Revolution And Other Writings

Gabriel Kuhn, Gustav Landauer

Description

This is the most comprehensive collection of Landauer's writing in English and a celebration o one of the most important agitators in the revolutionary movement. The collection includes his major work, Revolution, alongside 30 additional essays, articles and correspondence. The texts cover his entire biography, from the early Anarchism of the 1890s to his philosophical reflections at the turn of the century and his tireless agitation against the war. Presented wit an extensive introduction compiled by the editor and translator, Gabriel Kuhn.

Sujets

• Activism
• Anarchism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 08 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604864137
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

COVER

COPYRIGHT
Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader Edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn ISBN: 978-1-60486-054-2 LCCN: 2009901371 This edition copyright ©2010 PM Press All Rights Reserved
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Published in the EU by The Merlin Press Ltd. 6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street, Pontypool NP4 6ND, Wales
www.merlinpress.co.uk ISBN: 9780850366716
Layout by Daniel Meltzer Cover art by John Yates
Printed in the USA, on recycled paper
“T HE STATE IS A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP; A CERTAIN way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.”
– Gustav Landauer


PREFACE: LANDAUER TODAY
Richard J.F. Day
T HERE'S A CLICHÉ ABOUT WATCHING OUT WHAT YOU ASK FOR , since you may get it in a way that doesn’t quite please you. A few years ago, I asked for more of Gustav Landauer’s work to be translated into English, and Gabriel Kuhn responded by doing just that. Unlike the cliché scenario, however, I’m very happy with the result. That is, the book you hold in your hand. Since many people will read no further than the first paragraph of this preface, if they read it at all, I want to say right now: buy this book. It’s genuinely worth the price.
For those who need a little more convincing, allow me to provide some backup for my opinion. The introduction by Kuhn and Siegbert Wolf does an excellent job of reminding us of the relevance of the life and work of Gustav Landauer in his own time. But what about our time? Why should those of us standing on the ledge between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries be concerned about someone who died so long ago?
It would be too easy, and obviously incorrect, to say that nothing has changed in the last century. Yet, some very important elements of Landauer’s context do remain with us today. He was an anarchist living, working, and writing on the margins of an authoritarian state. He was an anti-capitalist activist, a revolutionary who was killed because of who he was, what he believed, and what he did. The state form still seeks total control over our lives, and with new technologies has arguably gone much further in reaching its goal. Corporations still seek the greatest profit over the shortest term for the smallest number of people, while ruining the lives of everyone else and destroying the planet. They, too, seem to be doing better than ever, penetrating deeper, wider, meeting the challenges they face – as always – by mutating and forging ahead.
And us? Well, we are trying, as always, to find places and ways of doing something other, something different, from what the system of states and corporations allows us to do, requires us to do. We protest, we urge reform, we foment revolution. We get occasional good results, here and there, but no one with their eyes open, their ear to the ground, their heart and mind engaged, will deny that we are losing ground, every day, week, month, year… from our vantage point, from that ledge, we see below us what Nietzsche called an abyss. Peak oil, economic meltdown, species decline, including homo sapiens sapiens , which despite continuing to increase its population in absolute numbers, is facing an ongoing decline in fertility rates. It’s only a matter of time … the squeamish anti-civilizationists among us, within us, need never overcome our fear of blowing dams. The beast is dying of its own accord, quite simply killing itself.
What, then, as Comrade Lenin and many before him asked, is to be done? I think this is where the work of Gustav Landauer becomes indispensable. The kinds of answers he provided to this question were very much ahead of their time, and have yet to be adequately explored, discussed, and implemented – in any language, as far as I know, but most certainly in English. Unwilling to wait for history to catch up with itself, Landauer called for ‘socialism here and now,’ for the creation of positive radical alternatives to the dominant order – within, and on the margins of this order. He felt that this was the only way to make the kind of lasting difference that was necessary if things were really going to change, and I agree with him.
The sense of urgency that drove Landauer and his work has only increased since his time, of course, rising now to obsessive-compulsive heights, as can be seen from the kinds of books flying along the conveyor lines of the virtual bookshops these days. Suddenly, it’s not only crazy anarchists and indigenous people and Gaian feminists who are talking about the coming destruction of the earth – it’s ex-Vice President of the United States Al Gore. It’s respectable, mainstream journalists. Everyone is cashing in. The question I’m interested in, is how do we cash out? Or, better yet, how do we leave behind the whole nexus of ideas and practices that give cash its value?
