion with the “New Economic policy” just beginning, a

regressive tendency was already making itself felt. Shortly before that

warning declaration of Lenin’s a decree had been promulgated on the

re-establishment of the various kinds of Co-operative — Consumer,

Agricultural and Industrial — as an economic organization. Two months

later there followed a decree with which a beginning was made for the

wholesale cancellation of the previously arranged merging of all

Co-operatives in the Association of Consumer Co-operatives, the

“Zentrosoyus”.

Towards the end of the same year the president of this Association

declared in a speech on the position and tasks of the Co-operatives that

it was only natural that the State Co-operative apparatus, functioning

in accordance with a fixed plan, should have become “bureaucratic,

inelastic and immovable”, and he made mention of the voices “that spoke

of the necessity of freeing the Co-operative from slavery to the State”,

indeed, he even admitted that there were times “when one had to speak of

such a freeing”. And true enough the people had often come to compare

compulsory organization with bondage. Now the authorities “completely

and unreservedly” abjured all official interference in the affairs of

the Agricultural Cooperatives and contented themselves with the wide

possibilities within the system of State Capitalism for “influencing and

regulating the Co-operatives by economic pressure”, until those that

“could not or would not adapt themselves” had been “rubbed out and

liquidated”. All the same, care was taken that reliable Party members

should get into the directorate of the central as well as of the

individual Societies and that the necessary “purges” were carried out

under the representatives of the Co-operative.

Two years after the appearance of his Taxation in Kind, Lenin, in May,

1923, the peak period of the New Economic Development, provided the

latter with its theoretical foundation in his great essay on the

Cooperative System. “When we went over to the New Economics,” he said,

“we acted precipitately in one respect, namely, we forgot to think of

the Co-operative System.” But he no longer contents himself now with

approving the Co-operative as a mere element to be built into the State

economy of the transition period. All of a sudden the Co-operative is

jerked into the very centre of the social new order. Lenin now describes

the Co-operative education of the people as “the only task that is left

us”. The “co-operativization” of Russia has acquired in his eyes a

“colossal”, a “gigantic”, a “limitless” significance. “It is,” he says,

“not yet the actual building of the socialist society, but it contains

everything necessary and sufficient for the building of this society.”

Yes, he goes even further: the Co-operative has become for him not

merely the pre-condition of social building but the very core of it. “A

social order of enlightened Cooperatives,” he asserts, “with common

ownership of the means of production, based on the class-victory of the

proletariat over the bourgeoisie — that is a socialist order of

society,” and he concludes: “The simple growth of the Co-operative is as

important for us as the growth of socialism,” yes, “conditional to the

complete co-operativization of Russia we would be already standing with

both feet on socialist ground.” In the planned, all-embracing State

Co-operative he sees the fulfilment of the “dreams” of the old

Co-operatives “begun with Robert Owen”. Here the contradiction between

idea and realization reaches its apogee. What those “Utopians”,

beginning with Robert Owen, were concerned about in their thoughts and

plans for association was the voluntary combination of people into small

independent units of communal life and work, and the voluntary

combination of those into a community of communities. What Lenin

describes as the fulfilment of these thoughts and plans is the

diametrical opposite of them, is an immense, utterly centralized complex

of State production-centres and State distribution-centres, a mechanism

of bureaucratically run institutes for production and consumption, each

locked into the other like cog-wheels: as for spontaneity, free

association, there is no longer any room for them whatever, no longer

the possibility of even dreaming of them — with the “fulfilment” of the

dream the dream is gone. Such at any rate had been Lenin’s conception of

the dovetailing of the Co-operative system into the State, and in that

otherwise very exhaustive essay of his written eight months before his

death he did not deny it. He wanted to give the movement which had then

reached its peak and which implied a reduction of centralism in all

fields, a definitive theoretical basis; but he denied it — necessarily,

given his train of thought — the basis of all bases: the element of

freedom.

Some people have thought they could see in this marked turning of

Lenin’s towards the Co-operatives an approach to the theories of the

Russian Populists, for whom such forms of communal association as

persisted or renewed themselves within the body of the people were the

core and bud of a future order of society, and whom Lenin had fought for

so long. But the affinity is only apparent. Even now Lenin was not

thinking for a moment of the Co-operative as a spontaneous, independent

formation growing dynamically and a law unto itself. What he was now

dreaming of, after all his grievous efforts to weld the people into a

uniform whole that would follow him with utter devotion, after all his

disappointments over “bureaucratic excrescences”, with the mark of

illness on him and near to death — was to unite two things which cannot

be united, the all-overshadowing State and the full-blooded

Co-operative, in other words: compulsion and freedom. At all periods of

human history the Co-operative and its prototypes have been able really

to develop only in the gaps left by the effective power of the State and

its prototypes. A State with no gaps inevitably precludes the

development of the Co-operative. Lenin’s final idea was so to extend the

Co-operative in scope and so to unify it in structure that it would only

differ from the State functionally but coincide with it materially. That

is the squaring of the circle.

Stalin has explained the change in Lenin’s attitude to the Co-operatives

from 1921 to 1923 by saying that State Capitalism had not gained

foothold to the degree desired, and that the Co-operatives with their

ten million members had begun to ally themselves very closely with the

newly developing socialized industries. This certainly draws attention

to Lenin’s real motives, but it is not sufficient to explain his

unexpected enthusiasm for Co-operatives. Rather, it is obvious that

Lenin now perceived in the Cooperative principle a counterbalance to the

bureaucracy he found so offensive. But the Co-operative could only have

become such a counterbalance in its original free form, not in Lenin’s

compulsory form, which was dependent on a truly “gigantic” bureaucracy.

As we have said, Lenin’s idea of compulsion was not carried out to the

full. The regressive movement finally led, in May, 1924, to the

restoration of voluntary membership, at first only for full citizens,

that is, citizens entitled to vote, but later, early in 1928, in the

rural Consumer Co-operatives for others as well, although with some

limitation as to their rights. Towards the end of 1923 the Board of the

Zentrosoyus stated: “We must confess that this change-over to free

membership ought to have been made earlier. We could then have met this

crisis on a surer foundation.” All the same an indirect compulsion was

henceforth exercised by means of preferential supplies to the

Co-operatives. In 1925 we hear from the mouth of the then president of

the Central Council of the Trades Unions that the Government, when

issuing subsidies and loans, took account of a person’s membership in a

manner that came very near to compulsion. And ten years afterwards the

urban Co-operatives, which had long suffered gravely under State

interference, were abolished at a stroke in 654 cities.

