The True Front | 25In it he argued that active participation in mutual-aid projects was a necessary
sentimental education as well as a revolutionary activity; workers would learn
self-reliance and cooperation and unlearn bad habits of deference to authority
while also building institutions that would bypass the state and capitalism by
providing for the needs of their members. Not only would such a method of revo-
lution be nonviolent; it was also the only way to realize socialism, since even if
socialist revolutionaries were somehow to storm the halls of power and defeat the
army, a people uneducated in cooperative ventures would simply restore the state
the very next day.^37
At this point we should note that anarchism was a minority movement with-
in socialism throughout Europe and was especially weak in Germany, where Der
Sozialist was the only anarchist paper at the time of its first run.^38 The SPD never
faced any real competition for the loyalty of the urban, industrial workers, and it
never acknowledged anarchism as a legitimate type of socialism. The expulsion
of the Jungen from the SPD congress, which echoed the expulsion of Bakunin
and the anarchists from the First International, would soon be followed by yet
another (physical, forcible) expulsion of Landauer and his compatriots from the
1893 Zurich meeting of the Second International.^39 At the 1896 meeting in Lon-
don another attempt was made, but the outcome was the same, except this time
Landauer was able to give his speech in favor of anarchist admission before the
expulsion vote came.^40 Landauer’s entry into political life was thus marked by a
tension: he quickly became a big fish in a very small pond.
Despite its numerical weakness, however, anarchism assumed outsized im-
portance in the eyes of the state and the public because of its association with
spectacular acts of terrorism, including bombings and political assassinations
worldwide, which were then known as “propaganda by the deed.” These in turn
led to repressive state measures against anarchists, even in countries like Ger-
many with very little violent anarchist agitation. Landauer himself was arrested
for the first time in October 1893 merely for advocating disobedience of the law;
his sentence was extended to a total of eleven months through the further charges
that he had called for violent overthrow of the government; sixteen other writers
for Der Sozialist were arrested and imprisoned on similar grounds by the end
of 1894, and in January 1895 the paper was forced to close, reopening only six
months later.^41
The police campaign against Der Sozialist was ironic, as the paper always
opposed violence, not merely because it would lead to state reprisals but also on
principle. Anarchism desires a society free from coercion, whereas violence is
the ultimate form of coercion. The society that anarchists want therefore can-
not be built by violent means, which is contrary to the practice of voluntary as-
sociation: “The anarchist idea is a peaceful idea, opposed to aggressiveness and
violence,” Landauer wrote in 1897.^42 He never swerved from this position, which