220 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
manual and intellectual labor; a rotation of roles and duties with the equal dis-
tribution of routine, monotonous tasks; the abolition of hierarchy in workplace
management, with no “bosses” with power to inspect worker output or restrict
worker movement; and health care for the sick and elderly.^48 Kibbutzim were oc-
casionally, though not always, explicit about the sources of this form of com-
munal organization in anarchism.^49 Members were untroubled by political theo-
rists who worried that their ideas were impossible or contrary to human nature.
When a Degania member was asked what would happen when a worker refused
to pull his share, or took too much from the collective treasury, the response was
“we would not love him.”^50
During the November Revolution, Landauer had issued a pamphlet enti-
tled Die vereinigten Republiken Deutschlands und ihre Verfassung (The United
Republics of Germany and Their Constitution), in which he laid out his vision
for what would replace the Second Reich, which had just “collapsed in shame.”^51
Lashing out against the demand for a central, elected German government to ne-
gotiate postwar terms, Landauer wrote: “No longer shall there be atomized voters
abdicating their power. Instead, there shall be municipalities, cooperatives, and
associations determining their own destiny in big assemblies and through del-
egates; delegates who are in constant exchange with their constituencies, who can
be recalled and replaced at any time.... A republic is a public affair, a common
body.”^52 Landauer expressed the hope that the workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’
councils, despite their ad hoc, spontaneous nature and their frequent conser-
vatism, represented the core of an emerging democracy, a federative structure
forming from the bottom up. Landauer hoped that Bavaria could lead Germany
in this regard, and that Germany could in turn lead erring Russia, and perhaps
inspire the countries of the Entente to have their own revolutions as well. Lan-
dauer reminds us of Buber’s concept of Zion:
Even in its first undifferentiated form a tendency towards federation was in-
nate in the Kvuza, to merge the Kvuzoth in some higher social unit; and a very
important tendency it was, since it showed that the Kvuza implicitly under-
stood that it was the cell of a newly structured society... the fundamental
assumption was that the local groups would combine on the same principle of
solidarity and mutual help as reigned within the individual group.^53That is, the anarchistic structure of each individual kibbutz would be replicated
on a wide scale through the federation of the kibbutzim into regional and na-
tional networks, as democratic in operation as the units composing them. If per-
vasive enough, these networks would obviate the need for a state.
Landauer was never a Zionist, but neither did he express disapproval of Bu-
ber’s Zionist ideas. As early as 1901, he had criticized the imperialistic universal-
ism of some comrades on the far left: “We have to realize that different cultures
exist next to each other and that the dream that all should be the same cannot be