Martin Buber (1878-1965), the Jewish philosopher and writer, was a dose friend of Gustav Landauer (Volume 1, Selections 40, 49, 79 & 111), the German anarchist socialist who advocated the creation of socialist communities in opposition to the modern state and capitalism. In Paths in Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949; reprint: Syracuse University Press, 1996), Buber sought to rescue the visionary communitarian socialism of people like Fourier, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer from the disdain for so-called ""utopian social-ism”fostered by both Marxists and supporters of the status quo. Although not strictly speaking an anarchist, since Buber, as with the later Proudhon (Volume 1, Selection 18), was willing to assign the state a limited role, his call for ""a rebirth of the commune” and his vision of a socialist commonwealth as a ""community of communities” was very much in the spirit of Landauer. The following excerpts are reprinted with the kind permission of the Belkin Agency and Martin Buber's literary estate.
FOR THE LAST THREE DECADES WE HAVE felt that we were living in the initial phases of the greatest crisis humanity has ever known. It grows increasingly clear to us that the tremendous happenings of the past years, too, can be understood only as symptoms of this crisis. It is not merely the crisis of one economic and social system being superseded by another, more or less ready to take its place; rather all systems, old and new, are equally involved in the crisis. What is in question, therefore, is nothing less than man’s whole existence in the world.
Ages ago, far beyond our calculation, this creature “Man” set out on his journey; from the point of view of Nature a well-nigh incomprehensible anomaly; from the point of view of the spirit an incarnation hardly less incomprehensible, perhaps unique; from the point ofview ofboth a being whose very essence it was to be threatened with disaster every instant, both from within and without, exposed to deeper and deeper crises. During the ages of his earthlyjourney man has multiplied what he likes to call his “power over Nature” in increasingly rapid tempo, and he has borne what he likes to call the “creations of his spirit” from triumph to triumph. But at the same time he has felt more and more profoundly, as one crisis succeeded another, how fragile all his glories are; and in moments of clairvoyance he has come to realize that in spite of everything he likes to call “progress” he is not travelling along the high-road at all, but is picking his precarious way along a narrow ledge between two abysses. The graver the crisis becomes the more earnest and consciously responsible is the knowledge demanded of us; for although what is demanded is a deed, only that deed which is born of knowledge will help to overcome the crisis. In a time of great crisis, it is not enough to look back to the immediate past in order to bring the enigma of the present nearer to solution: we have to bring the stage of the journey we have now reached face to face with its beginnings, so far as we can picture them.
The essential thing among all those things which once helped man to emerge from Nature and, notwithstanding his feebleness as a natural being, to assert himself —more essential even than the making ofa “technical” world out ofthings expressly formed for the purpose—was this: that he banded together with his own kind for protection and hunting, food gathering and work; and did so in such a way that from the very beginning and thereafter to an increasing degree he faced the others as more or less independent entities and communicated with them as such, addressing and being addressed by them in that manner. This creation of a “social” world out of persons at once mutually dependent and independent differed in kind from all similar undertakings on the part of animals, just as the technical work of man differed in kind from all the animals’ works. Apes, too, make use of some stick they happen to have found, as a lever, a digging-tool or a weapon; butthat is an affair of chance only: they cannot conceive and produce a tool as an object constituted so and not otherwise and having an existence ofits own. And again, many ofthe insects live in societies built upon a strict division of labour; but it is just this division of labour that governs absolutely their relations with one another; they are all as itwere tools; only, their own society is the thing that makes use of them for its “instinctive” purposes; there is no improvisation, no degree, however modest, of mutual independence, no possibility of “free” regard for one another, and thus no person-to-person relation-ship. Just as the specific technical creations of man mean the conferring ofindepend-ence on things, so his specific social creation means the conferring of independence on beings ofhis own kind. It is in the light of this specifically human idiosyncrasy that we have to interpret man’s journey with all its ups and downs, and so also the point we have reached on this journey, our great and particular crisis.
