anarchic thought

A philosopher against (and for)
by Colin Ward
prepared by Francesco Codello

Who died recently, sociologist, architect, urban planner and activist anarchist Colin Ward was one of the most interesting and challenging of libertarian thought and practice. There are often busy this time we publish a biography (unpublished in Italian) of the philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), the greatest exponent of that original line of thought between Judaism and anarchism.

All the personalities who have influenced me had ideas to express about human society. The reason why I believe that Martin Buber has shown most of all the things I believe about the social organization lies in the fact that he has been able to explain as clearly. I know him only because he was often quoted in Herbert Read published articles on anarchist magazine Freedom. Read was a director of Routledge publishing house and in 1949 he brought out a translation of Buber's Paths in Utopia book, the text was a reaffirmation of the anarchist tradition in socialist thought, ridiculed for decades both before and after publication of two forms of Idolatry of the State, that of Fabiani and the Marxist.
Since then I have followed the evolution of sociological theories of Buber and I was captivated by his lecture on "State and Society", which condenses a series of theses which, paradoxically, brought him only hostility. In the fifties, my friend, the architect, Gabriel Epstein, whose parents lived in the same street in Jerusalem randomly Buber, I confirmed that the then leadership of the Labor Party in Israel considered him a saboteur and a supporter. Three years after a veteran kibbutz told me that for Buber as he saw it was just an old trombone and clearly to his death in 1965 the Guardian reported that "in Palestine, his idea of ​​a double nationalism got him ostracized by orthodox , which calling him a 'enemy of the people.' "
A philosopher who was able to stand against anyone, but it was a model of kindness and benevolence, it must have something important to say. I thought about it and I do not think he's wrong. He was known as a theologian, but I remember when, in a BBC television program, he told a priest, perplexed: "I must confess that I do not like religion much." And one who suggested that he was said to be a mystic in fact, a rationalist, rationalism, and that was "the only one of my visions of the world to allow them to end in 'ism'".
The only time I saw him in person, was in 1956 at King's College in the Strand, where he held a conference on "What is common", explaining the philosophy of dialogue exposed in his book I and Thou, along with his thesis on community and society. He was inspired by a text by Aldous Huxley who reported their experiments with mescaline, which had become, to use the phrase uttered by Buber in a slow and emphatic English, a parable of what he considered the company separated the Western individualism . Huxley, in his escape from the "painful earthly world" under the influence of drugs, he discovered that his lips, the palms of the hands and genitals (the organs of communication with others, suggested Buber) had cooled and that he avoided gaze of those present. Why, Buber said, watching the other eye could recognize what we have in common. And after that escape from the ego and from the normal, Huxley's "met with a deep distrust of others." Huxley mescaline intoxication considered his mystical experience, but what we call mystics, Buber said, as what we call creative artists, do not try to escape from the human situation. "I do not want to leave the real world of speech, in which demands a response. Remain attached to the common world until they are torn. "
"Deep in my heart," he confessed, "I love the world more than you love the spirit," the president was embarrassed and jumps down to the steep stairs of the stage, to ask questions to those who ask questions, to be sure you understand what who wanted to know.
For Buber, as explained by Herbert Read, "the communication of truth, of any 'lesson', depends on the existence of a condition of reciprocity between teacher and student - every effective communication is a dialogue ..." Buber has a different meaning depending on who reads it. For me it is a philosopher of the company, a sociologist, in fact, that many decades ago had already understood the nature of the crisis of capitalism as socialism. "The era of advanced capitalism," he wrote, "has shattered the structure of society. The companies that preceded it was made of several companies: he had a complex and pluralistic, that gave that particular vitality and allowed her to resist the totalitarian tendencies inherent in the centralized state pre-revolutionary. "But the end was in the throes of Socialism 'idolatry of the state: "If socialism wants out of the impasse in which it is hunted, it is necessary, among other things, take the term' Utopia ', dissect and examine the actual content."
Buber was not an anarchist, but a supporter of what he called pluralist socialism. But the Socialists have not yet made its own claim to the west and East..

