Foreword to the Second Edition
The revolution has come, though I did not expect it this way. War has come,
just as I expected; and in that war I soon saw defeat and revolution relentlessly
approaching.
With a truly profound bitterness I state: it is now clear that I was essentially
correct in thisCall for Socialism and in articles in my journalThe Socialist. A
political revolution in Germany had not yet occurred; now it has been completed,
and only the revolutionaries’ inability to construct the new economy, in particular,
as well as the new freedom and self-determination, could be held responsible if a
reaction should bring about the reestablishment of new privileged powers. All
shades of Marxist Social Democratic parties, in all their varieties, are incapable of
political practice, of the constitution of humanity and its popular institutions
and of establishing a government representing labor and peace, just as they
cannot attain a theoretical comprehension of the social facts, as they most horribly
demonstrated before, during and after the war, from Germany to Russia, from
their militaristic enthusiasm to their unspiritual and uncreative reign of terror,
which are essentially related and were very curiously allied. However, if it is true,
as suggested both by some news reports and our hope’s trembling desire for grace
and a miracle, that Russian Bolsheviks, by a similarly beautiful and even more
transforming growth than was displayed by Friedrich Adler in Austria and Kurt
Eisner in Germany, have risen above themselves, their theoretical dogmatism and
barren practice, and given federation and freedom priority over centralism and
military-proletarian authoritarian organization, that they have become creative
and have overcome the industrial proletarian and the professor of death in them
by the spirit of the Russian peasant, the spirit of Tolstoy, by the one eternal spirit,
then that truly is not due to Marxism but rather to the heavenly spirit of the
revolution, which under the firm grip and rapid catapult of necessity, reveals
buried strata in man’s psyche, [especially that of the Russian man’s], and opens
up secret wellsprings of subconscious strength.
Capitalism, furthermore, has not displayed the anticipated progressiveness
of slowly and peacefully transforming itself into socialism; nor has it produced
socialism by a miraculous sudden collapse. And how could the principle of evil,
oppression, robbery, and philistine routine be expected to perform miracles? In
these times when routine has become a malignant scourge, it is spirit that must
lead to revolution, spirit that performs miracles; thus overnight it changed the
constitution of the German Reich, reducing a governmental structure, which
German professors had considered inviolably sacred, into a past episode of the
German landed and industrial Junkers. The government has collapsed; socialism
is the only salvation. It certainly did not result as a blossom of capitalism; it is
the heir and repudiated son waiting at the door behind which the corpse of his
unnatural father rots. Nor can socialism be added to the beautiful body of society
as an apex of national wealth and a sumptuous economy; it must be created
almost out of nothing amid chaos. In despair I called for socialism; but out of that
despair I drew great hope and joyous resolution, and the despair which I and the
likes of me bore in our hearts has not become a permanent condition. May those
who must now begin the work of construction not lack hope, a desire to work,
knowledge, and an enduring creativity.
Everything said here about the collapse applied fully only to Germany at present
and to the nations which, voluntarily or not, have shared its fate. As was said,
not capitalism as such has collapsed by virtue of its immanent impossibility, but
the capitalism of one group of nations, acting in conjunction with autocracy and
militarism, has been ruined by the liberally administered capitalism of another,
militarily weaker, capitalistically stronger area, in final conjunction with the volcanic
eruption of popular rage of its own people. I will not predict when and in
what form the collapse of the other, more clever representative of capitalism and
imperialism will occur. The social causes necessary for any revolution to take
place are present everywhere. However, the need for political liberation, the only
reason for a revolution to move toward a goal and become more than a revolt, is of
varying strength in those countries which have experienced democratic political
revolutions. The following seems to be evident: the more free political mobility
exists in a country, and the greater the adaptability of government institutions
to democracy, the more terrible and unproductive, however, the struggle will be
when social hardship, injustice and degradation finally generate the phantom of
a revolution and, consequently an all-too-real civilwar, if steps are not taken to
establish socialism immediately. The symptoms, which first appeared in Switzerland
— in ugly combination with war, war-profiteering, Swiss war-ersatz and non-
Swiss war-corruption — are clear enough to anyone who can distinguish creative
work from haplessly cruel excesses and spasmodic savagery.
For the revolution can only be a political one. It would not gain the support of
the enslaved masses, if they did not also desire to break free of social oppression
and economic hardship. However, the transformation of social institutions, of
property relations, of the type of economy cannot come by way of revolution.