What has been said will suffice to show how the Soviet regime

continually oscillated in practice between immediate radical

centralization and provisional tolerance of relatively decentralized

areas, but never, even to the slightest degree, made the trend towards

the goal of Socialism as formulated by Marx, namely, “the sloughing off

of the political husk”, the maxim of its conduct. One might amplify this

by mentioning the changing attitude it adopted during the Five Year Plan

of 1926 to 1931 to the collectivization of the peasantry. I shall

content myself with listing a few characteristic proclamations and

procedures in chronological sequence.

Towards the end of 1927, Molotov drew attention to the backwardness of

agriculture and in order to overcome it demanded that the village

Collectives — valuable despite their defects — should develop in

conjunction with the general plan of industrialization. In June, 1928,

Stalin declared it necessary to expand the existing Collectives as

intensively as possible and establish new ones. In April, 1929, the

slogan was given out at the Party Congress for the creation, still

within the framework of the Five Year Plan, of a socialized area of

production as a counterbalance to individual economy. The process of

collectivization soon took on more or less obvious forms of compulsion

and seemed so successful at first that Stalin stated at the end of the

same year: “If collectivization goes on at this rate the contrast

between town and village will be wiped out in accelerated tempo.” At the

beginning of 1930 the Central Committee of the Party estimated that the

tempo envisaged in the Plan had been outstripped, and emphatically

stressed the need for a concerted campaign against all attempts to slow

the movement down. In three years’ time complete collectivization would

have been achieved with the techniques of persuasion, “aided by certain

levers”. The Executive Committees of the various districts vied with one

another in the thoroughness of their administrative measures; a district

was not infrequently declared an “area of complete collectivization” and

where persuasion did not help threats were used. But it soon proved that

the impression of smashing success, an impression fostered by the marked

increase in the number of collective farm-economies, was a delusion. The

peasants reacted in their own way, by anything from the slaughtering of

cattle to actual uprisings, and the measures taken to liquidate the

kulaks did little to remedy the evil; the small peasants often joined

forces and the Red Army itself with its peasant sons reflected the

prevailing dissatisfaction.

Then Stalin, in his famous article “Dizzy with Success”, performed the

volte face that seemed necessary. The policy of collectivization, he

declared, rested according to Lenin’s doctrine on voluntary action. “You

cannot create collective economies by force. That would be stupid and

reactionary.” Lenin had also taught, he said, that “it would be the

greatest folly to try to irmtroduce collective cultivation of the land

by decree”. The voluntary principle had suffered injury, the tempo of

action had not corresponded to that of development, important inter-med

iate stages on the way to the complete Village Commune had been

by-passed. The Central Committee was therefore arranging, he said, for

an end to be made of compulsory methods. In July the Party Congress

proclaimed that collective economies could only be based on the

principle of voluntary admission, all attempts to apply force or

administrative coercion were “an offence against the Party line and an

abuse of power”. In the autumn the Commissar for Agriculture once more

criticized “the crude and ultra-administrative metlods which have been

employed in respect of the collective economies and their members”. But

less than five months lateT, after a considerable number of peasants, as

a result of the greater measure of freedom but in spite of the

privileges newly offered, had left the Collectives, the same Commissar

said, in his Report to the Congress of the Soviets regarding the sma.ll

and middling peasants who had not joined the Collective Movement: “Who

are they for, for the kulaks or for the Collectives? ... Is it possible

to remain neutral to-day?” In other words: he who is not for

collectivization is against the Soviet regime. The Congress confirmed

this view. During the nex.t few years renewed measures of severity

followed the alleviations necessitated by the famine crisis, until in

1936 nearly 90 per cent of the peasants had been collectivized, of

-which the Full Communes comprised only a diminishing fraction.

The old rustic Russia, as Maynard has rightly said, lasted up to 1929.

That it was bundled out of the world with its traditional system of

land-cultivation can, from the point of view of economic efficiency,

only be approved. But, from the point of vie-w of social structure, the

question must be put very differently. From this angle there should be

no talk of an Either-Or; the specific task was so to transform the

existing structural units that they should be equal to the new

conditions and demands, and at the same time retain their structural

character and nature as self-activating cells. This task has not been

fulfilled. It has been said, rightly enough, that Marxist thinking,

geared as it is to the rationalized big-business form of farming, the

industrialization and mechanization of agriculture, has been grafted

onto the old Russian Village Community which had accustomed the peasants

to the communal management of land. But the politically inspired

tendency to turn agriculture into a department of industry and the

peasants into the hired workers of this industry; the tendency to an

all-embracing and all-regulating State economy; a tendency which regards

the Agricultural Co-operative only as a stepping-stone to the Full

Commune and this in its turn only as a stepping-stone to the local

branch of the Agricultural Department of the Universal State Factory —

such a tendency destroyed and was bound to destroy the whole structural

value of the Village Community. One cannot treat either an individual or

a social organism as a means to an end absolutely, without robbing it of

its life-substance. “From the standpoint of Leninism,” said Stalin in

1933, “the collective economies, and the Soviets as well, are, taken as

a form of organization, a weapon and nothing but a weapon.” One cannot

in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a

club to put forth leaves.

Far longer than with any other people the “medieval” tendency to

associate in little bands for the purpose of common work has been

preserved among the Russians. Of the most singular social formation to

have sprung from this tendency, the Artel, Kropotkin could say some

forty years ago that it constituted the proper substance of Russian

peasant life — a loose, shifting association of fishermen and hunters,

manual workers and traders, hauliers and returned Siberian convicts,

peasants who travelled to the city to work as weavers or carpenters, and

peasants who went in for communal corn-growing or cattle-raising in the

village, with, however, divisions as between communal and individual

property. Here an incomparable building element lay ready to hand for a

great re-structural idea. The Bolshevist Revolution never used it. It

had no use for independent small communities. Among the various types of

“Kolkhoz” it favoured “for the present”, as Stalin said, the

agricultural Artel for economic reasons, but naturally the revolution

saw in it nothing but a stepping-stone. One of Russia’s best

theoreticians of economics has defined the aim.

