Martin Buber's Theopolitics

This Pathless Hour | 269

Proudhon believes neither in blind providence from below, which contrives

the salvation of mankind out of technical and material changes, nor in a free-

ranging human intellect, which contrives systems of absolute validity and en-

joins them on mankind. He sees humanity’s real way in the deliverance from

false faiths in absolutism, from the dominion of fatality.^110

This position led Proudhon to oppose centralist communism, as well as social
planning: “[Proudhon] refuses to equate a new ordering of society with uni-
formity; order means, for him, the just ordering of multiformity.”^111 We cannot
foresee the shape of a decent society, because we cannot anticipate the problems
that will emerge and the solutions that will be devised for them. What matters is
room for spontaneity and innovation now, during the struggle to create it: “We
may not ‘know’ what Socialism will look like, but we can know what we want
it to look like, and this knowing and willing, this conscious willing itself influ-
ences what is to be—and if one is a centralist one’s centralism influences what is
to be.”^112 Buber berates Kropotkin for simplifying Proudhon, “by setting up in
the place of the manifold ‘social antinomies’ the simple antithesis between the
principles of the struggle for existence and mutual help,” but he praises him for
his claim that “we conceive the structure of society to be something that is never
finally constituted.”^113 By contrast, Marx and Lenin were politicians and planners
who subordinated their utopian ends to a simplistic analysis of social problems
in which everything reduces to struggle for control of the means of production;
as a result, “the political act of revolution remained the one thing worth striving
for; the political preparation for it—at first the direct preparation, afterwards the
parliamentary and trades unionist preparation—the one task worth doing, and
thus the political principle became the supreme determinant.”^114 Lenin failed to
recognize that “a bureaucracy does not change when its names are changed”; as a
result, he ushered in a society that eliminated spontaneity and free association.^115
Reordering government without first reordering society, Lenin failed to grasp
that “changed power-relations do not of themselves create a new society capable
of overcoming the power-principle.”^116
This criticism of Lenin echoes the standard anarchist critiques of state com-
munism dating back to Bakunin. It is significant, however, that Buber places
Landauer as the last in the line of theorists he considers in Paths in Utopia. For
Landauer, the state is neither an institution nor a structure, but rather “a condi-
tion, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior;
we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.... State
is status—a state, in fact.”^117 This attitude is widespread in contemporary anar-
chism, found in everything from pamphlets to punk rock lyrics; for example,
this is arguably what the punk band Against Me!, in their song “Those Anarcho-
Punks Are Mysterious.. .,” means when they proclaim, “We’re all presidents,
we’re all congressmen, we’re all cops in waiting.”^118 No pure, ideal people can
overthrow the state because the people are the state; they inhabit and embody the