In the evolution of mankind hitherto this, then, is the line that predominates: the forming and re-forming of communities on the basis of growing personal independence, their mutual recognition and collaboration on that basis. The two most important steps that the man of early times took on the road to human society can be established with some certainty. The first is that inside the individual clan each individual, through an extremely primitive form of division of labour, was recognized and utilized in his special capacity, so that the clan increasingly took on the character of an ever-renewed association of persons each the vehicle of a different function. The second is that different clans would, under certain conditions, band together in quest offood and for campaigns, and consolidated their mutual help as customs and laws that took firmer and firmer root; so that as once between individuals, so now between communities people discerned and acknowledged differences of nature and function. Wherever genuine human society has since developed it has always been on this same basis offunctional autonomy, mutual recognition and mutual responsibility, whether individual or collective. Power-centres of various kinds have split off, organizing and guaranteeing the common order and security of all; but to the political sphere in the stricter sense, the State with its police-system and its bureaucracy, there was always opposed the organic, functionally organized society as such, a great society built up ofvarious societies, the great society in which men lived and worked, competed with one another and helped one another; and in each of the big and little societies composing it, in each of these communes and communities the individual human being, despite all the difficulties and conflicts, felt himself at home as once in the dan, felt himself approved and affirmed in his functional independence and responsibility.
All this changed more and more as the centralistic political principle subordinated the de-centralistic social principle. The crucial thing here was not that the State, particularly in its more or less totalitarian forms, weakened and gradually displaced the free associations, but that the political principle with all its centralistic features percolated into the associations themselves, modifying their structure and their whole inner life, and thus politicized society to an ever-increasing extent. Society’s assimilation in the State was accelerated by the fact that, as a result of modern industrial development and its ordered chaos, involving the struggle of all against all for access to raw materials and for a larger share of the world-market, there grew up, in place of the old struggles between States, struggles between whole societies. The individual society, feeling itself threatened not only by its neighbours’ lust for aggression but also by things in general, knew no way of salvation save in complete submission to the principle of centralized power; and, in the democratic forms of society no less than in its totalitarian forms, it made this its guiding principle. Everywhere the only thing of importance was the minute organization of power, the unquestioning observance of slogans, the saturation of the whole of society with the real or supposed interests ofthe State. Concurrently with this there is an internal development. In the monstrous confusion of modern life, only thinly disguised by the reliable functioning of the economic and State-apparatus, the individual clings desperately to the collectivity. The little society in which he was embedded cannot help him; only the great collectivities, so he thinks, can do that, and he is all too willing to let himselfbe deprived of personal responsibility: he only wants to obey. And the most valuable of all goods—the life between man and man—gets lost in the process; the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of man hires itself out as a functionary. The personal human being ceases to be the living member of a social body and becomes a cog in the “collective” machine. Just as his degenerate technology is causing man to lose the feel of good work and proportion, so the degrading social life he leads is causing him to lose the feel of community —just when he is so full of the illusion ofliving in perfect devotion to his community.
A crisis of this kind cannot be overcome by struggling back to an earlier stage of the journey, but only by trying to master the problems as they are, without minimizing them. There is no going back for us, we have to go through with it. But we shall only get through if we know where we want to go.
We must begin, obviously, with the establishment of a vital peace which will deprive the political principle of its supremacy over the social principle. And this primary objective cannot in its turn be reached by any devices of political organization, but only by the resolute will of all peoples to cultivate the territories and raw materials of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together. At this point, however, we are threatened by a danger greater than all the previous ones: the danger of a gigantic centralization of power covering the whole planet and devouring all free community. Everything depends on not handing the work of planetary management over to the political principle.
Common management is only possible as socialistic management. But ifthe fatal question for contemporary man is: Can he or can he not decide in favour of, and educate himself up to, a common socialistic economy? then the propriety of the question lies in an inquiry into Socialism itself: what sort ofSocialism is it to be, under whose aegis the common economy of man is to come about, if at all?