Land cultivation, he said, would only be regarded as socialized when all

the agricultural Artels had been replaced by State Collectives, when

land, means of production and livestock belonged to the State. Then the

peasants would live in community-houses as hired labourers of the State,

in huge agrarian cities, themselves the nodes of areas blessed with more

and more electrification. The fantastic picture to which this conception

belongs is in very truth the picture of a society finally and utterly

de-structured and destroyed. It is more — it is the picture of a State

that has devoured society altogether.

The Soviet regime has achieved great things in the technology of

economics and still greater things in the technology of war. Its

citizens seem in the main to approve of it, for a variety of reasons,

negative and positive, fictitious and real. In their attitude vague

resignation appears mixed’with practical confidence. It can be said in

general that the individual submits to this regime, which grants him so

little freedom of thought and action, perhaps because there is no going

back and as regards technical achievements there is at least a going

forward. Things look very different, at least to the impartial eye, when

it comes to what has actually been achieved in the matter of Socialism:

a mass of socialistic expostulations, no Socialist form at all. “What,”

asked the great sociologist Max “Weber in 1918, “will that ‘association’

look like of which the Communist Manifesto speaks? What germ-cells of

that kind of organization has Socialism in particular to offer if ever

it gets a real chance to seize power and rule as it wills?” In the

country where Socialism did get this chance there still existed such

germ-cells, which no other country in our epoch could rival; but they

were not brought to fruition. Nevertheless, there is still

breathing-space for change and transformation — by which is meant not a

change of tactics such as Lenin and his fellow-workers often effected,

but a change of fundamentals. The change cannot go backwards, only

forwards — but in a new direction. Whether forces as yet unnamed are

stirring in the depths and will suddenly burst forth to bring about this

change, on this question tremendous things depend.

Pierre Leroux, the man who appears to have used the word “Socialism” for

the first time, knew what he was saying when he addressed the National

Assembly in 1848 with these words: “If you have no will for human

association I tell you that you are exposing civilization to the fate of

dying in fearful agony.”

X . IN THE MIDST OF CRISIS

For the last thiree decadees we have felt that we were living in the

initial phases of the greatest crisis humanity has ever known. It grows

increasingly clear to us that the tremendous happenings of the past

years, too, can be understood only as symptoms of this crisis. It is not

merely the crisis of one economic and social system being supersseded by

another, more or less ready to take its place; rather all systems, old

and new, are equally involved in the crisis. What is in question,

therefore, is nothing less than man’s whole existence in the world.

Ages ago, far beyond our calculation, this creature “Man” set out on his

jouimey; from the point of view of Nature a well-nigh incomprehensible

anomaly; from the point of view of the spirit an incarnation hardly less

incomprehensible, perhaps unique; from the point of view of both a being

whose very essence it was to be threatened with disaster every instant,

both from within and without, exposed to deeper and deeper crises.

During the ages of his earthly journey man has multiplied what he likes

to call his “power over Nature” in increasingly rapid tempo, and he has

borne what he likes to call the “creations of his spirit” from triumph

to triumph. But at the same time he has felt more and more profoundly,

as one crisis succeeded another, how fragile all his glories are; and in

moments of clairvoyance he has come to realize that in spite of

everything he likes to call “progress” he is not travelling along the

high-road at all, but is picking his precarious way along a narrow ledge

between two abysses. The graver the crisis becomes the more earnesst and

consciously responsible is the knowledge demanded of us; for although

what is demanded is a deed, only that deed which is born of knowledge

will help to overcome the cirisis. In a time of great crisis it is not

enough to look back to the immediate past in order to bring the enigma

of the present nearer to solution; we have to bring the stage of the

journey we have now reached face to face with its beginnings, so far as

we can picture them.

The essential thing among all those things which once helped man to

emerge from Nature and, notwithstanding his feebleness as a natural

being, to assert himself — more essential even than the making of a

“technical” world out of things expressly formed for the purpose — was

this: that he banded together with his own kind for protection and

hunting, food gathering and work; and did so in such a way that from the

very beginning and thereafter to an increasing degree he faced the

others as more or less independent entities and communicated with them

as such, addressing and being addressed by them in that manner. This

creation of a “social” world out of persons at once mutually dependent

and independent differed in kind from all similar undertakings on the

part of animals, just as the technical work of man differed in kind from

all the animals’ works. Apes, too, make use of some stick they happen to

have found, as a lever, a digging-tool or a weapon; but that is an

affair of chance only: they cannot conceive and produce a tool as an

object constituted so and not otherwise and having an existence of its

own. And again, many of the insects live in societies built up on a

strict division of labour; but it is just this division of labour that

governs absolutely their relations with one another; they are all as it

were tools; only, their own society is the thing that makes use of them

for its “instinctive” purposes; there is no improvisation, no degree,

however modest, of mutual independence, no possibility of “free” regard

for one another, and thus no person-to-person relationship.

Just as the specific technical creations of man mean the conferring of

independence on things, so his specific social creation means the

conferring of independence on beings of his own kind. It. is in the

light of this specifically human idiosyncrasy that we have to interpret

man’s journey with all its ups and downs, and so also the point we have

reached on this journey, our great and particular crisis.

In the evolution of mankind hitherto this, then, is the line that

predominates: the forming and re-forming of communities on the basis of

growing personal independence, their mutual recognition and

collaboration on that basis. The two most important steps that the man

of early times took on the road to human society can be established with

some certainty. The first is that inside the individual clan each

individual, through an extremely primitive form of division of labour,

was recognized and utilized in his special capacity, so that the clan

increasingly took on the character of an ever-renewed association of

persons each the vehicle of a different function. The second is that

different clans would, under certain conditions, band together in quest

of food and for campaigns, and consolidated their mutual help as customs

and laws that took firmer and firmer root; so that as once between

individuals, so now between communities people discerned and

acknowledged differences of nature and function. Wherever genuine human

society has since developed it has always been on this same basis of

functional autonomy, mutual recognition and mutual responsibility,

whether individual or collective. Power-centres of various kinds have

split off, organizing and guaranteeing the common order and security of

all; but to the political sphere in the stricter sense, the State with

its police-system and its bureaucracy, there was always opposed the

organic, functionally organized society as such, a great society built

up of various societies, the great society in which men lived and

worked, competed with one another and helped one another; and in each of

the big and little societies composing it, in each of these communes and

communities the individual human being, despite all the difficulties and

conflicts, felt himself at home as once in the clan, felt himself

approved and affirmed in his functional independence and responsibility.

