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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Frontier Socialism
Self-Organisation and Anti-Capitalism
Monica Quirico
Gianfranco Ragona
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
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Monica Quirico · Gianfranco Ragona
Frontier Socialism
Self-Organisation and Anti-Capitalism
Monica Quirico Gianfranco Ragona
Turin, Italy Turin, Italy
Translated by
Angelina Ione Zontine Chiara Masini
Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-030-52370-1 ISBN 978-3-030-52371-8 (eBook)
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Acknowledgements
This book was to all intents and purposes written together and the authors
share scientific responsibility for the results. Monica Quirico carried out
the final editing for Chapters 3, 6, 7 and 9 and the second Interlude and
Gianfranco Ragona Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 8 and the first Interlude. We
have limited as much as possible in-text citations; however, in each section
the sources we have made use of are listed under References.
The Italian edition has been presented and discussed in several Italian
cities. The translation has been funded by the Department of Cultures,
Politics and Society (University of Turin).
We are particularly grateful to our life partners, Diego and Laura. In
different and unique ways, they have reminded us that what made the
1970s so unforgettable was the human and political solidarity that—in
the north as in the south, among intellectuals as well as the subprole-
tariat—mobilized individuals around values of justice and equality, and,
at the same time, how the loss of this feeling over the following decades
produced, and continues to produce, absurd, unfair and sometimes even
cruel effects, especially for subaltern subjects.
xiii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1 Hope and Disillusionment in Greece 1
2 What Socialism After Socialism? 8
3 A New Path to Self-Government 11
References 19
2 “Revolution Is Not What the Revolutionaries Believe
It to Be”: Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) 21
1 Life and Works 21
2 A Road for the Liberation of Workers 23
3 Analysis of Capitalism 30
4 Revolution 34
References 38
3 Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation: Alexandra
Kollontai (1872–1952) 41
1 Life and Works 41
2 Marxism, Class Initiative and Gender Autonomy 45
3 The Difficult Transition to Socialism 46
4 Class and Self-Government 50
References 54
xv
xvi CONTENTS
Interlude 1: Resistance or Revolution? The Spanish Civil

War
4 Self-Management and Communism: Paul Mattick
(1904–1981) 67
1 Life and Works 67
2 Marx and His Epigones 70
3 Mixed Economy and State Capitalism 74
4 Against Bolshevism, for a Workers’ Democracy 77
References 82
5 Workers’ Struggles Under Neocapitalism: Raniero
Panzieri (1921–1964) 85
1 Life and Works 85
2 Marx and Marxism 89
3 Monopolistic Capitalism: The Factory-Society 93
4 Workers’ Control 98
References 103
Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: The Dilemmas of a

Revolutionary Group Between the Hot Autumn
and the Restoration of Capitalism
6 Revolutionary Reformism: Rudolf Meidner
(1914–2015) 121
1 Life and Works 121
2 Marxism and Democracy 124
3 Beyond Private Property 126
4 The Debate Over the Wage Earner Funds
and Their Neutralization 130
References 133
7 A Communist Theory of Politics: Nicos Poulantzas
(1936–1979) 135
1 Life and Works 135
2 Marxism and the State 136
3 Economic and Political Crisis in Monopolistic Capitalism 142
4 Seizing the State and Direct Democracy 147
References 152
CONTENTS xvii
8 In the Midst of the Crisis 155

1 The Chilean “Laboratory” 155
2 The Legacy of 1968 158
3 The “Hayekization” of the World, or Keynes’ Defeat 162
4 Amidst the Rubble: Alan Bihr’s Paths to Renewal 165
References 170
9 (Tentative) Conclusions 173
1 A Compact Current? 173
2 The Movement of Movements 180
3 At the Intersection of Class, Gender
and Ethnicity—And Environment 183
4 Between Disaster and Hope 188
References 192
Index 195
About the Authors
Monica Quirico is Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of

