Blackwell Reference Online

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Gustav Landauer was an anarchist organizer, theorist, and writer whose importance to a history of revolution is twofold: first, in terms of his own revolutionary practice, and second, in terms of his contribution to a radical revision of theories of revolution. While best remembered as a theorist, author of a prodigious corpus of lectures, essays, translations, novels, and larger works of literary criticism, history, and political philosophy, Landauer was active in the anarchist movement throughout his life and was to pay for his radical practice with two prison terms and, ultimately, his own extra-judicial execution. German anarchists in Landauer's time were struggling to retain their place in the broader socialist movement, a place increasingly denied them by a socialist party establishment bent on maintaining its legitimacy within the parliamentary system and by a trend toward centralization in the labor movement. Thus, Landauer began his political life as a member of “Der Jungen” (or “Youth”), an anti-parliamentarist faction within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) . As the SPD moved toward reformism and doctrinaire Marxism after the Erfurt congress of 1891, the Jungen were marginalized and ultimately expelled, forming a new group called the Verein Unab-hangiger Sozialisten (Association of Independent Socialists) in 1892. After a struggle over its ideological direction, ... log in or subscribe to read full text