All this changed more and more as the centralistic political principle

subordinated the de-centralistic social principle. The crucial thing

here was not that the State, particularly in its more or less

totalitarian forms, weakened and gradually displaced the free

associations, but that the political principle with all its centralistic

features percolated into the associations themselves, modifying their

structure and their whole inner life, and thus politicized society to an

ever-increasing extent. Society’s assimilation in the State was

accelerated by the fact that, as a result of modern industrial

development and its ordered chaos, involving the struggle of all against

all for access to raw materials and for a larger share of the

world-market, there grew up, in place of the old struggles between

States, struggles between whole societies. The individual society,

feeling itself threatened not only by its neighbours’ lust for

aggression but also by things in general, knew no way of salvation save

in complete submission to the principle of centralized power; and, in

the democratic forms of society no less than in its totalitarian forms,

it made this its guiding principle.

Everywhere the only thing of importance was the minute organization of

power, the unquestioning observance of slogans, the saturation of the

whole of society with the real or supposed interests of the State.

Concurrently with this there is an internal development. In the

monstrous confusion of modern life, only thinly disguised by the

reliable functioning of the economic and State-apparatus, the individual

clings desperately to the collectivity. The little society in which he

was embedded cannot help him; only the great collectivities, so he

thinks, can do that, and he is all too willing to let himself be

deprived of personal responsibility: he only wants to obey. And the most

valuable of all goods — the life between man and man — gets lost in the

process; the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal

relationships wither; and the very spirit of man hires itself out as a

functionary. Ther .sOnal human being ceases to be the living member of a

social body and becomes a cog in the “collective” machine. Just as his

degenerate technology is causing man to lose the feel of good work and

proportion, so the degrading social life he leads is causing him to lose

the feel of community — just when he is so full of the illusion of

living in perfect devotion to his community.

A crisis of this kind cannot be overcome by struggling back to an

earlier stage of the journey, but only by trying to master the problems

as they are, without minimizing them. There is no going back for us, we

have to go through with it. But we shall only get through if we know

where we want to We must begin, obviously, with the establishment of a

vital peace which will deprive the political principle of its supremacy

over the social principle. And this primary objective cannot in its turn

be reached by any devices of political organization, but only by the

resolute will of all peoples to cultivate the territories and raw

materials of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together. At this

point, however, we are threatened by a danger greater than all the

previous ones: the danger of a gigantic centralization of power covering

the whole planet and devouring all free community. Everything depends on

not handing the work of planetary management over to the political

principle.

Common management is only possible as socialistic management. But if the

fatal question for contemporary man is: Can he or can he not decide in

favour of, and educate himself up to, a common socialistic economy? then

the propriety of the question lies in an inquiry into Socialism itself:

what sort of Socialism is it to be, under whose aegis the common economy

of man is to come about, if at all?

The ambiguity of the terms we are employing is greater here than

anywhere else. People say, for instance, that Socialism is the passing

of the control of the means of production out of the hands of the

entrepreneurs into the hands of the collectivity; but again, it all

depends on what you mean by “collectivity”. If it is what we generally

call the “State”, that is to say, an institution in which a virtually

unorganized mass allows its affairs to be conducted by “representation”,

as they call it, then the chief change in a socialistic society will be

this: that the workers will feel themselves represented by the holders

of power. But what is representation? Does not the worst defect of

modern society lie precisely in everybody letting himself be represented

ad libitum? And in a “socialistic” society will there not, on top of

this passive political representation, be added a passive economic

representation, so that, with everybody letting himself be represented

by everybody else, we reach a state of practically unlimited

representation and hence, ultimately, the reign of practically unlimited

centralist accumulation of power? But the more a human group lets itself

be represented in the management of its common affairs, and the more it

lets itself be represented from outside, the less communal life there is

in it and the more impoverished it becomes as a community. For community

— not the primitive sort, but the sort possible and appropriate to

modern man — declares itself primarily in the common and active

management of what it has in common, and without this it cannot exist.

The primary aspiration of all history is a genuine community of human

beings — genuine because it is community all through. A community that

failed to base itself on the actual and communal life of big and little

groups living and working together, and on their mutual relationships,

would be fictitious and counterfeit. Hence everything depends on whether

the collectivity into whose hands the control of the means of production

passes will facilitate and promote in its very structure and in all its

institutions the genuine common life of the various groups composing it

— on whether, in fact, these groups themselves become proper foci of the

productive process; therefore on whether the masses are so organized in

their separate organizations (the various “communities”) as to be as

powerful as the common economy of man permits; therefore on whether

centralist representation only goes as far as the new order of things

absolutely demands. The fatal question does not take the form of a

fundamental Either-Or: it is only a question of the right line of

demarcation that has to be drawn ever anew — the thousandfold system of

demarcation between the spheres which must of necessity be centralized

and those which can operate in freedom; between the degree of government

and the degree of autonomy; between the law of unity and the claims of

community. The unwearying scrutiny of conditions in terms of the claims

of community, as something continually exposed to the depredations of

centralist power — the custody of the true boundaries, ever changing in

accordance with changing historical circumstances: such would be the

task of humanity’s spiritual conscience, a Supreme Court unexampled in

kind, the right true representation of a living idea. A new incarnation

is waiting here for Plato’s “custodians”.

Representation of an idea, I say: not of a rigid principle but of a

living form that wants to be shaped in the daily stuff of this earth.

Community should not be made into a principle; it, too, should always

satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction. The realization of

community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for

all time: always it must be the moment’s answer to the moment’s

question, and nothing more.

In the interests of its vital meaning, therefore, the idea of community

must be guarded against all contamination by sentimentality or

emotionalism. Community is never a mere attitude of mind, and if it is

feeling it is an inner disposition that is felt. Community is the inner

disposition or constitution of a life in common, which knows and

embraces in itself hard “calculation”, adverse “chance”, the sudden

access of “anxiety”. It is community of tribulation and only because of

that community of spirit; community of toil and only because of that

community of salvation. Even those communities which call the spirit

their master and salvation their Promised Land, the “religious”

communities, are community only if they serve their lord and master in

the midst of simple, unexalted, unselected reality, a reality not so

much chosen by them as sent to them just as it is; they are community

only if they prepare the way to the Promised Land through the thickets

of this pathless hour. True, it is not “works” that count, but the work

of faith does. A community of faith truly exists only when it is a

community of work.