Contemporary History, Södertörn University, Stockholm. She has exten-
sively researched Swedish politics and labour movement, often in compar-
ative perspective (Sweden-Italy); in this field, she has conducted lessons
and seminars at international conferences and workshops and has
published several books and articles, in Italian, English and Swedish. Her
publications include: 2019, with Åse, Cecilia and Wendt, Maria. “Gen-
dered Grief: Mourners’ Politicisation of Military Death”. In Gendering
Military Sacrifice. A Feminist Comparative Analysis, ed. Cecilia Åse and
Maria Wendt. 145–176. London-NY: Routledge; with Ragona, Gian-
franco. 2018. Socialismo di frontiera. Autorganizzazione e anticapital-
ismo. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier; 2014. Socialdemokratin och EU . In
Det långa 1990-talet. När Sverige förandrades, ed. Anders Ivarsson West-
erberg, Ylva Waldemarson, Kjell Östberg, 193–213, Umeå: Borèa; 2012.
“Model or Utopia? The Meidner Plan and Sweden in Italy’s Political and
Trade Unionist Debate (1975–1984)”. Scandinavian Journal of History
37: 646–666; 2007. Il socialismo davanti alla realtà. Il modello svedese
(1990–2006). Roma: Editori Riuniti.
Gianfranco Ragona is Associate professor of History of Political

Thought at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, Univer-
sity of Turin, Italy. His main research interests are: History of Socialism,
History of Marxism and Marxology, German Anarchism and Judaism.
xix
xx ABOUT THE AUTHORS
In this field, he has conducted lessons and seminars at national and

international conferences and workshops and has published several books
and articles. His publications include: 2019. “La «nuova democrazia» di
Kurt Eisner”. In Il Pensiero Politico. Rivista di Storia delle Idee Politiche
e Sociali 52: 240–252; 2019. G. Landauer, Appello al socialismo, ed.
G. Ragona. Rome: Castelvecchi; with Quirico, Monica. 2018. Social-
ismo di frontiera. Autorganizzazione e anticapitalismo. Turin: Rosenberg
& Sellier. K. Marx, F. Engels, Scritti. Novembre 1867-luglio 1870. Eds.
G. M. Bravo, M. Ceretta, G. Ragona; Milan: Edizioni Pantarei; 2018. K.
Marx, F. Engels, Scritti. Ottobre 1871-novembre 1873. Eds. G. M. Bravo,
M. Ceretta, G. Ragona. Milan: Edizioni Pantarei; 2013. Anarchismo.
Le idee e il movimento. Roma-Bari: Laterza; 2011. Gustav Landauer.
A Bibliography (1889–2009). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura;
2010. Gustav Landauer. Anarchico, ebreo, tedesco. Rome: Editori Riuniti
University Press.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1 Hope and Disillusionment in Greece

Greece, 25 January 2015: Syriza, the radical left coalition founded in
2004 on the wave of the counter-globalization movement and trans-
formed into a party in 2012, won the general election with over 36% of
the vote, barely missing out on securing the absolute majority of seats. Its
programme included radically re-negotiating the country’s debt with the
Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International
Monetary Fund) as well as a National Reconstruction Plan centred on
four priorities: escaping the humanitarian crisis, restarting the economy,
boosting employment and revitalizing democracy.
“Hope wins”, Syriza rejoiced on social media. It seemed to mark a
happy end to the exhausting economic, political and institutional crisis
that had begun a few years earlier when Punchinello’s secret (of having
presented the European Union falsified financial data to ensure Greece’s
entrance into the eurozone) was made public, a crisis that the govern-
ments and economic and financial powers of various countries speculated
on for years. In fact, the socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou put
an end to the pantomime in 2009. The following year the country, on
the verge of bankruptcy, was forced to ask for international aid; the funds
were granted, but with a quid pro quo: Greece was required to imple-
ment a brutal and relentless series of structural reforms. Over a three-year
period, the Greek GDP fell (by 25%) along with its real public spending,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_1
2 M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA
while the number of unemployed rose. There were cries of humanitarian

