German anarchist thinker who served in Bavaria’s revolutionary government and was killed by counterrevolutionary troops in 1919.
The state is a social relationship. Create new communities, and it can be replaced by a different social relationship.
Landauer argued that the state was not merely an apparatus to overthrow but a social relationship that could be replaced by creating voluntary communities. In 1908 he founded the Socialist Bund to pursue socialism through cooperatives and communal association. He opposed the First World War and came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request in 1918 to support the revolution. In April 1919 he joined the Bavarian Soviet Republic as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. After government forces crushed the republic, he was arrested and killed at Stadelheim Prison on 2 May.
Activities and affiliations
- Social movements and organizing · Affiliation unconfirmed
Career Timeline
- 1908Founded the Socialist Bund
- 1918Came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request to support the revolutionary government
- 1919Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the Bavarian Soviet Republic
Related historical events
The Socialist Bund and Cooperative Organizing
Rather than wait for an abstract future or the capture of state power, Landauer treated the organization of cooperation and community outside the capitalist order as socialism’s starting point. His 1907 essay “Volk und Land: Thirty Socialist Theses” helped prompt Berlin anarchists and independent socialists to form a practical organization. After he spoke at a public assembly in Berlin in May 1908, groups came together as the Socialist Bund (Sozialistische Bund). It aimed to federate cooperatives in which striking workers could participate, building a social base as autonomous as possible from the state-capitalist system. In 1908–09 Landauer published the Bund’s leaflets, and in 1909 revived Der Sozialist to advance the organization’s work. By the publication of For Socialism in 1911, the Bund had twenty groups in Berlin, Zurich and other cities in Germany and Switzerland, as well as one in Paris. In a 1910 article, Landauer described the difference between the Bund’s socialists and communists not as competing blueprints for a future society, but as a refusal to prescribe such a blueprint in advance and a commitment to realize socialism through action in the present.