The real essence of community is to be found in the fact — manifest or

otherwise — that is has a centre. The real beginning of a community is

when its members have a common relation to the centre overriding all

other relations: the circle is described by the radii, not by the points

along its circumference. And the originality of the centre cannot be

discerned unless it is discerned as being transpicuous to the light of

something divine. All this is true; but the more earthly, the more

creaturely, the more attached the centre is, the truer and more

transpicuous it will be. This is where the “social” element comes in.

Not as something separate, but as the all-pervading realm where man

stands the test; and it is here that the truth of the centre is proved.

The early Christians were not content with the community that existed

alongside or even above the world, and they went into the desert so as

to have no more community save with God and no more disturbing world.

But it was shown them that God does not wish man to be alone with him;

and above the holy impotence of the hermit there rose the Brotherhood.

Finally, going beyond St. Benedict, St. Francis entered into alliance

with all creatures.

Yet a community need not be “founded”. Wherever historical destiny had

brought a group of men together in a common fold, there was room for the

growth of a genuine community; and there was no need of an altar to the

city deity in the midst when the citizens knew they were united round —

and by — the Nameless.

A living togetherness, constantly renewing itself, was already there,

and all that needed strengthening was the immediacy of relationships. In

the happiest instances common affairs were deliberated and decided not

through representatives but in gatherings in the market-place; and the

unity that was felt in public permeated all personal contacts. The

danger of seclusion might hang over the community, but the communal

spirit banished it; for here this spirit flourished as nowhere else and

broke windows for itself in the narrow walls, with a large view of

people, mankind and the world.

All this, I may be told, has gone irrevocably and for ever. The modern

city has no agora and the modern man has no time for negotiations of

which his elected representatives can very well relieve him. The

pressure of numbers and the forms of organization have destroyed any

real togetherness. Work forges other personal links than does leisure,

sport again others than politics, the day is cleanly divided and the

soul too.

These links are material ones; though we follow our common interests and

tendencies together, we have no use for “immediacy”. The collectivity is

not a warm, friendly gathering but a great link-up of economic and

political forces inimical to the play of romantic fancies, only

understandable in terms of quantity, expressing itself in actions and

effects — a thing which the individual has to belong to with no

intimacies of any kind but all the time conscious of his energetic

contribution. Any “unions” that resist the inevitable trend of events

must disappear. There is still the family, of course, which, as a

domestic community, seems to demand and guarantee a modicum of communal

life; but it too will either emerge from the crisis in which it is

involved, as an association for a common purpose, or else it will

perish.

Faced with this medley of correct premises and absurd conclusions I

declare in favour of a rebirth of the commune. A rebirth — not a

bringing back. It cannot in fact be brought back, although I sometimes

think that every touch of helpful neighbourliness in the

apartment-house, every wave of warmer comradeship in the lulls and

“knock-offs” that occur even in the most perfectly “rationalized”

factory, means an addition to the world’s community-content; and

although a rightly constituted village commune sometimes strikes me as

being a more real thing than a parliament; but it cannot be brought

back. Yet whether a rebirth of the commune will ensue from the “water

and spirit” of the social transformation that is imminent — on this, it

seems to me, hangs the whole fate of the human race. An organic

commonwealth — and only such commonwealths can join together to form a

shapely and articulated race of men — will never build itself up out of

individuals but only out of small and ever smaller communities: a nation

is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities. If

the family does not emerge from, the crisis which today has all the

appearance of a disintegration, purified and renewed, then the State

will be nothing more than a machine stoked with the bodies of

generations of men. The community that would be capable of such a

renewal exists only as a residue. If I speak of its rebirth I am not

thinking of a permanent world-situation but an altered one. By the new

communes — they might equally well be called the new Co-operatives — I

mean the subjects of a changed economy: the collectives into whose hands

the control of the means of production is to pass. Once again,

everything depends on whether they will be ready.

Just how much economic and political autonomy — for they will of

necessity be economic and political units at once — will have to be

conceded to them is a technical question that must be asked and answered

over and over again; but asked and answered beyond the technical level,

in the knowledge that the internal authority of a community hangs

together with its external authority. The relationship between

centralism and decentralization is a problem which, as we have seen,

cannot be approached in principle, but, like everything to do with the

relationship between idea and reality, only with great spiritual tact,

with the constant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right

proportion between them. Centralization — but only so much as is

indispensable in the given conditions of time and place. And if the

authorities responsible for the drawing and re-drawing of lines of

demarcation keep an alert conscience, the relations between the base and

the apex of the power-pyramid will be very different from what they are

now, even in States that call themselves Communist, i.e. struggling for

community. There will have to be a system of representation, too, in the

sort of social pattern I have in mind; but it will not, as now, be

composed of the pseudo-representatives of amorphous masses of electors

but of representatives well tested in the life and work of the communes.

The represented will not, as they are to-day, be bound to their

representatives by some windy abstraction, by the mere phraseology of a

party-programme, but concretely, through common action and common

experience.

The essential thing, however, is that the process of community-building

shall run all through the relations of the communes with one another.

Only a community of com^ munities merits the title of Commonwealth.

The picture I have hastily sketched will doubtless be laid among the

documents of “Utopian Socialism” until the storm turns them up again.

Just as I do not believe in Marx’s “gestation” of the new form, so I do

not believe either in Bakunin’s virgin-birth from the womb of

Revolution. But I do believe in the meeting of idea and fate in the

creative hour.

EPILOGUE. AN EXPERIMENT THAT DID NOT FAIL

The era of advanced Capitalism has broken down the structure of society.

