Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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href="#ulink_c25a87d7-3a13-5059-849b-4564a4696b4b">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 belong together. Religion without socialism 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