24 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
the few who had not taken a detour via social democracy.”^30 For Landauer, the
conflict with the Jungen marked the SPD as rotten from the beginning, and in
1919, only weeks before he would die at the hands of its contracted militiamen,
he declared, “In the entire natural history I know of no more disgusting creature
than the Social Democratic Party.”^31
The split of the Jungen led rapidly to the founding of two projects that
heavily involved Landauer. The first was the newspaper Der Sozialist, the offi-
cial organ of the dissenters; Landauer soon became one of its primary editors.
In its opening statement of purpose, the newspaper charged the SPD executive
with opportunism, reformism, and authoritarianism: “We are opponents of
legislative- parliamentary activity; experience has shown that it leads unavoid-
ably to corruption and possibilism. We must stress the fact that parliament is
an institution through which the bourgeoisie exercises its rule over the prole-
tariat.”^32 Landauer’s early articles focused on the antistatist socialism of figures
like Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) and Benedikt Friedländer (1866–1908), a friend
and neighbor who introduced Landauer to the work of Max Stirner.^33 The title
Der Sozialist was retained as a polemical thrust that anarchism was the only true
socialism; in 1895 Landauer changed the subtitle of the paper to Organ für Anar-
chismus-Sozialismus, arguing that “anyone who is not blinded by the dogmas of
the political parties will recognize that anarchism and socialism are not opposed
but co-dependent. True cooperative labor and true community can only exist
where individuals are free, and free individuals can only exist where our needs
are met by brotherly solidarity.”^34 In the fall of 1892 the second project was born
when Wille and others accused the SPD of attempting to turn the Freie Volks-
bühne into an arm of the party, forming the Neue Freie Volksbühne in response.
Landauer served on the board of the new theater for several years.^35
The content of Landauer’s anarchism evolved over the years 1893–1898, mov-
ing from an urban-focused industrial syndicalism (promoting the consolidation
of democratically organized unions of factory workers) toward a rurally based
valorization of agricultural work and village life that seemed to share more with
völkisch romanticism than with modern socialist ideology.^36 The move was par-
tially rooted in an effort to appeal to constituencies neglected by the SPD, which
adhered closely to the Marxist line that the industrial proletariat was the only
real revolutionary subject and that the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry were
irrelevant. Landauer was consistent, however, in his insistence that anarchism
stood for the free development of individuality in the context of a democratically
organized socialist community, and that steps could be taken toward the imme-
diate achievement of socialism, without having to wait for the forces of history
to reach a predetermined juncture. His 1895 pamphlet, A Way to the Liberation
of the Working Class, was written to support a producer cooperative launched by
Wilhelm Weise, an anarchist construction worker who worked for the Sozialist.