The society which preceded it was composed of different societies; it

was complex, and pluralistic in structure. This is what gave it its

peculiar social vitality and enabled it to resist the totalitarian

tendencies inherent in the pre-revolu-tionary centralistic State, though

many elements were very much weakened in their autonomous life. This

resistance was broken by the policy of the French Revolution, which was

directed against the special rights of all free associations. Thereafter

centralism in its new, capitalistic form succeeded where the old had

failed: in atomizing society. Exercising control over the machines and,

with their help, over the whole society, Capitalism wants to deal only

with individuals; and the modern State aids and abets it by

progressively dispossessing groups of their autonomy. The militant

organizations which the proletariat erected against Capitalism — Trades

Unions in the economic sphere and the Party in the political — are

unable in the nature of things to counteract this process of

dissolution, since they have no access to the life of society itself and

its foundations: production and consumption. Even the transfer of

capital to the State is powerless to modify the social structure, even

when the State establishes a network of compulsory associations, which,

having no autonomous life, are unfitted to become the cells of a new

socialist society.

From this point of view the heart and soul of the Co-operative Movement

is to be found in the trend of a society towards structural renewal, the

re-acquisition, in new tectonic forms, of the internal social

relationships, the establishment of a new consociatio consociationum. It

is (as I have shown) a fundamental error to view this trend as romantic

or Utopian merely because in its early stages it had romantic

reminiscences and utopian fantasies. At bottom it is thoroughly topical

and constructive; that is to say, it aims at changes which, in the given

circumstances and with the means at its disposal, are feasible. And,

psychplogically speaking, it is based on one of the eternal human needs,

even though this need has often been forcibly suppressed or rendered

insensible: the need of man to feel his own house as a room in some

greater, all-embracing structure in which he is at home, to feel that

the other inhabitants of it with whom he lives and works are all

acknowledging and confirming his individual existence. An association

based on community of views and aspirations alone cannot satisfy this

need; the only thing that can do that is an association which makes for

communal living. But here the co-operative organization of production or

consumption proves, each in its own way, inadequate, because both touch

the individual only at a certain point and do not mould his actual life.

On account of their merely partial or functional character all such

organizations are equally unfitted to act as cells of a new society.

Both these partial forms have undergone vigorous development, but the

Consumer Co-operatives only in highly bureaucratic forms and the

Producer Co-operatives in highly specialized forms: they are less able

to embrace the whole life of society to-day than ever. The consciousness

of this fact is leading to the synthetic form: the Full Co-operative. By

far the most powerful effort in this direction is the Village Commune,

where communal living is based on the amalgamation of production and

consumption, production being understood not exclusively as agriculture

alone but as the organic union of agriculture with industry and with the

handicrafts as well.

The repeated attempts that have been made during the last 150 years,

both in Europe and America, to found village settlements of this kind,

whether communistic or co-operative in the narrower sense, have mostly

met with failure.[8] I would apply the word “failure” not merely to

those settlements, or attempts at settlements, which after a more or

less short-lived existence either disintegrated completely or took on a

Capitalist complexion, thus going over to the enemy camp; I would also

apply it to those that maintained themselves in isolation. For the real,

the truly structural task of the new Village Communes begins with their

federation, that is, their union under the same principle that operates

in their internal structure. Hardly anywhere has it come to this. Even

where, as with the Dukhobors in Canada, a sort of federative union

exists, the federation itself continues to be isolated and exerts no

attractive and educative influence on society as a whole, with the

result that the task never gets beyond its beginnings and, consequently,

there can be no talk of success in the socialist sense. It is remarkable

that Kropotkin saw in these two elements — isolation of the settlements

from one another and isolation from the rest of society — the efficient

causes of their failure even as ordinarily understood.

The socialistic task can only be accomplished to the degree that the new

Village Commune, combining the various forms of production and uniting

production and consumption, exerts a structural influence on the

amorphous urban society. The influence will only make itself felt to the

full if, and to the extent that, further technological developments

facilitate and actually require the decentralization of industry; but

even now a pervasive force is latent in the modern communal village, and

it may spread to the towns. It must be emphasized again that the

tendency we are dealing with is constructive and topical: it would be

romantic and Utopian to want to destroy the towns, as once it was

romantic and Utopian to want to destroy the machines, but it is

constructive and topical to try to transform the town organically in the

closest possible alliance with technological developments and to turn it

into an aggregate composed of smaller units.

Indeed, many countries to-day show significant beginnings in this

respect.

As I see history and the present, there is only one all-out effort to

create a Full Co-operative which justifies our speaking of success in

the socialistic sense, and that is the Jewish Village Commune in its

various forms, as found in Palestine. No doubt it, too, is up against

grave problems in the sphere of internal relationships, federation, and

influence on society at large, but it alone has proved its vitality in

all three spheres. Nowhere else in the history of communal settlements

is there this tireless groping for the form of community-life best

suited to this particular human group, nowhere else this continual

trying and trying again, this going to it and getting down to it, this

critical awareness, this sprouting of new branches from the same stem

and out of the same formative impulse. And nowhere else is there this

alertness to one’s own problems, this constant facing up to them, this

tough will to come to terms with them, and this indefatigable struggle —

albeit seldom expressed in words — to overcome them. Here, and here

alone, do we find in the emergent community organs of self-knowledge

whose very sensitiveness has constantly reduced its members to despair —

but this is a despair that destroys wishful thinking only to raise up in

its stead a greater hope which is no longer emotionalism but sheer work.

Thus on the soberest survey and on the soberest reflection one can say

that, in this one spot in a world of partial failures, we can recognize

a non-failure — and, such as it is, a signal n on-failure.

What are the reasons for this? We could not get to know the peculiar

character of this co-operative colonization better than by following up

these reasons.

One element in thesse reasons has been repeatedly pointed out: that the

Jewish Village Commune in Palestine owes its existence not to a doctrine

but to a situation, to the needs, the stress, the demands of the

situation. In establishing the “Kvuza” or Village Commune the primary

thing was not ideology but work.

This is certainly correct, but with one limitation. True, the p.oint was

to solve certain problems of work and construction which the Palestinian

reality forced on the settlers, by collaborating; what a loose

conglomeration of individuals could not, in the nature of things, hope

to overcome, or even try to overcome, things being what they were, the

collective could try to do and actually succeeded in doing. But what is

called the ““ideology” — I personally prefer the old but untarnished

word “Ideal” — was not just something to be added afterwards, that would

justify the accomplished facts. In the spirit of the members of the

first Palestinian Communes ideal motivesjoined hands with the dictates

of the hour; and in the motives there was a curious mixture of memories

of the Russian Artel, impressions left over from reading the so-called

“utopian” Socialists, and the haJf^unconscious after-effects of the

Bible’s teachings about social justice. The important thing is that this

ideal motive remaimed loose and pliable in almost every respect.

