The anarchist Gustav Landauers first of his three forms of Community is our self, “a hereditary power that we can discover deep in the mine pits of our inner self”
No Fear of Landauer’s “Communism”
Gustav Landauer is one of the most important thinkers of the beginning of the 20th century. His anarchist approach is attributed to anarcho-communism. But apart from Max Stirner and Paul Goodman, I know of no anarchist who could be less associated with what we understand today as socialism or communism.
A few quotes may sufficiently show this:
The anarchists have always been far too fond of systems and attached to rigid narrow concepts.
Anarchy is not about a struggle between the classes — the dispossessed against the possessors — but about free, strong, and sovereign individuals breaking free from mass culture.
Those who want “to bring freedom to the world” — which will always be their idea of freedom— are tyrants, not anarchists. Anarchy will never be a matter of the masses.
Gustav Landauer. Revolution and Other Writings. PM Press. Kindle-Version.
There is no clearer rejection of all socialist and communist do-gooders. He calls them tyrants. And about the more moderate “democratic socialists”, like the German SPD he writes :
In the whole history of nature I know of no creature more disgusting than the Social Democratic Party!” [Gustav Landauer 1919]
His communism is indeed a kind of utopia, a society of the future, but Landauer is nevertheless anything but a utopian:
Anarchy is not a matter of the future: it is a matter of the present. It is not a matter of making demands; it is a matter of how one lives.
Landauer’s conception of communism we learn most from the enumeration of his three forms of community. If you have read and understood the above short quotations, however, you will not be surprised that he does not say much about the content of his utopia of communism.
Landauers Three forms of community
Landauer warns, like Goodman or Heidegger later, to construct the subject as the isolated individual as the starting point of perception. If we want to enter into such constructivist aberrations from which we can no way out, we may read Kant or Schopenhauer, he says.
Since Kant, conceptual thought has only killed the living world. Now the living world finally rises up and kills the dead concept instead.
Thus is Landauer’s optimism, his whole “communist program.” (His warning against Kant was unfortunately not loud enough and therefore could not prevent Auschwitz.)
To find the first community, anarchists must radically free themselfes from their constraints, must,
“in Nietzsches words, are able to recreate the original chaos in themselves and to become spectators at the drama of their own desires and deepest secrets. Only once we have achieved this can we decide which one of our many personalities should define who we are.”
If we make this separation a radical one and if we – as separated individuals – allow ourselves to sink to the depths of our being and to reach the inner core of our most hidden nature, then we will find the most ancient and complete community1Emphasis by me: a community encompassing not only all of humanity but the entire universe. Whoever discovers this community in himself will be eternally blessed and joyful, and a return to the common and arbitrary communities of today will be impossible
So that would be the first of the three forms of community.
The first of these communities refers to what one usually calls the individual – however, as I want to show, the individual is always a manifestation of the universe. The second refers to the forced communities of bourgeois societies and states. The third refers to the community which is only yet to come: to the one we want to initiate without further delay.
That’s all we need to hear from him for now. The path he proposes is almost congruent with that of the Cynics and the Romantics before him. He can’t say much more about “communism” as the community he is aiming at, because then it would soon be a program and according to his, according to our definition of anarchism, he would want to leave it and bring us his “freedom”, he would become a tyrant.
- 1Emphasis by me