disaster (increased infant and senile mortality, the spread of AIDS and
other diseases that were believed to have been eradicated) and political
emergency, in that the extraordinary conditions favoured the rebirth of
Nazism (with the Golden Dawn party catalysing a part of the popular
protest).
Up to that point, such an apocalyptic scenario had been unthinkable
for a European public stupefied by propaganda asserting the providen-
tial unavoidability of continental unification. Syriza reacted to the crisis
by rediscovering mutual aid, creating public clinics and pharmacies, self-
organized soup kitchens, work cooperatives for the unemployed, markets
for direct producer-to-consumer selling and collective schools. One of the
party leaders, Yannis Albanis, explained:
We won because we went into the streets, the squares, the areas where
everything was missing […] and we were the first to take care of the
people’s needs. It is no longer a time to lock ourselves away and hold
discussions among party officials; today we must go to the places where
the conflict arises and where need is felt. (Pucciarelli and Russo Spena
2015)
Support for self-organization practices (mutual aid but also street

protests) and the anti-austerity programme bore fruit: the 2012 general
election crowned Syriza as the second-leading party in the country,
behind New Democracy, and the main opposition power; in the 2014
elections, Syriza obtained over 26% of the vote to become the majority
party and went on to triumph in the following year’s elections (although
the percentage of votes it won forced the party to ally with the anti-EU
right-wing party Independent Greeks).
Throughout Europe, the anti-capitalist left was shaken: after years
(decades?) of opaque and self-referential leaders, Syriza’s leader, Alexis
Tsipras, finally offered an internationally key figure who could be taken
as a model for his ability to trigger a virtuous circle between bottom-up
mobilization and institutional victory. Waves of politicians and intellec-
tuals set out from all over Europe, from Rome to Stockholm, to converge
in Athens to celebrate this new beginning for Greece and Europe as a
whole.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
At the end of the first phase of negotiations, Tsipras, considering the

conditions set by creditors for paying off the debt to be unfeasible—
because they were based, once again, on restrictive measures that would
have been the final blow for a country that was already dying—called a
referendum for 5 July 2015. The verdict of the Greek people was clear:
62% of voters rejected the creditors’ plan.
The European left rejoiced: if an instrument such as the referendum
held in the de-democratized capitalism of the European Union had
succeeded in upsetting political, institutional and financial balances that
until the day before had seemed unquestionable, maybe it was possible to
change course.
The end is well known. Indeed, the spell was broken almost imme-
diately, the very next day after the referendum: the controversial finance
minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned, on the urging of Tsipras himself. He
had been working for some time, with the help of American economist
James Galbraith (and with Tsipras’ consent, according to the version
Varoufakis has always maintained) on a plan B: replacing the euro with
an electronic currency, to be understood as a prelude to a possible return
to the drachma, in case creditors were stubborn with their claims.
Some scholars have compared the negotiations between the Tsipras
government and the Troika to the negotiations in Versailles at the end of
World War I: the stakes were never economic—repaying a debt everyone
knew could never be collected—but rather purely political. It was a matter
of redesigning European geopolitics in the name of English and French
supremacy, in the case of Versailles, and of the primacy of Germany and
transnational financial powers, in the case of Greece (Fumagalli 2015)—
even at the cost of producing further humanitarian disasters and political
setbacks.
Varoufakis has said that Tsipras, immediately after the referendum,
disclosed to him his fear of an imminent coup d’état: this struck a nerve,
in a country such as Greece. It may even have been an all-too-obvious
card to play. No one knows what really happened during the negotiations
between the EU and IMF, on the one hand, and the Greek Government,
on the other. What is well known is that, a few days after the referendum,
Tsipras accepted the agreement with the EU that voters had rejected.
The early elections of September 2015, convened by the Prime Minister
himself to acknowledge the political crisis that his about-face had trig-
gered, confirmed the relative majority of Syriza (which had split, in the
meantime). However, complying with the parameters imposed by credi-

