Gustav Landauer – Quintessentially Anarchist, Preternaturally Prescient

Gustav Landauer is, for me, the quintessential anarchist.

The brilliance of his mind was exceeded only by the depth of love for Humanity in his heart. His analysis of the poetry of Goethe and Walt Whitman bear witness to this.

Gustav Landauer was a mystic. He was also one of the most grounded and lucid thinkers the world has ever produced. His ability to grasp the essence of both the spiritual and the material in his mind and with his precious Soul was unique and set him apart from many of his comrades. He was able to do this because he apprehended, correctly, that both the spiritual and the material derive, ultimately, from the same source – the Moral, and exist to express moral imperatives.

Precious little remains of the writings of Gustav Landauer. Of that, little has been translated into English.

Below are two excerpts from the writings of Gustav Landauer:

"One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another – One day it will be realized that Socialism is not the invention of anything new, but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has grown…We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men." – Gustav Landauer
"Schwache Stattsmanner, Schwacheres Volk!"
Der Sozialist, June, 1910

"…The realization of Socialism is always possible if a sufficient number of people want it. The realization depends not on the technological state of things, although Socialism when realized will of course look differently and develop differently according to the state of technics; it depends on people and on their spirit…Socialism is possible and impossible at all times; it is possible when the right people are there to will it and to do it; it is impossible when people either don't will it or only supposedly will it, but are not capable of doing it." – Gustav Landauer
"For Socialism", quoted in Martin Buber,
Paths in Utopia
Translated by R.F.C. Hull

If there is one lesson I learned from the 20th C. it is that revolution is not the way. I can think of no recipe for disaster more sure fire than people having more freedom and responsibility than they are prepared for. Landauer understood this and warned against it repeatedly. He was not in favor of revolution, but rather evolution. In his writings he warns against Communist or Socialist governments and predicts, with startling prescience, what is destined to occur if Communism or Socialism is made into a form of government. Landauer was not a Marxist. Had the Left adopted the Socialism of Landauer, rather than those of Marx, the tragic events of the 20th C. probably would not have occurred.

It is necessarily true that the state must be gradually supplanted by substituting the ways in which we now interact with one another with new and better ways. Common sense tells us why.

Only in the actual adoption of new and better ways of interacting with one another do we demonstrate how and to what extent we are truly prepared for greater responsibility and liberty. The state is transformed, as a matter of fact, by those acts and only insofar as we are able to tolerate the specific new freedoms and responsibilities and then only to those specific extents.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
visualviolet@hotmail.com