Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (83 page)

It is a process which is never complete, but constantly renews itself: ‘No final security of 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 …’
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He therefore called for the development of self-managing communities and co-operatives which can bring people together and release them from their crippling dependence on authority. As he grew older, he talked less of class struggle and saw ‘direct action’ as the building of co-operatives coupled with Tolstoyan passive resistance to authority. The ‘general strike’ – the panacea of the anarcho-syndicalists — should not be a downing of tools but rather the reorganization of work under workers’ control. In the end, he came to see revolution not as a violent cataclysmic upheaval but as the peaceful rejection of coercive society and the gradual creation of alternative institutions. Rejecting industrial urbanism, he further urged the renewal of the traditional rural community by a return of the workers to the land.

Although Landauer wrote a preface to a pamphlet by Max Nettlau on Bakunin, his mature anarchism drew on the writings of both Proudhon and Kropotkin (whose works he also translated). He considered Proudhon the greatest of all socialists and freely adopted his schemes for mutual credit and exchange. He tried to reconcile individual possession of property and mutualist co-operation by suggesting that there should be a profusion of different forms of possession — individual, communal and co-operative — in a free society. It would be for the members of each community to decide periodically on the right balance between the different forms of possession.

Landauer translated Kropotkin’s
Mutual Aid
and was impressed by his
Fields, Factories and Workshops.
Like Kropotkin, he promoted the economic independence of local and regional communities which combined agriculture and industry on a small scale. For Germany, he advocated a confederation of local communities in order to release the creative and organic spirit which lay imprisoned within the State. But while sharing Kropotkin’s vision of the integration of industry and agriculture, he called more insistently for a return to the land. Landauer even went so far as to argue that ‘the struggle for socialism is a struggle for the land; the social question is an agrarian question’.
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By identifying the genuine community with the land, Landauer turned his back on urban-based syndicalism.

The philosophical idealist in Landauer ultimately diverged from the
scientifically-minded Kropotkin. He shared his stress on mutual aid and co-operation, but he insisted, like Malatesta, that they were the result of human will, not of natural laws at work in human society. In order to create a free society, he looked to spiritual awareness, not to the development of reason or science. A degree of high culture is reached only when a unifying spirit pervades social structures, ‘a spirit dwelling in the individuals themselves and pointing beyond earthly and material interests’. Socialism, he wrote in 1915, is ‘the attempt to lead man’s common life to a bond of common spirit in freedom, that is, to religion’.
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Landauer was not very optimistic about the possibility of change in his own day. He felt that his German contemporaries were the most obedient of subjects, demonstrating only too well la Boétie’s notion of voluntary servitude. The authoritarian State existed as a result more of human passivity than of externally imposed tyranny. He had little faith in the German working class and felt that only a few would be able to develop anarchism in exemplary co-operative settlements on the land.

Landauer remained an impressive figure in German literary circles, tall and gaunt with his long, dark beard and hair. ‘One felt when he spoke’, Rudolf Rocker recalled, ‘that every word came from his soul, bore the stamp of absolute integrity.’
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But he became increasingly isolated within the socialist movement before and during the First World War, earning the hatred of many compatriots for his principled opposition to it: ‘War is an act of power, of murder, of robbery’, he wrote in 1912. ‘It is the sharpest and clearest expression of the state.’
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Nevertheless, Landauer participated as a minor leader in the Bavarian Revolution of 1918–19. In November 1918, he was invited to Munich by his friend Kurt Eisner, the new socialist President of the Bavarian republic. He threw himself into the struggle as a member of the Revolutionary Workers’ Council and the Central Workers’ Council, trying to create his ideal of a federalist and decentralized society of self-managing communities. After the assassination of Eisner, Landauer became minister of education in the ‘cabinet’ of the short-lived Munich Council Republic proclaimed in April 1919. It was an attempt by anarchists and intellectuals to establish a free and independent Bavaria. Landauer worked with the poet Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller (the author of a play about the Luddites), and Ret Marut (later to become the author B. Traven) but their efforts were tragically cut short Landauer’s programme to provide libertarian education for people of all ages was never realized. In little more than a week, the anarchists were ousted by communists who rejected their ‘pseudo-republic’. The revolution was eventually crushed by an army of 100,000 troops sent from Berlin by the Minister of Defence Gustav Noske.

In the aftermath, Landauer was beaten and murdered in Munich.
According to a worker who witnessed the event, ‘an officer struck him in the face. The men shouted, “Dirty Bolshi! Let’s finish him off!” and a rain of blows from rifle-butts drove him out in the yard … they trampled on him till he was dead; then stripped the body and threw it into the wash-house.’ ‘Kill me then!’, he is reported as saying, ‘To think that you are human beings!’
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The unassuming pacifist had just turned forty-nine years old.

But he was not forgotten. The Anarchist Syndicalist Union of Munich, with workers’ contributions, raised a monument to him, using his own words as his epitaph: ‘Now is the time to bring forth a martyr of a different kind, not heroic, but a quiet, unpretentious martyr who will provide an example for the proper life.’
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It was torn down by the Nazis after Hitler’s rise to power.

Since his death, Landauer has exerted a strong influence on those who see the State as a set of relationships pervading society rather than as some mechanical superstructure. Through his friend Martin Buber (who edited his writings), Landauer influenced the Israeli communitarian movement. In the sixties and seventies, his call to drop out and to create alternative institutions found a resounding echo in the counter-culture.

