The following quote is probably the only bit of Landauer’s writing that is fairly well known, among anarchists, at least. The State is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior, we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one and other... We are the State and continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community... (Eugene Lunn, Prophet Of Community (Univ. of California 1973), p.226)

Note how he does not reify the State by turning it into an object above us and how he refuses to turn politicians into scapegoats, We are the State... But in spite of this fact, deep inside, we never really accept the State. It is imposed upon us, and in the contemporary world, at least, by ourselves. Community and State are two different entities. The State is never established within the individual... never been voluntary... Once long ago there were communities... Today there is force, the letter of the law, and the State. (Gustav Landauer, - For Socialism (Telos Press), p.43) He went further than the usual anarchist concept of the State, Landauer’s step beyond Kropotkin consists primarily in his direct insight into the nature of the State. The State is not, as Kropotkin thinks, an institution which can be destroyed by a revolution. (Martin Buber, Paths In Utopia, p.46)

The end result of the replacement of free cooperation and its consciousness (the community) by the State is “social death.” Landauer, p.7 This is very evident today with the destruction of community, the loss of voluntarism and solidarity – all replaced by statist systems and laws.

Martin Buber, using Landauer’s conceptions, explains how the State “overdetermines” the amount of coercion in a society. People living together at a given time and in a given space are only to a certain degree capable, of their own free will, of living together rightly;...the degree of incapacity for a voluntary right order determines the degree of legitimate compulsion. Nevertheless the de facto extent of the State always exceeds more or less - and mostly very much exceeds - the sort of State that would emerge from the degree of legitimate compulsion. This constant difference (which results in what I call “;the excessive State”;) between the State in principle and the State in fact is explained by the historical circumstance that accumulated power does not abdicate except under necessity. It resists any adaptation to the increasing capacity for voluntary order so long as this increase fails to exert sufficiently vigorous pressure on the power accumulated.... “;We see,”; says Landauer, “;how something dead to our spirit can exercise living power over our body.” (Buber, p.47)

There is only one way to overcome the power of the State according to Landauer and Buber. (The following is a paraphrase of Buber’s statement.) It is the growth of a real organic structure, for the union of persons and families into various communities and of communities into associations, and nothing else, that “;destroys”; the State by displacing it....association without sufficient and sufficiently vital communal spirit does not set Community up in the place of the State - it bears the State in its own self and it cannot result in anything but State, i.e. power-politics and expansionism supported by bureaucracy. (Buber, pp.47-8)

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