More of the Genius of Gustav Landauer

If there is one lesson I learned from the 20th C. it is that revolution is not the way. I can think of no recipe for disaster more sure fire than people having more freedom and responsibility than they are prepared for. Landauer understood this and warned against it repeatedly. He was not in favor of revolution, but rather evolution. In his writings he warns against Communist or Socialist *governments* and predicts, with startling prescience, what is destined to occur if Communism or Socialism is made into a form of government. Landauer was not a Marxist. Had the Left adopted the Socialism of Landauer, rather than those of Marx, the tragic events of the 20th C. probably would not have occurred.

It is necessarily true that the state must be gradually supplanted by substituting the ways in which we now interact with one another with new and better ways. Common sense tells us why.

*Only in the actual adoption of new and better ways of interacting with one another do we demonstrate how and to what extent we are truly prepared for greater responsibility and liberty*. The state is transformed, as a matter of fact, by those acts and only insofar as we are able to tolerate the specific new freedoms and responsibilities and then only to those specific extents.

Doreen