In his answer to this question Landauer was one of the first post-anarchists, inasmuch as he read Nietzsche anarchistically, and through his development of a discursive understanding of the state and capitalism as states of relations , rather than ‘things.’ This is an absolutely crucial insight for, as Karl Marx and Judith Butler have very clearly shown, once we become aware of the fact that we are (re)producing the dominant order through our daily activity, we become able to change our behaviour, and thereby the dominant order itself. Hence the privilege given, by Landauer, to working ‘alongside’ rather than against the state form, diverting our energies. Here he prefigures the currently hot autonomist marxist concept of prefiguration, although it must be noted that this idea has long been a staple of anarchist theory and practice.
This is the most important answer to the question, Why Landauer, now? Because he provides exactly what we need in order to have some small chance of peering into the abyss and coming up with something to do other than just follow everyone else as they semi-consciously leap into it.
There’s another question I want to address, though, which is, Why should we be paying attention to this particular collection of translations? Here I have an abundance of answers, so fecund a proliferation that I will simply list them. For me, perhaps, the greatest strength of this text is the detailed discussion of links between Landauer’s life and his writing. When I teach theory, anarchist or otherwise, I always highlight the fact that Gramsci went to prison, got sick, and died, for his ideas. Emma Goldman got ‘sent back to Russia’ for hers, Walter Benjamin shot himself because he was certain he had missed his last chance to escape the Nazis, people die every day in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Tibet and, yes, even on the lands claimed by the Canadian state, the ‘peaceful country’ I inhabit – or rather, that inhabits me. The introduction also addresses differing interpretations of Landauer’s work in various languages, and its reception and influence around the world. Finally, the extensive bibliography will be of great aid to seasoned Landauer scholars and new explorers alike.
In the texts themselves, the tiny, difficult, often insoluble, problems of translation are treated in a subtle yet straightforward way. The result is a very readable rendering of the German original, a rendering that is perhaps superior to the original, according to some accounts. At the same time, Landauer’s delicacy, ferocity, confusion, concision – all of the multiple and contradictory elements that make him who he is, his texts what they are – are preserved. Words, people, and events, that may not be common knowledge in the English-speaking world are accurately identified as such, and footnoted. Overall, this collection is well researched and very tight, in the sense that musicians give to this term. I found myself thinking “Ah, the real thing,” that is, activist-oriented theory of the sort that was so common a few generations ago, and is now becoming more common again.
I would like my final words to be some first words from Landauer himself, who is surprisingly good at giving us a laugh, and a timeless, pointed, anarchist laugh, at that.
“I will not hesitate to say the following in all clarity (knowing that I will not receive much appreciation from either side) : to some degree, the anarchist politics of assassination only stems from the intentions of a small group amongst them that wants to follow the example of the big political parties. What drives them is vanity – a craving for recognition. What they are trying to say is : ‘We are also doing politics. We aren’t doing nothing. We are a force to be reckoned with!’ These anarchists are not anarchic enough for me.” (“Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism”)
Every time I see a twenty-something-year-old male dressed in combat fatigues strutting away from a protest with blood streaming from his head and swearing at the cops, I think of this quote from Gustav Landauer. And I think to myself: All well and good, but who’s going to do the dishes, drywall your bedroom, take out the recycling, cook your meals, clean the house, look after the kids and elders, and change your bandages, while you try to get yourself out of jail and then field that short-lived but highly ego-gratifying spate of inquiries from the global media? Here and now, boys, here and now!


EDITOR'S NOTE
Gabriel Kuhn
P AUL A VRICH HAS CALLED G USTAV L ANDAUER "THE MOST influential German anarchist intellectual of the twentieth century." 1 In the English-speaking world, however, Gustav Landauer has only received limited attention. For decades, almost all of his writings – about a dozen books and pamphlets, as well as hundreds of essays, articles, and letters – remained untranslated. In the 1970s, over fifty years after his death at the hands of reactionary soldiers, a number of scholarly studies about his life and work appeared and his main text, Aufruf zu