The Jewish poet Erich Mühsam was also deeply influenced by Landauer and worked with him in Munich Council Republic. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour in the aftermath. He was a brilliant journalist as well as lyric poet, combining the insights of Kropotkin and Nietzsche to develop his own eccentric anarchism. After the defeat of the Munich Council, Mühsam served more than four years of a long sentence before being released in 1924 in a general amnesty. He did not turn his back on politics: he became active in the Red Aid organization which assisted political prisoners, and edited a monthly anarchist review
Fanal.
He remained an outspoken critic of German militarism and warned of the growing dangers of Nazism. He not only continued to write poetry but also composed a volume of ‘Unpolitical Memoirs’. One of his last works was called
The Liberation of Society from the State.
Mühsam was eventually arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and murdered in Oranienburg concentration camp the following year.

While Landauer expresses the most constructive side of anarchism, his compatriot Most probably contributed more than any other German to anarchism’s reputation as a violent and destructive creed. Most was born at Augsburg in Bavaria, the son of a governess and a clerk. He left school at fourteen and became apprenticed to a bookbinder. As a member of the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD), he was elected a deputy to the Reichstag from 1874 to 1878. After writing against the Kaiser and clergy, he was forced into exile and arrived in London as a political refugee in 1878. His activities provided Henry James with a theme for his novel
The Princess Casamassima
(1886).

From 1879 Most began publishing the journal
Freiheit.
It was exported and mainly exerted an influence in Germany and Austria where its gospel of revolutionary violence and illegality appealed more to conspiratorial groups than to the socialist movement at large. As a result of writing an editorial celebrating the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the British courts sentenced him to sixteen months’ imprisonment.

On his release, Most set sail for the United States. When he arrived in New York in 1882, he rapidly became a fully-fledged anarchist. He began publishing
Freiheit
again and continued to do so until his death in 1906. He fervently promoted propaganda by the deed as well as by the word, undertaking lecture tours which preached violent revolution. Most became notorious for recognizing ‘a “wild” anarchist in every criminal’.
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In order to obtain specialised information on how to make bombs, he worked in an explosive factory. He then wrote the pamphlet
Revolutionäre Kriegsmissenschaft
(Science of Revolutionary Warfare), a do-it-yourself ‘manual of instruction in the use and preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc.’ Much of this was just bluster: Most did not employ such means himself, but his enthusiastic advocacy inspired disaffected rebels with more foolhardiness than himself. Nevertheless, like Nechaev, he believed for a while that the revolutionary end justifies any means, including the murder of individuals. ‘Assassination’, he wrote, ‘is a concomitant of revolution, if you choose to call the forcible removal of insufferable oppression, assassination.’
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Not surprisingly, Most rapidly became known as one of the most dangerous men in America, although after the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 he had second thoughts about violent revolution. He gloried in his reputation and always embraced class warfare with enthusiasm: ‘Tyrants and the bourgeoisie hate me. I hate tyrants and the bourgeoisie. Our mutual hatred is my pride and joy.’
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Most was no original thinker; indeed, Max Nettlau correctly observed that he advanced ‘in steps’ in his own political development.
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It is difficult to find in Most’s writings many nuanced ideas. He was above all a propagandist, and felt obliged to express views which he thought his subscribers wanted to hear. As a social revolutionary, in 1882 he adopted for himself four ‘rules’ which sum up his positive teaching:

For Most, it was as if revolution had replaced God, and he worshipped the new deity in every possible way. The ultimate goal was anarchism which, as a good lapsed socialist, he defined as ‘socialism perfected’.
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Like Most, Rocker was a German by birth and reflected in his life the transnational and cosmopolitan nature of modern anarchism. He was born in 1873 in the ancient Rhine city of Mainz, South Germany, the scion of old burgher families. As a Rhinelander, he was exposed to the region’s anti-Prussian and federalist traditions. His father was a printer but it was his uncle who introduced him to socialism. He joined a dissident Marxist group in Mainz known as ‘Die Jungen’ (Landauer was also a temporary member), a largely libertarian grouping within the SPD. The German socialist movement was dominated at the time by Marx and Lassalle and the young Rocker was soon repelled by its dogmatic narrow-mindedness. He became convinced that socialism was not only a question of a full belly but also a question of culture which ‘would have to enlist the sense of personality and the free initiative of the individual’.
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Looking for an alternative, he began to read the classic anarchist thinkers from Godwin to Kropotkin.

After leaving school, Rocker became a bookbinder and travelled through several European countries, contacting members of the international anarchist movement. Because of his political activities he went into exile in 1892, first in Paris and then, at the beginning of 1895, in London.

For the next twenty years, Rocker devoted the best years of his life to the Jewish anarchist movement in the East End of London. He quickly learned Yiddish and from 1898 edited the Yiddish paper
Arbeter Fraint
(The Worker’s Friend) and from 1900 the literary monthly
Germinal.
The paper was responsible for one of the first criticisms of the Marxist conception of history to appear in Yiddish. Rocker argued that materialism and idealism are both different views of life; however much we try, we can never find absolute truth. It is therefore impossible to believe that there is a final goal as Marx suggested: ‘Freedom will lead us to continually wider and expanding understanding and to new social forms of life. To think that we have reached
the end of our progress is to enchain ourselves in dogmas, and that always leads to tyranny.’
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