There were various dreams about the future: people saw before them a

new, more comprehensive form of the family, they saw therrnselves as the

advance guard of the Workers’ Movement, as the direct instrument for the

realization of Socialism, as the prototype of the new society; they had

as their goal the creation of a new man and a new world. But nothin g of

this ever hardened into a cut-and-dried programme.

These men did not, as everywhere else in the history of cooperative

settlements, bring a plan with them, a plan which the concrete situation

could only fill out, not modify; the ideal gave an impetus but no dogma,

it stimulated but did not dictate.

More important, however, is that, behind the Palestinian situation that

set the tasks of work and reconstruction, there was the historical

situation of a people visited by a great external crisis and responding

to it with a great inner change. Further, this historical situation

threw up an elite — the “Chaluzim” or pioneers — drawn from all classes

of the people and thus beyond class. The form of life that befitted this

elite was the Village Commune, by which I mean not a single note but the

whole scale, ranging from the social structure of “mutual aid” to the

Commune itself. This form was the best fitted to fulfil the tasks of the

central Chaluzim, and at the same time the one in which the social ideal

could materially influence the national idea. As the historical

conditions have shown, it was impossible for this elite and the form of

life it favoured, to becomie static or isolated; all its tasks,

everything it did, its whole pioneering spirit made it the centre of

attraction and a central influence. The Pioneer spirit (“Chaluziuth”)

is, in every part of it, related to the growth of a new and transformed

national community; the moment it grew self-sufficient it would have

lost its soul. The Village Commune, as the nucleus of the evolving

society, had to exert a powerful pull on the people dedicated to this

evolution, and it had not merely to educate its friends and associates

for genuine communal living, but also to exercise a formative structural

effect on the social periphery. The dynamics of history determined the

dynamic character of the relations between Village Commune and society.

This character suffered a considerable setback when the tempo of the

crisis in the outer world became so rapid, and its symptoms so drastic,

that the inner change could not keep pace with them. To the extent that

Palestine had been turned from the one and only land of the “Aliyah” —

ascent — into a country of immigrants, a quasi-Chaluziuth came into

being alongside the genuine Chaluziuth. The pull exerted by the Commune

did not abate, but its educative powers were not adapted to the influx

of very different human material, and this material sometimes succeeded

in influencing the tone of the community. At the same time the Commune’s

relations with society at large underwent a change. As the structure of

the latter altered, it withdrew more and more from the transforming

influence of the focal cells, indeed, it began in its turn to exert an

influence on them — not always noticeable at first, but unmistakable

to-day — by seizing on certain essential elements in them and

assimilating them to itself.

In the life of peoples, and particularly peoples who find themselves in

the midst of some historical crisis, it is of crucial importance whether

genuine elites (which means elites that do not usurp but are called to

their central function) arise, whether these elites remain loyal to

their duty to society, establishing a relationship to it rather than to

themselves, and finally, whether they have the power to replenish and

renew themselves in a manner conformable with their task. The historical

destiny of the Jewish settlements in Palestine brought the elite of the

Chaluzim to birth, and it found its social nuclear form in the Village

Commune.

Another wave of this same destiny has washed up, together with the

quasi-Chaluzim, a problem for the real Chaluzim elite. It has caused a

problem that was always latent to come to the surface. They have not yet

succeeded in mastering it and yet must master it before they can reach

the next stage of their task. The inner tension between those who take

the whole responsibility for the community on their shoulders and those

who somehow evade it, can be resolved only at a very deep level.

The point where the problem emerges is neither the individual’s

relationship to the idea nor his relationship to the community nor yet

to work; on all these points even the quasi-Chaluzim gird up their loins

and do by and large what is expected of them. The point where the

problem emerges, where people are apt to slip, is in their relationship

to their fellows. By this I do not mean the question, much discussed in

its day, of the intimacy that exists in the small and the loss of this

intimacy in the big Kvuza; I mean something that has nothing whatever to

do with the size of the Commune. It is not a matter of intimacy at all;

this appears when it must, and if it is lacking, that’s all there is to

it. The question is rather one of openness. A real community need not

consist of people who are perpetually together; but it must consist of

people who, precisely because they are comrades, have mutual access to

one another and are ready for one another. A real community is one which

in every point of its being possesses, potentially at least, the whole

character of community. The internal questions of a community are thus

in reality questions relating to its own genuineness, hence to its inner

strength and stability. The men who created the Jewish Communes in

Palestine instinctively knew this; but the instinct no longer seems to

be as common and alert as it was. Yet it is in this most important field

that we find that remorselessly clear-sighted collective

self-observation and self-criticism to which I have already drawn

attention. But to understand and value it aright we must see it together

with the amazingly positive relationship — amounting to a regular faith

— which these men have to the inmost being of their Commune. The two

things are two sides of the same spiritual world and neither can be

understood without the other.

In order to make the causes of the non-failure of these Jewish communal

settlements sufficiently vivid, in Palestine, I began with the

non-doctrinaire character of their origins. This character also

determined their development in all essentials. New forms and new

intermediate forms were constantly branching off — in complete freedom.

Each one grew out of the particular social and spiritual needs as these

came to light — in complete freedom, and each one acquired, even in the

initial stages, its own ideology — in complete freedom, each struggling

to propagate itself and spread and establish its proper sphere — all in

complete freedom. The champions of the various forms each had his say,

the pros and cons of each individual form were frankly and fiercely

debated — always, however, on the plane which everybody accepted as

obvious: the common cause and common task, where each form recognized

the relative justice of all the other forms in their special functions.

All this is unique in the history of co-operative settlements. What is

more: nowhere, as far as I see, in the history of the Socialist movement

were men so deeply involved in the process of differentiation and yet so

intent on preserving the principle of integration.

The various forms and intermediate forms that arose in this way at

different times and in different situations represented different kinds

of social structure. The people who built them were generally aware of

this as also of the particular social and spiritual needs that actuated

them. They were not aware to the same extent that the different forms

corresponded to different human types and that just as new forms

branched off from the original Kvuza, so new types branched off from the

original Chaluz type, each with its special mode of being and each

demanding its particular sort of realization. More often than not it was

economic and suchlike external factors that led certain people to break

away from one form and attach themselves to another. But in the main it

happened that each type looked for the social realization of its

peculiarities in this particular form and, on the whole, found it there.

