Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

The InteIWar Years /391
they rejected, but when it became clear that they intended to adopt the authoritarian methods
of the Bolsheviks, Landauer withdrew his offer. Two weeks later he was brutally beaten
and shot to death by reactionary troops sent by the central Social Democratic government in
Berlin to crush the Bavarian revolution. Hundreds of others were also slaughtered. The Social
Democratic minister of national defence, Gustav Noske, congratulated the commander of the
troops for the "discreet and wholly successful way in which you have conducted your operations
in Munich" (as quoted in Lunn, page 340).
The following excerpts are from the forward to the second edition of For Socialism, which
Landauer wrote in Munich in early january 1919 while there was still hope for genuine revolutionary
transformation along communitarian anarchist lines. The translation by David j.
Parent is from the Telos Press edition (St. Louis, 1978), and is reprinted with the kind permission
of the publisher.
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 applies 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,