 | |
| Author | Rudolf Rocker |
|---|---|
| Subject | Anarchist criticism of religion, statism, nationalism and centralism |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Covici-Friede |
Publication date | 1937 |
Nationalism and Culture is a nonfiction book by German anarcho-syndicalist writer Rudolf Rocker. In this book, he criticizes religion, statism, nationalism, and centralism from an anarchist perspective.
The ideas expressed in the book, Rocker claimed, dated back to the time before World War I, when he was a leader in the Jewish anarchist labor movement in London. Over the years, many parts of Nationalism and Culture were published in various essays and lectures. [1] Rocker started working on the book around 1925, while he was still living in Germany. At first, he only planned a short book on nationalism, but over the years the material grew. At the time, Rocker was becoming more and more disillusioned as a wave of nationalism spread about Germany. This development culminated when the Nazi Party under Hitler came to power in 1933. Meanwhile, the German anarchist movement and the Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union Rocker was active in, were waning. This led Rocker to even question whether Germans were at all capable of anarchist thought. [2]
Rocker begins the first part of Nationalism and Culture with a chapter attacking the Insufficiency of Economic Materialism as it was called. Rocker maintained that there is a distinct difference between natural science and the humanities. While the former was concerned with "a causality of physical necessity", the latter with "a matter of a causality of human aims and ends". He criticizes Marxism for attempting to describe human interactions with scientific terms thus neglecting the will to power, a term borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, as a motor for historical development. [3]
The book continues by describing the emergence and development of religion. Rocker claims religion to enslave its very creator, man, since man submits himself to a mysterious power over which he has no control. He also applies this criticism to modern-day politics. According to Nationalism and Culture, man is submitted to an all-powerful state just as he is to an all-powerful god. "Thus", Rocker claims, "we arrive at the very foundations of every system of rulership and recognize that all politics is in the last instance religion, and as such tries to hold the spirit of man in the chains of dependence." He adds that nationalism is the ideology, which justifies man's coercion by the state, pointing to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas greatly influenced the nationalist ideology. According to Rousseau, the citizen's freedom presupposes his submission under the common good embodied by the state. [4] The state claims to be the creator of culture, when in truth, according to Nationalism and Culture, it is quite the opposite. The Renaissance is considered a mixed blessing, because on the one hand it was a period of high cultural productivity, but on the other hand the basis of the modern state. Similarly, Rocker gives Protestant Reformation the credit of having liberated the individual from the Catholic Church, but accuses it of having subdued it under the absolutist state. In his analysis of the Age of Enlightenment, Rocker distinguishes between liberal and democratic ideals. Liberalism reduced government to the night watchman state and thus contributed to individual liberty, while democracy is based on the general will and the collective rather than the individual and is therefore no more than a new form of despotism. This dichotomy between authoritarian democratic and libertarian ideas can also be seen in the history of the socialist movement, Rocker claims. While in Germany, Hegelian Marxism, which Rocker considers to be authoritarian, dominated the movement, the French socialists were influenced by the more liberal Proudhon. The consequence of Marx's authoritarian socialism is the Soviet regime, a twin evil of fascism, according to Rudolf Rocker. [5]
The second part of Nationalism and Culture begins by refuting the various justifications for the nation: namely, the nation as a community of ideals, as a community of language, and as a racial collective. He concludes: "The nation is not the cause, but the result, of the state", it is not a natural institution but trained unto man much like a religion: "one is a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, just as one is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Jew." The book proceeds by championing the idea that power is essentially detrimental to cultural development and Ancient Greece is cited as one of many examples for this. One chapter is devoted to architecture, as the "most social of all arts". Rocker concludes by pointing to the rise of new dictatorships, Nazism and Soviet communism, which take the place of people's unconditional trust in the infallibility of the Church. This trust leads them to support the "rape of all human rights". Against this authoritarianism, Rocker advocates a "new humanitarian socialism". [6]