And not only was each form based on a definite type, it moulded and

keeps on moulding this type. It was and is intent on developing it; the

constitution, organization and educational system of each form are — no

matter how consciously or unconsciously — dedicated to this end. Thus

something has been produced which is essentially different from all the

social experiments that have ever been made: not a laboratory where

everybody works for himself, alone with his problems and plans, but an

experimental station where, on common soil, different colonies or

“cultures” are tested out according to different methods for a common

purpose.

Yet here, too, a problem emerged, no longer within the individual group

but in the relation of the groups to one another; nor did it come from

without, it came from within — in fact, from the very heart of the

principle of freedom.

Even in its first undifferentiated form a tendency towards federation

was innate in the Kvuza, to merge the Kvuzoth in some higher social

unit; and a very important tendency it was, since it showed that the

Kvuza implicitly understood that it was the cell of a newly structured

society. With the splitting off and proliferation of the various forms,

from the semi-individualistic form which jealously guarded personal

independence in its domestic economy, way of life, children’s education,

etc., to the pure Communistic form, the single unit was supplanted by a

series of units in each of which a definite form of colony and a more or

less definite human type constituted itself on a federal basis. The

fundamental assumption was that the local groups would combine on the

same principle of solidarity and mutual help as reigned within the

individual group. But the trend towards a larger unit is far from having

atrophied in the process. On the contrary, at least in the Kibbuz or

Collectivist Movement, it asserts itself with great force and clarity;

it recognizes the federative Kibbuzim — units where the local groups

have pooled their various aspirations — as a provisional structure;

indeed, a thoughtful leader of their movement calls them a substitute

for a Commune of Communes. Apart from the fact, however, that individual

forms, especially, for instance, the “Moshavim” or semi-individualistic

Labour Settlements — though these do not fall short of any of the other

forms in the matter of communal economic control and mutual help — are

already too far removed from the basic form to be included in a unitary

plan, in the Kibbuz Movement itself subsidiary organizations stand in

the way of the trend towards unification which wants to embrace and

absorb them. Each has developed its own special character and

consolidated it in the unit, and it is natural that each should incline

to view unification as an extension of its own influence. But something

else has been added that has led to an enormous intensification of this

attitude on the part of the single units: political development. Twenty

years ago a leader of one of the big units could say emphatically: “We

are a community and not a Party.” This has radically changed in the

meantime, and the conditions for unification have been aggravated

accordingly.

The lamentable fact has emerged that the all-important attitude of

neighbourly relationship has not been adequately developed, although not

a few cases are on record of a flourishing and rich village giving

generous help to a young and poor neighbour which belonged to another

unit. In these circumstances the great struggle that has broken out on

the question of unification, particularly in the last decade, is the

more remarkable. Nobody who is a Socialist at heart can read the great

document of this struggle, the Hebrew compilation entitled The Kibbuz

and the Kvuza, edited by the late labour leader Berl Kaznelson, without

being lost in admiration of the high-minded passion with which these two

camps battled with one another for genuine unity. The union will

probably not be attained save as the outcome of a situation that makes

it absolutely necessary. But that the men of the Jewish Communes have

laboured so strenuously with one another and against one another for the

emergence of a communitas communitatum, that is to say, for a

structurally new society — this will not be forgotten in the history of

mankind’s struggle for self-renewal.

I have said that I see in this bold Jewish undertaking a “signal

non-failure”. I cannot say: a signal success.

To become that, much has still to be done. Yet it is in this way, in

this kind of tempo, with such setbacks, disappointments, and new

ventures, that the real changes are accomplished in this our mortal

world.

But can one speak of this non-failure as “signal”? I have pointed out

the peculiar nature of the premises and conditions that led to it. And

what one of its own representatives has said of the Kvuza, that it is a

typically Palestinian product, is true of all these forms.

Still, if an experiment conducted under certain conditions has proved

successful up to a point, we can set about varying it under other, less

favourable, conditions.

There can hardly be any doubt that we must regard the last war as the

end of the prelude to a world crisis.

This crisis will probably break out — after a sombre “interlude” that

cannot last very long — first among some of the nations of the West, who

will be able to restore their shattered economy in appearance only.

They will see themselves faced with the immediate need for radical

socialization, above all the expropriation of the land. It will then be

of absolutely decisive importance who is the real subject of an economy

so transformed, and who is the owner of the social means of production.

Is it to be the central authority in a highly centralized State, or the

social units of urban and rural workers, living and producing on a

communal basis, and their representative bodies? In the latter case the

remodelled organs of the State will discharge the functions of

adjustment and administration only. On these issues will largely depend

the growth of a new society and a new civilization. The essential point

is to decide on the fundamentals: a restructuring of society as a League

of Leagues, and a reduction of the State to its proper function, which

is to maintain unity; or a devouring of an amorphous society by the

omnipotent State; Socialist Pluralism or so-called Socialist

Unitarianism. The right proportion, tested anew every day according to

changing conditions, between group-freedom and collective order; or

absolute order imposed indefinitely for the sake of an era of freedom

alleged to follow “of its own accord”. So long as Russia has not

undergone an essential inner change — and to-day we have no means of

knowing when and how that will come to pass — we must designate one of

the two poles of Socialism between which our choice lies, by the

formidable name of “Moscow”. The other, I would make bold to call

“Jerusalem”.

[1] Buber’s survey of the cooperative movement takes its place with the

works of Gide, Infield, Mladenatz, Kropotkin, and Kaznelson.

[2] The minutes appeared in Zurich 1929 under the title “Sozialismus aus

dem Glauben” (Socialism from Faith).

[3] “Den Boden frei machen” also means to “free the land”, make it

available to the people. The phrase is used in this latter sense in the

next paragraph. Trans.

[4] See footnote, p, 52.

[5] A “shaking off of burdens”, the name given to the “disburdening

ordinance” of Solon, by which all debts were lowered. Trans.

[6] Vollgenossenschaft is evidently a term coined by the author. It is

here translated literally since no equivalent term is to be found in the

English authorities. Trans.

[7] Described in the next chapter.

[8] Of course, I am not dealing here with the otherwise successful

“socio-economic organizations, used by governmental or semi-governmental

agencies to improve rural conditions” (Infield, Co-operative Communities

at Work, p. 63).