tors seemed to inexorably erode the consensus the party enjoyed, turning
it into a target for the same street protests it had previously sparked and
for which, above all, it had provided a political outlet.
After what was described as the humiliation of the Greek Prime
Minister in Brussels, left-wing European parties’ political tourism to
Athens came to an abrupt end; the image of “young Alexis”, whose face
had been splashed across all the protest banners for months, was hastily
put back in the warehouse.
Many Western Marxists, comfortably seated on their sofas, had hoped
that the Greeks would sacrifice themselves on the altar of ideology, experi-
encing what happens to a country that rebels against international finance
and thus acting as a Guinea pig for the left of other countries. Those
same people now branded Tsipras a “traitor”—an indelible stigma in
the tormented history of the left. “Contradiction is the name of the
left in power”, Costas Douzinas wrote (Douzinas 2017), recalling that
in Brussels Tsipras had been forced to choose between capitulating and
leaving the euro, i.e. between a bad option and a worse one. Just as if
playing out a Greek tragedy (indeed), two moral laws collided: it was
not possible to preserve Syriza’s identity and at the same time ensure the
survival of Greece. Tertium non datur: whatever decision Tsipras made,
he would have paid for it. Once he had accepted the agreement (albeit in
a tempered form, compared to the one the EU had offered the week
before) would it have been “more leftist” to resign, thus leaving the
country to the centre-right? Syriza’s time in government (bearing in mind
that government and power do not coincide) can be read as an attempt to
hold together an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of belief: to accept
the EU memorandum so as to avoid leaving the eurozone (an option that
the majority of Greeks opposed) and at the same time—albeit not without
contradictions and misunderstandings—to encourage social opposition to
the very policy of sacrifice that the government had committed itself to
implementing. Working both inside and outside the state, Poulantzas, one
of the leading figures of this book, might have said. To complete the
picture, it should be remembered that Syriza used the country’s primary
surplus (what is left to the state after having paid all expenses, but before
having paid the interest on the debt) accrued thanks to its having achieved
the creditors’ objectives, to launch redistributive measures which were
undoubtedly late in coming but nonetheless alleviated the difficulties of
the weaker social groups.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Was it worth it? We do not have a definitive answer. It is worth

reflecting, however, on the fact that Syriza, despite losing the elections
in 2019, did obtain 31.53%: a percentage that is now unimaginable not
only for the few remaining left-wing parties in Europe, but also for the
more tried-and-tested social democratic (or rather, social liberal) parties
such as the Nordic ones. It is also remarkable that the Nazis did not
succeed in securing a place in the parliament.
Instead of crying “betrayal”, we prefer to wonder about the limits
of a “national path to socialism” in a context as rigid as that of the
European Union and transnational financial powers. In 1973, capital
used the military coup in Chile to cancel an attempt at carrying out
a democratic transition to socialism; in 2015, capital showed that it no
longer needed armed force (at least, not in Europe) to proactively curb
Greece’s milder—yet nonetheless completely heretical, in a parameter-led
Europe—idea of exiting the crisis with measures to support the popular
classes, on the one hand, and increase taxes on assets, on the other.
Today, in fact, all that is required is to threaten to suspend aid to a
country crippled by the spiral of state and individual indebtedness which
led many people, in Berlin as well as Brussels and Washington, to close
their eyes to its political-financial problems.
Nevertheless, the gaze of a large part of the anti-capitalist universe (the
remaining parties, but also the intelligentsia and associations) inexorably
stops, in fact if not in principle, at the borders of their own country (or
even neighbourhood). We think that nationalism is the curse of the left:
it was evident in the Soviet Union, China and many other situations, not
least of which the state of abandonment in which Greece found itself.
We have always been opposed to the European Union in that it
expresses a hegemonic neo-liberal design; however, sovereignism, even
when permeated by “social” tones, also horrifies us—and in fact regularly
leads to reactionary stances, beginning with positions on immigration.
Today more than ever before, socialism either exists without borders or
it does not exist at all; not (only) to ensure moral superiority, but—to
be frank—as a result of some sort of “historical necessity” imposed by
capital.
In the face of this challenge, the conclusion to be drawn from
both the Greek case and the anti-capitalist mobilizations of the early
twenty-first century is that organizations and movements such as Social
Forums, Occupy Wall Street, Los Indignados, No Tav and more have
invested heavily in experimenting with alternative forms of sociality
(the occupation of public space, permanent assemblies, autonomous

