Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) was an important anarchist theorist and key precursor of organic radicalism, murdered by proto-Nazi soldiers in Stadelheim Prison, Munich, after the collapse of the Bavarian Revolution.
Strongly influenced by Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Landauer was very much part of the Romantic anti-capitalist tradition identified by Michael Löwy and has been described as representing “a left-wing form of the völkisch current in thought”. [1]
Like his friend Martin Buber, he saw a close link between human interrelationships and the rebirth of community which was needed to put society right.
Landauer also echoed the likes of William Morris and John Ruskin, and prefigured Guy Debord, in condemning what he called this “odious society of masquerade”, [2] the industrial capitalist “unculture” from which free people needed to separate themselves.
He wrote in 1911: “Progress, what you call progress, this incessant hustle-bustle, this rapid tiring and neurasthenic, short-breathed chase after novelty, after anything new as long as it is new, this progress and the crazy ideas of the practitioners of development associated with it… this progress, this unsteady, restless haste; this inability to remain still and this perpetual desire to be on the move, this so-called progress is a symptom of our abnormal condition, our unculture”. [3]
Helmut Rüdiger comments: “Landauer does not share the progressivist optimism so evident in the conceptions of Marx as in other revolutionary theories; he demands awareness of the human, rather than blind confidence in the development of Technik and science”. [4]
Landauer translated several texts by Peter Kropotkin, [5] whom he met during a brief spell in England, and was very much influenced by the idea of the authentic human community, the Gemeinschaft, described by Ferdinand Tönnies. [6]
He also translated into German writing by Bengali poet and fellow organic radical inspiration Rabindranath Tagore. [7]
Like Constantin von Monakow, he extended his concept of the organic to a cosmic level, regarding the universe as a living creature with a collective soul and writing that “the psyche [das Seelenhafte] in the human being is a function or manifestation of the infinite universe”. [8]
Landauer’s libertarian “socialism” was in truth, as Peter Marshall writes, “a form of mystical anarchism which stood in the German idealist tradition stretching back as far as Meister Eckhart.
“His originality lies in the way he developed the romantic concern with the Volk in a libertarian rather than an authoritarian direction.
“The word Volk had come to mean something like the ‘common people’, but it was also used to describe the German language, culture and customs as distinct from the State. Landauer wanted to realize the potential unity of the Volk“… Landauer was thus an eloquent prophet of real community”. [9]
His view of human communities, and indeed the human species itself, as being living organisms meant that he did not see any essential conflict between collective and individual interests.
He declared. “Anarchy is the expression of the liberation of man from the idols of the state, the church and capital; socialism is the expression of the true and genuine community among men, genuine because it grows out of the individual spirit”. [10]
He argued that fellow anarchist Max Stirner’s notion of an absolute and independent individual was a phantom, as each individual belonged to their community, and to humankind, both physically and spiritually.
“As the individual organism is only a part of a great, real physical community, so the individual soul is part of a great, real spiritual community… a vital part of a larger organic whole”. [11]
Individuals should rid themselves of their ego, in a “mystical death”, so as to become fully part of the living human community, believed Landauer.
He wrote: “Restore the natural order; understand the wise words of Socrates: know thyself! Know thyself, as thou are really”.
One should also know the other as the kindred human soul that he really was, “behind the mask that, just like you, he wears”. [12]
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