Nationalism and Culture was originally supposed to be published in Germany in 1933, but the Machtergreifung and Rocker's emigration intervened. It was not published until 1937, by the Spanish anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán and the publishing house Tierra y Libertad. Soon after the release, however, the Spanish Civil War made the book hard to sell. Alexander Berkman, one of Rocker's friends and also a well-known anarchist, started an English translation. Rocker, however, was unhappy with Berkman's work. With the help of anarchists he had met on a lecture tour in the United States, Rocker contacted Ray E. Chase, a professor at the University of California, who agreed to translate the book. This translation was published by the Rocker Publication Committee, which had been formed for this purpose, and the Covici-Friede publishing house in New York City, despite Emma Goldman having warned Rocker of Covici-Friede's bad reputation. Rocker's bad luck continued and the publishing house declared bankruptcy just a year after Nationalism and Culture was released. Nevertheless, the book was soon translated into Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, French, and Japanese. It could not be published in Rocker's native Germany until 1949, after the end of World War II. There it was published under the title Die Entscheidung des Abendlandes (The Decision of the West). [7]
Nationalism and Culture was received very well in the anarchist movement. Many compared Rocker to the likes of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin to underline the work's importance for anarchism. Augustin Souchy claimed Rocker deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for the book. It has some influence to this day. For example, Noam Chomsky was greatly influenced by Rocker and Nationalism and Culture in particular. In the socialist spectrum, the book was lauded by Willi Eichler's magazine Geist und Tat and F. A. Ridley of the Socialist Leader . Lewis Mumford also expressed admiration for the book. The English socialist philosopher Bertrand Russell considered Nationalism and Culture an important contribution to political philosophy. [8]
Both Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, despite disagreeing with Rocker on many points, considered the book significant and wished it be read by as many people as possible. [9] Solomon F. Bloom, reviewing the book in The New Republic considered the book "a most welcome contribution" and conceded that Rocker "supports his position with a wealth of information of encyclopedic range", but criticized that "[c]rucial concepts such as will, nation and religion are inadequately defined". [10] Hans Rothfels in the American Historical Review criticized that "[o]bvious misstatements and misinterpretations are not infrequent", but called it "a combative book, but [...] not one of rattling bones nor a mere rehash of enlightened misconceptions about dark ages or the great impostors" and attributed "a wealth of information not easily accessible, and a sharply focused insight into cultural dynamics, which too often has been obscured by conventional theories of progress or of an organic or any other sort of determinism" to it. [11] The American Sociological Review's recension is largely positive: "The book gives the historical and philosophical description of the problem. Its solution is still a challenge to the future", the reviewer C. R. Hoffer claims. [12] The American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, although he disagreed with Rocker's condemnation of the state, conceded that Nationalism and Culture included some interesting ideas. T. S. Eliot's The Criterion compared Nationalism and Culture to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West . Rocker and Spengler agreed in that there are no "eternal truths" and both considered there to be an antagonism between culture and power. While Rocker affirmed the former, Spengler considered the Roman Empire's imperial power a model for modern society. Nationalism and Culture became one of very few anarchist works to be used by university professors; several American professors had students read it for discussions about nationalism. [13]
Libertarian socialism, also referred to as anarcho-socialism, anarchist socialism, free socialism, stateless socialism, socialist anarchism and socialist libertarianism, is a left-wing, anti-authoritarian, anti-statist and libertarian political philosophy within the socialist movement which rejects the state's control of the economy under state socialism. Overlapping with anarchism and libertarianism, libertarian socialists criticize wage slavery relationships within the workplace, emphasizing workers' self-management and decentralized structures of political organization. As a broad socialist tradition and movement, libertarian socialism includes anarchist, Marxist, and anarchist- or Marxist-inspired thought as well as other left-libertarian tendencies. Anarchism and libertarian Marxism are the main currents of libertarian socialism.
Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery. Anarcho-syndicalist theory generally focuses on the labour movement. Reflecting the anarchist philosophy from which it draws its primary inspiration, anarcho-syndicalism is centered on the idea that power corrupts and that any hierarchy that cannot be ethically justified must be dismantled.
Anarchists have traditionally been skeptical of or vehemently opposed to organized religion. Nevertheless, some anarchists have provided religious interpretations and approaches to anarchism, including the idea that glorification of the state is a form of sinful idolatry.
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, known later as Volin or Voline (Во́лин), was a Russian anarchist who participated in the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions before being forced into exile by the Bolshevik Party. He was a proponent of the anarchist organizational form known as synthesis anarchism.