In these matters, action from below can only shake off, destroy and abandon
something; action from above, even by a revolutionary government, can only
abolish and command, whereas socialism must be built, erected, organized out of a
new spirit. This new spirit prevails mightily and ardently in the revolution. Robots
become men. Cold, unimaginative men are fired with enthusiasm. The entire
status quo, including opinions, positive and negative, is cast into doubt. Reason,
which formerly focused only on selfish interest, becomes rational thinking and
thousands of men sit or pace restlessly in their rooms, for the first time in their
lives forging plans for the common welfare. Everything becomes accessible to
the good. The incredible miracle is brought into the realm of possibility. The
reality which is otherwise hidden in our souls, in the structures and rhythms of
art, in the faith-structures of religion, in dream and love, in dancing limbs and
gleaming glances, now presses for fulfillment. However, the tremendous danger
remains that the old humdrum way and empty imitation will take hold of the
revolutionaries and make them shallow, uncultured radicals, with the ringing
rhetoric and violent gestures, who neither know, nor want to know, that the
transformation of society can come only in love, work, and silence.
They also ignore another point, despite the experiences of past revolutions.
All these revolutions were a great renewal, a bubbling refreshment, a high point
of nations; but their permanent results were slight. Ultimately they brought
a change only in the forms of political disenfranchisement. Political freedom,
maturity, honest pride, self- determination and an organic, corporative coherence
of the masses out of one unifying spirit, voluntary associations in public life —
this can only be achieved by a great adjustment, by economic and social justice, by
socialism. How could there be a commonwealth of true communities in our era, in
which Christianity affirms the equality of all the children of men, in origin, rights
and destiny; how could there be a free public life, pervaded by the all-fulfilling,
dynamic spirit of enthusiastically progressive men and deep, strong women, if
slavery, disinheritance and ostracism persist in any form and guise?
The political revolution which brings the spirit to power and makes it the strong
imperative and decisive implementation, can clear the way for socialism, for a
change of conditions by a renewed spirit. But decrees can, at most, incorporate
men as government slaves into a new military-like economy; the new spirit of
justice must create its own forms of economy. The idea must embrace the needs
of the moment within its long-range view and shape them energetically. What
was previously only an ideal, is realized by the work of renewal born out of the
revolution.
The need for socialism is there. Capitalism is collapsing. It no longer works.
The fiction that capital works has burst like a bubble; the only thing that attracted
the capitalist to his sort of work, to the risk of his fortune and the leadership and
administration of enterprise, namely profit, no longer attracts him. The age of the
profitability of capital, of interest and usury, is over; the mad war-profits were
a dance of death. If we are not to perish in our Germany, to perish really and
literally, the only salvation is work, real work done, performed and organized by
an unselfish, fraternal spirit. New forms of work must be developed, freed from
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a tribute payable to capital, ceaselessly creating new values and new realities,
harvesting and transforming the products of nature for human needs. The age of
the productivity of labor is beginning; otherwise we have reached the end of the
line.
Technology has placed both long known and newly discovered natural forces
at man’s service. The more people cultivate the earth and transform its products,
the richer the harvest. Mankind can live in dignity and without care. No one
need be another’s slave, no one need be excluded and disinherited. Work, the
means of life, need not become an arduous torment. All can live in openness to
spirit, soul, play, and God. Revolutions and their painfully long, oppressive prehistory
teach us that only the most extreme distress, only the feeling of sheer
desperation brings the masses of men to reason, to the reason which, for wise men
and children, always comes naturally; what horrors, ruins, hardships, scourges,
plagues, conflagrations and wild cruelties are we to expect, if even at this fateful
hour, reason, socialism, spiritual leadership and conformity to the spirit do not
enter into men’s minds?
Capital, which has been the parasitic master, must become the servant — but a
form of capital that represents community, reciprocity, equality of exchange. O
suffering men, are you still standing helplessly before the obvious and childishly
easy solution? Even in this hour of need, that also was your hour of political
action? Do you still remain animals that have lost their instincts and are stupified
by reason, since you wait so long? Do you not yet see the error that lies in
your boastful arrogance and indolence of heart? What has to be done is so clear
and simple that every child understands it. The means are there; whoever looks
around, sees it. The imperative of the spirit which leads the revolution can help
us through great measures and undertakings. Submit to this spirit; petty interests
must not hamper it. But its full implementation is impeded by heaps of rubble
that have been piled upon the conditions and even the souls of the masses. One
road is open, more open than ever, to help bring about revolution and the collapse
of the present system: to begin on a small scale, and voluntarily, immediately, on
all sides,you are called, you and your friends!
Otherwise the end is here: capital is losing its return due to economic conditions,
governmental demands, and international obligations; a nation’s indebtedness
to other nations and to itself is expressed in finance policy by ever more
debts. France, at the time of the great revolution, made a marvelous recovery
from the debts of the ancien regime and its own financial turmoil by the great
adjustment that began with the distribution of lands and the joy in work and
enterprise unleashed by the liberation from bondage. Our revolution can and
should distribute lands on a grand scale. It can and should create a new and
revitalized farm population, but it certainly cannot give the capitalist class joy
in work and enterprise. For capitalists, the revolution is only the end of the war:
collapse and ruin. The capitalists, their industrial managers and their dealers lose
not only their income but also will lose their raw materials and world market.