“Why I don't hate the Germans”

Buber was born in Vienna, from a family of enlightened and emancipated Jews, but after the divorce of their parents had gone to live with his grandfather in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia. There could enjoy "a very short and quivering years of religious piety" and ended "formal obedience to Jewish law," but he also discovered the Pietist sect of Hasidism. While studying philosophy at Vienna, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he met the poet and propagandist and anarchist Gustav Landauer came into contact with the Zionist movement. Landauer was collaborator and after the killing of the latter, after the massacres in the "republic of the Councils" of Monaco, became the executor. The relationship was stormy with Zionism. For him, the movement had nothing to do with hopes for a Jewish state: "Although for many Zionism has become a mask of pride, the tool to hide their alienation and lack of roots in Europe, for Buber was the means to create new roots, the means of last resort to restore sporadic contacts with the European tradition ", as with the tradition of cooperative settlements promoted by secular and socialist pioneers such as Aaron David Gordon.
In the midst of the cataclysm that hit Germany, Buber expatriation in 1938 and was the chair of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There he found himself more isolated than at any other time in his life. "During the conflict that preceded and accompanied the birth of the State of Israel, Buber took a position (a natural consequence of its spiritual Zionism) that alienated the sympathy of broad sectors of the Israeli community. He argued with Judah Magnes, Ernst Simon and others that the only solution to the Jewish problem was a binational state in which Arabs and Jews had to live with and that both nations had to share: this caused him great antipathy and resentment. "
In 1951 he was criticized for accepting the Goethe Prize from the University of Hamburg. They asked him if he had been too quick to forgive. In response he accepted yet another award in German and spoke these words, withdrawing it:

About ten years ago, a considerable number of Germans - had to be several thousand - under the indirect control of the German government and the direct one of its representatives, killed millions of my people, with a procedure prepared and implemented in a systematic way, whose cruelty organized not find unmatched in any previous historical event. I, who am a survivor, I have only formally common humanity with those who participated in this action. You are so radically removed from the gathering of human beings, have moved in a sphere of monstrous inhumanity so inaccessible to my conception, which to me has not even been able to give birth to hatred. And who am I to presume to grant a pardon?
When I think of the German people of the times of Auschwitz and Treblinka, come to mind first of all, many who knew what monstrous things were happening and there stood against it. But my heart, who knows the weaknesses of men, he refuses to condemn my neighbor who could not win on himself to become a martyr. Then he appears in front of the mass of those who did not know what had kept hidden from the German public did not try to find out what was truth behind the rumors. When I think of these men, I think the sense of anguish, which I know well, the human creature in front of a truth that is afraid of not being able to bear. And finally I can think of, thanks to reliable reports, some that are familiar to me in the eyes, in fact and in his voice, as if they were friends, who refused to follow orders and have been killed or killed themselves, or have known what was going on, there are opposite and have been put to death, or knowing and not being able to do anything to stop it have committed suicide. I see these people very close to me, in that special intimacy that binds us to the dead and sometimes their own. The respect and affection for these Germans hour fills my heart.

The book Buber's Paths in Utopia, completed in 1945, is a defense and a reaffirmation of the current criticism of socialist thought from Marx and Engels as "Utopian" and that this has been ignored in history books and university courses on political thought. The book puts the light in particular the anarchist tradition represented by Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer. On the issue of ends and means, put it this way:

Kropotkin summed up the view of the bottom ends in a single sentence: the most complete development of individuality "will combine with the greatest development in every aspect of voluntary association, and at every possible level for all possible purposes, an association that is in flux, which contains in itself the elements of its life, which takes the form that best match at any given time to the many battles to be fought in every field. "This is exactly what he wanted Proudhon in his more mature development of thought. It may be argued that the goal of Marxism is not substantially different in its constitution, but at this point in front of us is a huge gap, reassembled only by the special current Marxist utopians, a rift between the transformations to be performed in a future time (not much time after the victory of the Revolution) on the one hand and, secondly, the road to the Revolution and beyond of it, a road that is characterized by a pervasive centralism that does not allow differences and initiatives individual. The uniformity as a means must be transformed miraculously into a multiplicity as an end, the constriction in the wild. Because contrary to what the socialist utopians and Marxists do not want half related to the end, he refuses to believe in our faith in the "jump" the future we now have the exact opposite of what we stand for and believes instead here and now we must create the space immediately possible for the thing for which we stand, because it can come to fruition, does not believe in post-revolutionary leap, but in the continuity of the revolution.

