A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the Works of Gustav Landauer^205schwächeres Volk (Weak statesmen, weaker people), the essay
contains Landauer’s most widely quoted statement:
A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However,
those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can
be overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word.
The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating
to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relation-
ships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently. The abso-
lute monarch said: I am the state. We, who we have imprisoned
ourselves in the absolute state, must realise the truth: we are the
state! And we will be the state as long as we are nothing different;
as long as we have not yet created the institutions necessary for a
true community and a true society of human beings.^24Landauer’s anarchist critique was not directed against the illegiti-
mate rule of the state (archein), rather it recognised that the state,
far from being a singular centre of top-down power and domina-
tion, consists of the micro-power and network structures of each
member. Power, for Landauer, lay in the hands of the oppressed as
well as of the oppressors, its front line running through each indi-
vidual. It is precisely because “we are the state”, that we have the
power to organise differently, though it requires, and is only possi-
ble if, we first recognise that it was we who have “imprisoned our-
selves”, that there is no state to be overcome, but only ourselves.^25
The essential problem to which Landauer’s political struggle
drew attention was the difference between the state as an ideo-
logical excuse on the one hand, and lived reality on the other. He
argued that “we speak of the state without thinking. This word
designates nothing but a definite condition of a public-legal na-
ture in which we persist with our wills. It is the reification of what
are in fact fluid and spiritual relations; it does injury to our per-
ception because we take an expedient for naked reality.”^26 What
Landauer effectively argued was that no such thing as “the state”
exists, that it is only language creating an illusion in which the
state appears as a “thing or a fetish” It is a reified institution and
central unity, constructing out of the openness and fluidity of so-
cial relationships order, norms, practices, discourses, technologies
and essential identities.