Moreover, the negative component of socialism is there and no power can remove
it from the earth: the complete, hourly increasing disinclination of the workers,
indeed their psychic inability to continue to hire themselves out under capitalist
conditions.
Socialism, then, must be built; it must be set into operation amid the collapse,
in conditions of distress, crisis, improvisations. I will now shout from the rooftops
how out of the greatest need the greatest virtue must be established, and the
new labor corporations out of the fall of capitalism and the pressing needs of
the living masses. I will not fail to rebuke the proletarians of industry, who
consider themselves the only workers, for their narrow-mindedness, the wild
obstinacy, intransigence and crudeness of their intellectual and emotional life,
their irresponsibility and incapacity for a positive economic organization and
leadership of enterprises. By absolving men of guilt and declaring them creatures
of social conditions, one does not make these products of society different than
they are, while the new world will be built not with men’s causes but with the
men themselves. I will delay to call upon government and municipal officials,
leaders of cooperatives and large factories, technical and commercial employees
and directors, lawyers, and officers whose roles in the present system will become
superfluous, to help this movement, modestly, expertly and zealously, in a spirit of
community and of personal originality. I will sharply criticize the government’s
counterfeiting of paper money that now goes by the name of monetary policy
and especially the compensation for unemployment that is made in this so-called
money, though every healthy person, no matter what profession he previously
practiced, must participate in the construction of the new economy, in saving
society from the greatest danger, when as much as possible has to be constructed
and planned as possible. I will recommend the use of the presently unproductive
military bureaucracy so that capitalism’s unemployed can be led to positions
where emergency economics, which must bring salvation, needs them; I will
call for the strongest revolutionary energy, which will lead to the salvation and
socialization of reality. At this point let me give a brief preliminary summary:
what I have repeated again and again in the call which follows and in essays in my
Socialist, which complement it, is that socialism is possible and necessary in every
form of economy and technology. It has no use for the industrial and mercantile
technology of capitalism nor for the mentality that produced this monstrosity.
Because socialism must commence and because the realization of spirit and virtue
is never mass-like and normal but rather results only from the self-sacrifice of
the few and the new venture of pioneers, socialism must free itself from ruin out
of poverty and joy in work. For its sake we must return to rural living and to a
unification of industry, craftsmanship and agriculture, to save ourselves and learn
justice and community. What Peter Kropotkin taught us about the methods of
intensive soil cultivation and unification of intellectual and manual labor in his
important and now famous bookThe Field, the Factory, the Workshop as well as
the new form of credit and monetary cooperative must all be tested now in our
most drastic need and with creative pleasure. Necessity demands, voluntarily but
under threat of famine, a new start and construction, without which we are lost.
Let me add one last word, the most serious one. If we convert the greatest
hardship into the greatest virtue and transform the emergency labor made necessary
by the crisis into the provisional beginning of socialism, our humiliation
will be credited to our honor. Let us disregard the question as to how our socialist
republic, arising out of defeat and ruin, will stand among the victorious nations
and the mighty countries presently devoted to capitalism. Let us not beg, let us
fear nothing, let us not flinch. Let us act among the nations, like Job activated
by his suffering, abandoned by God and the world in order to serve God and the
world. Let us construct our economy and the institutions of our society so that
we can rejoice in hard work and a worthy life. One thing is certain: when things
go well with us in poverty, when our souls are glad, poor and honorable men
in all other nations, in all of them will follow our example. Nothing, nothing in
the world has such irresistible power of conquest as goodness does. We were
politically retarded, were the most arrogant and provoking lackeys; the harm
that resulted for us with the inevitability of destiny has incensed us against our
masters, moved us to revolution. So at one stroke, namely the blow that struck
us, we assumed leadership. We are to lead the way to socialism; how else could
we lead than through our example? Chaos is here. New activities and turmoil
are on the horizon. Minds are awakening, souls rising to responsibility, hands
taking action. May the revolution bring rebirth. May, since we need nothing
so much as new, uncorrupted men rising up out of the unknown darkness and
depths, may these renewers, purifiers, saviors not be lacking to our nation. Long
live the revolution, and may it grow and rise to new levels in hard, wonderful
years. May the nations be imbued with the new, creative spirit out of their task,
out of the new conditions, out of the primeval, eternal and unconditional depths,
the new spirit that really does create new conditions. May the revolution produce
religion, a religion of action, life, love, that makes men happy, redeems them and
overcomes impossible situations. What does life matter? We will die soon, we
all die, we do not live at all. Nothing lives but what we make of ourselves, what
we do with ourselves. Creation lives; not the creature, only the creator. Nothing
lives but the action of honest hands and the governance of a pure, genuine spirit.
Munich, January 3, 1919
Gustav Landauer
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