is disembodied spirit, and therefore, not genuine spirit; socialism without religion is body emptied of spirit and, hence, also not genuine body.”189 Ragaz conceived of Buber as standing much closer to him than many Christian representatives. The anarchist methodology of a cooperative and communal society was accepted and reflected by Ragaz in his social and ecclesiological explication. Ragaz was convinced that an anarchist concept of the cooperative community was the only adequate sociological form of Christianity. Next to the labor union, he believed it must become a necessary and fundamental component of the new political and social construction of society.190
In addition, a Russian, Peter Kropotkin, helped Ragaz to overcome the Darwinian concept of evolution. In his book, Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier und Menschenwelt (1908), Kropotkin, without finally rejecting Darwin’s concept of the fight for survival, did not regard this idea as one single motive in the development and progress of nature and humanity. Kropotkin made an attempt to discuss and build an anarchist philosophy on natural scientific grounds. Against the Darwinian idea of struggle for survival, he proposed that the regulation is the mutual aid that gains significance in the process of evolution. According to Kropotkin, there is in nature and history a structure of reciprocal aid and an attitude of solidarity.
Marx and Kropotkin would share a similar social vision of communism, but Marx was skeptical of the immediate establishment of Communism. According to Marx, the attainment of the final stage of Communism goes on ahead of the phase of a raw Communism. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition from state power monopoly to the revolutionary party appeared to Marx to be unavoidable. However, in a circle of anarchism, the appropriation of the state through the party is not meant to be the negation of the state but only another interpretation of state despotism. According to Kropotkin, a communist society could be realized without the state.191 The vision of the dominion-free society, the organization of life in community, and an anti-institutional stance made an impact on Ragaz. Ragaz held such an anarchist vision as “the basis of socialism” in a better and more adequate form than Marxist socialism. Furthermore, Ragaz distinguished between a dogma and a methodological principle of anarchism. He rejected anarchism in the form of a total philosophical-theoretical explanation of the world and human race. What attracted Ragaz was a principle of the federative construction of society in terms of small and personal unified social groups from below to above. Opposed to a form of the state, this idea is oriented toward the cooperative and communal essence of society.192
Given this fact, anarchism as a principle stands in the line of God’s kingdom because the theocracy of God’s kingdom means none other than an anarchist order. The anarchism of God’s kingdom does not mean disorder or chaos but quite the reverse. Here every human being stands in a direct relation to God and in freely ordered and equally based community to each other. The kingdom of God does not run counter to anarchism, but anarchism comes out of the kingdom of God. Where anarchism stands under the rule of God, there is no master-slave relation in the interpersonal realm. The primary rule of God does not tolerate a secondary dominating form of human over human. Where there is the Sprit of the living God, there occurs a voluntary and domination-free personal community.
In this anarchist principle of a cooperative and federal community Ragaz saw a concrete realization-form within the historical process. Where God rules and is given glory, the traditional structure of dominion and rule can be broken and eliminated. Then a new communal and cooperative order of solidarity must be developed. As Ragaz stresses, “the anarchism of the immediacy under God is the highest form of historical life and of human community.”193
After 1916 the religious-social movement began to decline, in part due to Ragaz’s conflict with Kutter and in part due to his rejection of the dialectical theology of Barth. In his first edition of Romans (1919), Barth, speaking on behalf of Social Democracy, expressed his critique that Ragaz’s religious socialism had limitations. In 1919 at a religious-socialist conference in Tambach, Barth was invited in place of Ragaz, who was unable to speak because of health reasons. Herein Barth dealt a final blow to any kind of hyphenated Christianity in light of totaliter aliter revolution. In the wake of Barth’s commentary on Romans (1919, 1922) and the Tambach lecture (1919), many pastors in Germany and Switzerland left their previous alliance with religious socialism in order to become followers of the dialectical theology of Barth. This remained a bitter experience for Ragaz, who attacked dialectical theology as reactionary, quietistic, antihumanistic and antisocial.
Ragaz sensed that Barth, in his Romans I, initiated his attack on religious socialism. After the publication of Romans I, Ragaz wrote in his diary: “Barth, Römerbrief: That is possibly the strongest attack up to now against me, because it cuts the center. Inspired by Kutter, misusing Blumhardt, full of poison, spitefulness, and arrogance. But so many significant and profound things.”194 Ragaz regarded Barth as turning away from the religious-socialist movement at three levels: 1) the religious-socialist message was theologized, so that it led to a new orthodoxy; 2) it was reduced to a churchly sphere (ecclesiologized) with the consequence of a new clericalism; and 3) it was reduced to Paulinism, that is, in Barth’s Römerbrief, Paul’s epistle to the Romans retained primacy over Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.195
In 1921 Ragaz published an anthology of writings of the two Blumhardts with his own commentary, Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt, Vater und Sohn—und weiter! In the same year Ragaz made an important decision to commit to the labor movement. By abandoning his teaching position on the theological faculty in Zurich, he moved into a predominantly working-class section of Zurich, Aussersihil, where he built up an educational center for the poor. He spent the rest of his life working at this center and editing the journal Neue Wege. In his struggle for peace and against the power of militarism, Ragaz became a pacifist and a supporter of the League of Nations.196
Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen in the Midst of the World War I and Socialism
The Situation of Social Democracy in Switzerland
The period of the Second International (1889–1914) cannot be simply identified with the Marxist movement. Many sources of European socialism had influenced the ideology and movement of the socialist parties that belonged to the International. For instance, there was a tradition of Lassalleanism in Germany, Proudhonism and Blanquism in France, and anarchism in Italy. Although Marxism stood out as the dominant ideology of the workers’ movement and proletariat, this was not the ideological center of the Second International. This International can be understood as an assemblage of socialist parties from different backgrounds representing the masses and various workers’ movements.197
The philosophical texts of Karl Marx such as the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right remained unpublished until the 1930s. One group, which viewed Marxism as a theory of social development and progress out of capitalistic society and its inevitable and necessary collapse, tried to combine and complement the philosophical ethics of Kant with a historical materialism. This is the classic way of neo-Kantian Marxism dominant in figures such as Cohen, Natorp, and Voländer.
In the socialism of the Second International we notice that there was a struggle against anarchism and revisionism, and a conflict between Social Democrats and left-wing groups after the Russian Revolution of 1905. When Barth joined the Swiss Socialist Party in 1915, this party was still radical in its progressive orientation because it did not split into communist and revisionist wings until the Zimmerwald conference. No doubt the German Social Democracy was dominant in the