networks of production and distribution) without concerning themselves
too much about what the issues that used to be central to communist
and socialist movements (organizational form, alliances between different
social subjects, direct or representative democracy). When they have
managed to cross the threshold of power, they have been either pulverized
(like Syriza) or forced to strike a precarious balance between being against
the system and moving within it (like Podemos in Spain). On the whole,
criticizing and opposing capitalism require new movements to engage in
a great effort of theoretical and practical innovation:
This is both their strength, in that they are not trapped in the models
inherited from the past, and their weakness, because they have no memory;
they were born out of a tabula rasa and failed to complete the process
of mourning the defeats of the Twentieth century. They are creative but
also fragile because they do not have the same strength as movements
that, conscious of their history, acted in the wake of a specific tradition.
(Traverso 2017)
At the level of planning and organization, indeed, weakness and fragility

seem to characterize all of the currents of antagonistic mobilization
that have managed to reach beyond minorityism: capitalism seems ever-
lasting between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in part because
these attempts have not even made it as far as imagining a completely
new society; they have only—perhaps in the name of realism—proposed
limited corrective measures to render the system liveable, but without
effectively envisioning the conditions of a radically different common exis-
tence. The strong hypotheses of the socialism of the past are unable
to inspire the disheartened, frustrated, exploited and always, albeit in
different ways, oppressed masses on different continents. It was these
basic observations that gave rise to the idea for this book; they were
bolstered by the fact that, as we were conducting the final editing of the
text in view of the English translation, the coronavirus struck the world,
changing rhythms, habits, living and working conditions, and certainties.
Suddenly, the concluding section we were discussing and drafting based
on a critical reading of a group of original contributions about the condi-
tions of possibility for a project of anti-capitalist emancipation (defined as
socialist, communist or otherwise, it does not matter much at this point)
seemed out of date. And all of a sudden many of those interesting writings
1 INTRODUCTION 7
seemed to have aged as well (Dieterich 2006; The Invisible Committee

2009–2017; Honneth 2017; Wright 2010, 2019; Douzinas and Zizek
2010; Sunkara 2019).
The pandemic—or rather, the way it is being managed—has impris-
oned us in a sort of kairòs, an exceptional temporal conjuncture or,
rather, a suspension of temporality, in which the darkest legacy of the past
converges with the prospects of a dystopian future. On the one hand, after
so much talk about “post-” this and that, the wholesale inertia of transna-
tional institutions, beginning with the European Union, has contributed
to pushing us back into the paradigm of political modernity in its most
aggressive version: the supremacy of the nation state, which is sovereign
precisely in that it determines a state of exception. On the other hand, in
the face of this resurgent Leviathan (which will be temporary, of course,
but can always be resuscitated for future emergencies) the social fabric
of modernity (starting with class aggregations) has come undone. What
we have instead is a de-socialized society that, as Naomi Klein has noted,
embodies the most daring utopia of Silicon Valley: a network of individ-
uals enthralled by the internet and physically, as well as morally, distanced
out of fear of their neighbours and proximity itself.
In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler writes
that “when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms
of public space (including virtual ones), they are exercising a plural and
performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the
midst of the political field, and which […] delivers a bodily demand for
a more liveable set of economic, social and political conditions no longer
afflicted by induced forms of precarity” (Butler 2018, 11).
Aggregations take on political significance even before they make
explicit claims. What then becomes of collective action when the impera-
tive of social coexistence is physical distancing? In this regard, two obser-
vations seem to offer hope. First, that in the midst of the pandemic the
workers’ movement—which many believe to be doomed—has managed
to mobilize from Europe to the Americas. The bodies of workers have
taken the aggregation imposed on them by the process of capitalist
valorization (to produce even at the cost of health) and turned it against
the law of profit in order to defend their basic rights. Without indulging
in nostalgia for some reductive vision of workerism, we think it is worth
reflecting on this wave of resistance on the part of a movement that had
been cut off from the narrative of the liquid society.
Second, it is encouraging that the outbreak of the pandemic prompted