The ambiguity of the terms we are employing is greater here than anywhere else. People say, for instance, that Socialism is the passing of the control of the means of production out of the hands of the entrepreneurs into the hands of the collectivity; but again, it all depends on what you mean by “collectivity.” Ifit is what we generally call the “State,” that is to say, an institution in which a virtually unorganized mass allows its affairs to be conducted by “representation,” as they call it, then the chief change in a socialistic society will be this: that the workers will feel themselves represented by the holders of power. But what is representation? Does not the worst defect of modern society lie precisely in evetybody letting himself be represented ad libitum? And in a “socialistic” society will there not, on top of this passive political representation, be added a passive economic representation, so that, with everybody letting himself be represented by everybody else, we reach a state of practically unlimited representation and hence, ultimately, the reign of practically unlimited centralist accumulation of power? But the more a human group lets itselfbe represented in the management ofits common affairs, and the more it lets itselfbe represented from outside, the less communal life there is in it and the more impoverished it becomes as a community. For Community—not the primitive sort, but the sort possible and appropriate to modern man—declares itself primarily in the common and active management of what it has in common, and without this it cannot exist.
The primary aspiration of all history is a genuine community of human beings —genuine because it is community aU through. A community that failed to base itself on the actual and communal life of big and little groups living and working together, and on their mutual relationships, would be fictitious and counterfeit. Hence everything depends on whether the collectivity into whose hands the control of the means of production passes will facilitate and promote in its very structure and in all its institutions the genuine common life of the various groups composing it—on whether, in fact, these groups themselves become properfoci of the productive process; therefore on whether the masses are so organized in their separate organizations (the various “communities”) as to be as powerful as the common economy of man permits; therefore on whether centralist representation only goes as far as the new order of things absolutely demands...
Wherever historical destiny had brought a group of men together in a common fold, there was room for the growth of a genuine community; and there was no need of an altar to the city deity in the midst when the citizens knew they were united round—and by—the Nameless. A living togetherness, constantly renewing itselfwas already there, and all that needed strengthening was the immediacy of relationships.
In the happiest instances common affairs were deliberated and decided not through representatives but in gatherings in the market and the unity that was felt in public permeated all personal contacts. The danger of seclusion might hang over the community, but the communal spirit banished it; for here this spirit flourished as nowhere else and broke windows for itself in the narrow walls, with a large view of people, mankind and the world.
All this, I may be told, has gone irrevocably and forever. The modern city has no agora and the modern man has no time for negotiations of which his elected representatives can vety well relieve him. The pressure of numbers and the forms of organization have destroyed any real togetherness. Work forges other personal links than does leisure, sport again others than politics, the day is cleanly divided and the soul too. These links are material ones; though we follow our common interests and tendencies together, we have no use for “immediacy.” The collectivity is not a warm, friendly gathering but a great link-up of economic and political forces inimical to the play of romantic fancies, only understandable in terms of quantity, expressing itself in actions and effects—a thing which the individual has to belong to with no intimacies of any kind but all the time conscious of his energetic contribution. Any “unions” that resist the inevitable trend of events must disappear. There is still the family, of course, which, as a domestic community, seems to demand and guarantee a modicum of communal life; but it too will either emerge from the crisis in which it is involved, as an association for a common purpose, or else it will perish.
Faced with this medley of correct premises and absurd conclusions I declare in favour of a rebirth of the commune. A rebirth—not a bringing back. It cannot in fact be brought back, although I sometimes think that every touch of helpful neighbourliness in the apartment-house, every wave of warmer comradeship in the lulls and “knock-offs” that occur even in the most perfectly “rationalized” factory, means an addition to the world’s community-content; and although a rightly constituted village commune sometimes strikes me as being a more real thing than a parliament... it cannot be brought back. Yet whether a rebirth of the commune will ensue from the “water and spirit” of the social transformation that is imminent—on this, it seems to me, hangs the whole fate of the human race. An organic commonwealth—and only such commonwealths can join together to form a shapely and articulated race of men—will never build itself up out of individuals but only out of small and ever smaller communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities. If the family does not emerge from the crisis which today has all the appearance of a disintegration, purified and renewed, then the State will be nothing more than a machine stoked with the bodies ofgenerations of men. The community that would be capable of such a renewal exists only as a residue. If f speak of its rebirth I am not thinking of a permanent world-situation but an altered one. By the new communes—they might equally well be called the new Co-operatives—I mean the subjects of a changed economy: the collectives into whose hands the control of the means of production is to pass. Once again. everything depends on whether they will be ready.