Kropotkin, but even better Landauer

Buber wrote these words long before the "forty years wasted" by the imposition of Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe. But when we look at capitalist society, says Buber, "we see a society that is inherently poor and impoverished in the structure every day" (for the structure of society is defined as the social or community content: you can say that a society is structurally rich as it is made up of genuine companies, or by local communities, community work and their association step by step). Buber makes a comparison between the ideas of Proudhon and those of Saint-Simon: "Saint-Simon took account of the reform of the state, Proudhon, the transformation of society. An authentic reconstruction of society can begin only by a radical alteration of the relationship between social order and political order. It can no longer be a political regime to replace with another, but to bring out, instead of a political regime implanted about a company, one that is an expression of society itself. "
For Buber, Kropotkin amplifies the thought of Proudhon, with the simple contrast between the principles of the struggle for survival and mutual aid. The initial theory of the State in which he is considered Kropotkin historically under-substantiated and while the subsequent arguments seem more useful, expressed in the French edition of 1913 of The Modern Science and Anarchism: "Throughout the history of civilization have faced two opposing traditions, two opposing trends: the Roman tradition and the natural, the Imperial and Federal, the authoritarian and libertarian. "
Buber believes that the step forward made by Gustav Landauer than Kropotkin lies in his insight on the question of the state. To Landauer "the state is a condition, a particular relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior of men: we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Buber examines the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and shows how their attitudes toward unions and workers' councils, as against the old Russian institutions, the mir and the artel, these were seen only as instruments of political struggle . "From the point of view of Leninism," said Stalin "collective economies and even the Soviets were seen as a form of organization, a weapon and nothing but a weapon." In the nature of things, says Buber, "is not we can expect a little tree turned into a stick throw the leaves. "
Everything in the social thought of Buber, pushes him to the cooperative movement, whether it's consumer cooperatives, production or home. It moves from a foregone conclusion:

For the most part, the management of large cooperative institutions differs from that of organizations increasingly capitalist and bureaucratic principle has completely discredited, in vast areas, voluntary work, once acclaimed as the most precious and essential to the cooperative movement. This is most evident in countries where consumer groups have increasingly cooperated with the State and local authorities; Charles Gide had certainly not wrong when he exhorted us not forget the history of the wolf in sheepskin and expressed the fear that instead of make "cooperative" state, we only managed to make "static" cooperatives.
Those of us who have spent a lifetime as members of nomal consumer cooperatives in England will no doubt agree. We have seen the internal politics of the cooperative movement used as a starting point to get to a post by left-wing politicians. At the same time we have observed (and this is something that Buber had failed to notice) as the leaders of the local offices of consumer cooperatives were lured with wages from double chains of supermarkets capitalist.
Buber, however, had come to examine the repeated attempts in the previous century and a half, in Europe and America, to found cooperative settlements, discovering a need to use the word failure is not only for experiments after a short life had completely dissolved or had taken what he considered a capitalist framework, thus dropping the opponent's court, but also exerted a similar criticism of attempts that aimed at a wider co-operative way of life, but isolation from the rest of the world.
In fact, the real task, really new common structural village begins with their federation, or by their union on the same principle at work in their internal structure. Even in places like the Dukhobors in Canada, where a sort of federation itself continues to be isolated and does not exert any force of attraction and no educational influence to society as a whole, the result is that you do not even begin to do that task and then there is no reason to speak of success in a socialist direction. Interestingly, Kropotkin sees these two elements - isolation of settlements between them and their isolation from the rest of society - the actual causes of failure as it is normally.
If the "full cooperative", which combine production and consumption is integrated agriculture and industry, must become the cell of a new society, it is necessary, according to Buber, that "the emergence of a network of settlements, on a territorial basis and federal structure, with no dogmatic rigidity, enabling the coexistence side by side of different forms of society, but always pointing to a new organic whole. " In 1945 he was convinced that there was an attempt "which authorizes us to speak of success in a socialist direction, and this is the common Jewish village in its various forms, founded in Palestine." He called the kibbutz movement a signal of non-failure (could not say successful) because he knew too well the difficulties and disappointments of the intrusion of politics and "regrettable fact that the all-important attitude of good-neighborly relations is not been adequately developed, "and how much still remained to be done.
There are two poles of Socialism, Buber concludes, among which we can choose: "One must designate it - given that Russia has not yet undergone a substantial change - with the formidable name of Moscow. The other would be proud to call it Jerusalem. "

