target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_d1b8a208-9bb4-5dc3-862c-3496a0185e0a">173 Ragaz and Lenin never talked to each other, but an indirect dialogue occurred between them over the issue of the question of the revolutionary use of violence. The leader of the Youth organization stood on the side of Lenin by turning away from the religious-socialist approach. Münzenberg wrote, “Lenin saves us from religion.”174
Through Neue Wege, Lenin was aware of the antiwar position in the religious-socialist circle. Lenin reported that a pious philistine declared that it was not bad to turn a weapon against the war agitator, whereas famous Social Democrats such as Kautsky justified the chauvinism scientifically: “Whose voice is it? Our citation is extracted from a journal of a petit-bourgeois Christian democrat, whose journal is published in society of the upright cleric in Zurich.”175 Lenin actually began his attack on Ragaz and his religious socialism before Ragaz came to know about Lenin. Ragaz also reported, “I had no relation with Lenin and was not concerned about him. But Lenin was concerned about me and our movement. Lenin calls us in one Zurich journal ‘tearful social clerics’ who would keep the workers’ association from the use of violence. Obviously we stood in the way for him. The necessity of the violence was for him a dogma.”176 Warning against the danger of Bolshevism as practiced in the Soviet Union, Ragaz himself was confronted with the spirit of Bolshevism. In an article (in Neue Wege in November 1918), Ragaz defined Bolshevism as “Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced in Russia.”177 Lenin acclaimed that the proletariat must break with the bourgeois dictatorship through the dictatorship of the proletariat.178 The meaning of the Bolshevist dictatorship of the proletariat lay in taking away the means of production, the state apparatus, and finally the cultural apparatus, especially the press. This was the way of eliminating ruling violence through revolutionary violence. Only then could the whole economic, social, and cultural apparatus serve socialism in a genuine sense.179
According to Ragaz, Bolshevism from above and Bolshevism from below were no less than a minority rule over majority by holding “a belief in violence rather than justice, in dictatorship rather than democracy, in absolutism rather than freedom, in matter rather than spirit.” For Ragaz, therefore, “Bolshevism is imperialism and militarism in another form.”180 There was only one way to revolution: through a military coup and a military dictatorship evolving from it. But Ragaz did not find the idea of military dictatorship bearable or feasible: “The emergence of socialist militarism after the destruction of capitalistic militarism is one of the saddest surprises that we have witnessed in our time.”181 In order to battle Bolshevism, Ragaz calls for a new orientation in socialism. The kingdom of God must overthrow the kingdom of violence and build up the kingdom of freedom. Therefore, socialism has a task of uniting “a powerful sense of community and a passionate consciousness of freedom.”182 Although Ragaz argued that a certain measure of violence becomes inevitable, he denounced every use of violence as a defeat of socialism. Ragaz’s ideal was a social revolution without violence, a victory without violence through a spirit of truth toward “an immediate socialism and an immediate democracy.”183
We cannot underestimate an anarchist element in Ragaz’s religious socialism. Anarchism, especially in its communal form, had a strong impact on Ragaz’s theory and praxis until his late phase. In 1914/15 when there took place a collapse of the Second International after World War I, Ragaz strove to seek a new orientation and content for socialism. He came into contact with an anarchist circle initiated by a medical doctor, F. Brupbacher, in Zurich. As Ragaz recalled, this period belonged to his “anarchist intermezzo.”184 However, in April 1915, under the influence of Gustav Landauer, Ragaz broke with the Brupbacher circle. In Landauer’s concept of idealistic socialism Ragaz saw a point of contact with his theology of God’s kingdom-socialism. Socialism as a voluntary attitude and movement is to be realized in a new community. For Ragaz there was a close connection between Landauer’s anarchism and his socialism of the kingdom of God. According to Ragaz, Landauer was an anarchist in the sense that he—with or without Credo—knew something about a living God and God’s kingdom.
The influence of Landhauer upon Ragaz and Ragaz’s emotional participation in Landhauer’s life and destiny become explicit at this point. On the questions of rejection of the state, the condemnation of the war, and the fundamental demand for violence-free activity, we notice a parallel between Landhauer and Ragaz. Gustav Landauer, an activist of the Bayern revolution, founded the “Socialist Alliance” with Martin Buber in 1908 in the attempt to build up a communal socialism, a community without hierarchy or violence. Early in 1919 he was called by the comrades of the Munich counciliar republic and took part for six days in the Bayern council government. After the collapse of the first council republic in April of 1919, Landauer was put under arrest and slain on the way to prison.
What Landauer defended was a new socialism without enforcement or authority: “The socialist alliance declares as the aim of endeavor anarchy in the original sense: Order through alliances of voluntariness.”185 In the alliances there is neither rule nor oppressed, but only the community of equality. Neither class struggle nor proletarian politics can be the aim. With this idea in mind, Landauer turned away from an orthodox and a revisionist Marxism; he also turned from a program of the reformist party in the Second International. To be sure, the central content of Landauer’s vision was directed against the dominion of human over other humans and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Ragaz’s emphasis on the community as a sociological form, we see Landauer’s idea of Bünde der Freilligkeit informing Ragaz. Ragaz found in Landauer’s thought a methodologically open anarchism. According to Ragaz, Landauer’s anarchism was not doctrine (in fact did not mention dogma) but was a method that he operated in freedom and superiority. From this viewpoint he looked and worked onwards, always remaining in freedom and never becoming slave to his method. Ragaz looked upon Landauer as one of “the greatest socialists of all ages.”186
Next to Landauer we need to mention Buber and Peter Kropotkin. In connection with Landauer, Buber developed a similar anarchist idea of the community. Buber’s concept of community cannot be detached from his concept of religiosity. He was a very important dialogue partner to Ragaz because Buber integrated his anarchist project of socialism into the Jewish tradition of faith in God. Starting from the God of the Bible and God’s promised kingdom, Buber and Ragaz shared their own view of transformation of the social relation in this light. In April 1928 Buber and Ragaz organized a convention in Heppenheim under the heading, “Socialism through Faith” (“Sozialimus aus dem Glauben”).187 At stake for them was a shared commonality between the Hebrew prophets and early Christianity. In April 1923 Buber had reviewed Ragaz’s book Weltreich, Religion und Gottesherrschaft (1923) in the literary section of the Frankfurter Zeitung.188
The hope of the kingdom of God and communal renewal of the world united a Jew, Buber, with a Christian, Ragaz, beyond religious barriers. Like Ragaz, Buber understood himself as a religious socialist. As Buber states in “Three Theses of a Religious Socialism” (1928), “Religious socialism can only mean that religion and socialism are essentially directed to each other—that each of them needs the covenant with the other for the fulfillment of its own essence . . . Unity with God and community among the creatures