The essential thing. however. is that the process of community-building shall run all through the relations of the communes with one another. Only a community of communities merits the title of Commonwealth...
The era of advanced Capitalism has broken down the structure of society. The society which preceded it was composed of different societies; it was complex. and pluralistic in structure. This is what gave it its peculiar social vitality and enabled it to resist the totalitarian tendencies inherent in the pre-revolutionary centralistic State. though many elements were very much weakened in their autonomous life. This resistance was broken by the policy of the French Revolution. which was directed against the special rights of all free associations. Thereafter centralism in its new. capitalistic form succeeded where the old had failed: in atomizing society. Exercising control over the machines and. with their help. over the whole society. Capitalism wants to deal only with individuals; and the modern State aids and abets it by progressively dispossessing groups of their autonomy. The militant organizations which the proletariat erected against Capitalism—Trades Unions in the economic sphere and the Party in the political—are unable in the nature of things to counteract this process of dissolution. since they have no access to the life of society itself and its foundations: production and consumption. Even the transfer of capital to the State is powerless to modity the social structure. even when the State establishes a network of compulsory associations. which. having no autonomous life. are unfitted to become the cells of a new socialist society.
From this point of view the heart and soul of the Co-operative Movement is to be found in the trend of a society towards structural renewal. the re-acquisition. in new tectonic forms. of the internal social relationships. the establishment of a new consociatio consociationum. It is... a fundamental error to view this trend as romantic or utopian merely because in its early stages it had romantic reminiscences and utopian fantasies. At bottom it is thoroughly topical and constructive; that is to say, it aims at changes which. in the given circumstances and with the means at its disposal, are feasible. And, psychologically speaking, it is based on one ofthe eternal human needs, even though this need has often been forcibly suppressed or rendered insensible: the need of man to feel his own house as a room in some greater, all-embracing structure in which he is at home, to feel that the other inhabitants of it with whom he lives and works are all acknowledging and confirming his individual existence. An association based on community of views and aspirations alone cannot satisfy this need; the only thing that can do that is an association which makes for communal living. But here the co-operative organization of production or consumption proves, each in its own way, inadequate, because both touch the individual only at a certain point and do not mould his actual life. On account of their merely partial or functional character all such organizations are equally unfitted to act as cells of a new society. Both these partial forms have undergone vigorous development, but the Consumer Co-operatives only in highly bureaucratic forms and the Producer Co-operatives in highly specialized forms: they are less able to embrace the whole life of society today than ever. The consciousness of this fact is leading to the synthetic form: the Full Co-operative. By far the most powerful effort in this direction is the Village Commune, where communal living is based on the amalgamation of production and consumption, production being understood not exclusively as agriculture alone but as the organic union of agriculture with industty and with the handicrafts as well...
The socialistic task can only be accomplished to the degree that the new Village Commune, combining the various forms of production and uniting production and consumption, exerts a structural influence on the amorphous urban society. The influence will only make itself felt to the full if, and to the extent that, further technological developments facilitate and actually require the decentralization of industry; but even now a pervasive force is latent in the modern communal village, and it may spread to the towns. It must be emphasized again that the tendency we are dealing with is constructive and topical: it would be romantic and utopian to want to destroy the towns, as once it was romantic and utopian to want to destroy the machines, but it is constructive and topical to try to transform the town organically in the closest possible alliance with technological developments and to turn it into an aggregate composed of smaller units.
World History