Cooperation and federalism

This polarity has not worked well. Almost half a century later there can be no essential changes in Moscow, although not in the sense advocated by Buber. When in Jerusalem, few people would see as a beacon of socialism. Already in the twenties Buber warned that if the Zionist movement in Palestine, the Jews had not found a way to live with the Arabs and next to them, they would be living with their hostility.
In 1950, during celebrations for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Buber held a conference on "Society and State." He began by quoting the opinion of sociologist Robert MacIver, for which "identify the social with the political means to be guilty of the grossest of confusion, which prevents the understanding of both companies throughout the state." It then passed in review the arguments of scholars from Plato to Bertrand Russell, who treated the relationship between social principle and political principle. The first is seen in the power, authority, dominion, the second refers to families, groups, union, cooperative bodies and communities. It is the same distinction made by Jayaprakash Narayan between Rajni (state policy) and lokniti (People's Political). For Buber the fact that people feel threatened by each other gives the state defined its unifying power, it depends on the instinct of preservation of society itself, the external crisis triggered when the underlying action is required than in domestic crises.
The administration of the social sphere, he claims, is the equivalent of the government in the political sphere. But all forms of government have this in common: each has more power than is required by the given situation: in practice to have this excess capacity is what gives us the political power. The extent of this excess, which of course can not be calculated precisely, is the exact difference between Administration and Government. I call it "political surplus". His justification comes from the state of latent crisis between nations and within each nation ... The political principle is always stronger in relation to the social principle, than the situation requires it. The result is a continuous reduction of social spontaneity.
After reading these words, I found the terminology of Buber much more valid picture of the facts of the real world and much more useful than a dozen conferences of political or social sciences. His words can resize the political back into its proper measure. For example, put them in the British politics of the eighties. The government used the populist language: "rolling back the frontiers of the state" (set back the boundaries of the state) or "setting the people free" (free to people), while at the same time central control policies practiced ferocious and invasive , with a war against the minimum of independent political attempts of local authorities. Even voluntary organizations were manipulated to become transmission belts of government policy. The "external latent crisis" in the form of the Cold War or the Falklands campaign was exploited "when action was required from above" and at the end of the Cold War, is usefully followed the Gulf War.
If the categories of Buber is observable in a relatively free society like the UK, apply with overwhelming evidence to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which invariably aimed to destroy all those social institutions that were unable to rule directly. The importance of the Catholic Church in Poland and the Lutheran Church in East Germany was not a matter of religious dogma, but in reality, these institutions were among the few outbreaks of power alternative left. The continued reduction of social spontaneity envisioned by Buber is a feature of the Nazi period in Germany or the Soviet Union of Bolshevism, as well as Pinochet's Chile and Romania of Ceausescu, as each survivor recalls.
Like Buber, I am convinced that the conflict between social and political order is a permanent aspect of the human condition. He did a deducing from the writings of Kropotkin always optimistic observation that the conflict between authoritarian and libertarian tradition tradition is present in the past history as in the next, and Landauer's thesis the idea that this conflict is not overcome by a revolution..

If we want to weaken the rule we need to strengthen the society, because the power of one is the extent of the weakness of the other.

The exploration of the paths made ​​by Buber of Utopia, far from accepting things as they are, confirm, works like many other authors who have influenced me, that the lack of a road map of Utopia does not mean that there are paths to destinations more accessible.

Colin Ward