National-anarchism is a right-wing nationalist ideology which advocates racial separatism, racial nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and racial purity. National-anarchists claim to syncretize neotribal ethnic nationalism with philosophical anarchism, mainly in their support for a stateless society, while rejecting anarchist social philosophy. The main ideological innovation of national-anarchism is its anti-state palingenetic ultranationalism. National-anarchists advocate homogeneous communities in place of the nation state. National-anarchists claim that those of different ethnic or racial groups would be free to develop separately in their own tribal communes while striving to be politically horizontal, economically non-capitalist, ecologically sustainable, and socially and culturally traditional.
Anarchism and nationalism both emerged in Europe following the French Revolution of 1789 and have a long and durable relationship going back at least to Mikhail Bakunin and his involvement with the pan-Slavic movement prior to his conversion to anarchism. There has been a long history of anarchist involvement with nationalism all over the world as well as with internationalism.
Jewish anarchism encompasses various expressions of anarchism within the Jewish community.
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Anarchism has been an undercurrent in the politics of Palestine and Israel for over a century. The anarchist ideology arrived in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, carried by a big wave of emigrants from Eastern Europe. The ideas of Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy had remarkable influence on famous exponents of some Left Zionists. Anarchists organized themselves across Israel and Palestine, and influenced the worker movement in Israel. Anarchists often call for a zero state solution, to the Palestinian Israeli conflict, in reference to a complete abolition of the states of Israel and Palestine.
Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America is a book by the German anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker about the history of liberal, libertarian, and anarchist thought in the United States.
Germinal was a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London edited by the German-born Rudolf Rocker. It appeared from 1900 to 1903, and then again from 1905 to 1908.
Dos Fraye Vort was a short-lived Jewish anarchist newspaper from Liverpool in 1898 edited by Rudolf Rocker.
Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory is a book by Uri Gordon that investigates anarchist theory and practice. An expanded reworking of the author's PhD thesis at the University of Oxford, the book was released by Pluto Press, a London-based radical publisher, in November 2007. It is presented as "an anarchist book about anarchism", and assumes some background knowledge and sympathy for anarchism on the part of the reader. Gordon considers his approach in the book to have many commonalities with that of anthropologist David Graeber, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
The relation between anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche has been ambiguous. Even though Nietzsche criticized anarchists, his thought proved influential for many of them. As such "[t]here were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of 'herds'; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'übermensch'—that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave".
Some observers believe existentialism forms a philosophical ground for anarchism. Anarchist historian Peter Marshall claims, "there is a close link between the existentialists' stress on the individual, free choice, and moral responsibility and the main tenets of anarchism."
German individualist philosopher Max Stirner became an important early influence in anarchism. Afterwards Johann Most became an important anarchist propagandist in both Germany and in the United States. In the late 19th century and early 20th century there appeared individualist anarchists influenced by Stirner such as John Henry Mackay, Adolf Brand and Anselm Ruest and Mynona.
Types of socialism include a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and organizational self-management of enterprises as well as the political theories and movements associated with socialism. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity in which surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole. There are many varieties of socialism and no single definition encapsulates all of them, but social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms. Socialists disagree about the degree to which social control or regulation of the economy is necessary, how far society should intervene, and whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change.
Johann Rudolf Rocker was a German anarchist writer and activist. He was born in Mainz to a Roman Catholic artisanal family.
The term classless society refers to a society in which no one is born into a social class. Distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or social network might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society. Thus, the concept posits not the absence of a social hierarchy but the uninheritability of class status. Helen Codere defines social class as a segment of the community, the members of which show a common social position in a hierarchical ranking. Codere suggest that a true class-organized society is one in which the hierarchy of prestige and social status is divisible into groups. Each group with its own social, economic, attitudinal and cultural characteristics, and each having differential degrees of power in community decision.
Anarchism and libertarianism, as broad political ideologies with manifold historical and contemporary meanings, have contested definitions. Their adherents have a pluralistic and overlapping tradition that makes precise definition of the political ideology difficult or impossible, compounded by a lack of common features, differing priorities of subgroups, lack of academic acceptance, and contentious, historical usage.