several waves of protest around the world: initially to urge authorities to
adopt measures to contain the virus, then to protest against the disman-
tling of social policies and then again to deal with the emergency not
by handing over personal freedom and intelligence to the state, but
rather by building solidarity networks to protect society’s most vulner-
able members, from the elderly to prisoners, from the unemployed to
illegal immigrants. The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police
on 25 May 2020 triggered a worldwide mobilization against racism that
showed that activists were able to combine the proven techniques of the
“Black lives matter” movement with the creativity and courage required in
a historical moment in which struggles may be criminalized by invoking
national unity in the name of the health emergency. In very different
contexts such as the United States and Hong Kong, activists have been
able to escape from the dichotomy of violence vs. non-violence; while
refusing to reproduce the brutality of institutions, they have also physi-
cally resisted the attacks of police and army forces (Chattopadhyay et al.
2020).
For our part, while avoiding endeavours of pre-packaged specula-
tion that represent no more than exercises of the imagination, we are
convinced that past and present struggles, analyses and failures can offer
fertile grounds for drawing lines of action and critique that not only guide
the construction of a society beyond and against capitalism, but make
this task a constant topic of contemporary discussions. It may lead to
squabbles, but not over which identity to defend; rather, to understand,
for example, the most effective way to safeguard pluralism in a socialist
society. Although we only partially agree with their practical proposals,
we find Wright and Hanhel’s discussion of “the level of detail to which
post-capitalist visions should aspire, the future of markets, and whether a
revolutionary strategy has a credible role to play in anti-capitalist politics”
(Hahnel and Wright 2016, V; see also Wright 2010) to represent a highly
useful methodological suggestion.
2 What Socialism After Socialism?

The terms communism and socialism have a long and, to some extent,
surprising history. One of the first instances of the word “communist”
dates back to the sixteenth century, and it was subsequently used to
refer to the communion of goods preached by certain Anabaptist sects.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
As such, it was generally used in the field of religion and, especially,

peasant life. Conversely, in the nineteenth century, the critics of indus-
trialization who took on the physical, moral and political consequences
of workers’ exploitation were called, or called themselves, socialists. As
some scholars noted, therefore, communism originally referred to a
human communitarian nature understood as something worth recov-
ering; socialism instead imagines a new form of sociality to be built
progressively throughout history (Grandjonc 1989; Cole 1953–1960).
Marx opted for the word communism, while coming to terms with his
previous philosophical conscience: “We call communism the real move-
ment which abolishes the present state of things”, he states in The German
Ideology (1845). The very founders of what was later defined “scien-
tific socialism” were also the authors of the Manifesto of the Communist
Party. In one of the many reprints of the essay, Engels clarified the
terminological choice he and Marx had made: “By Socialists, in 1847,
were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian
systems (…) on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks,
who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any
danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances” (Engels 2010,
516). Later on, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx
made a distinction that was destined to endure: on the one hand, he
identified the “socialist” phase of the proletarian revolution (when state
power is in the hands of the working class, but the social product is
still distributed according to the principles of bourgeois civil law and
work corresponds with access to the basic goods needed to live); on
the other hand, he indicated a later and superior phase, actual commu-
nism, in which unequal law prevails and the society achieves the motto
“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
Later in the twentieth century, communism and socialism often indicated
different political projects (revolution and reformism), although Western
communist parties had little to do with traditional-style revolutionary
transformation (modelled on the seizing of the Winter Palace).
Focusing on the world of anarchism, another thread of modern
socialism, matters become—if possible—even more complicated. At first
glance, anarchists have long opposed communism or, rather, they have
incorporated anti-communism into their own genetic code: this can
be seen from the time of the repression of the Kronstadt Commune
(which though was not a completely anarchic event) and Machnovščina
(the Ukrainian libertarian movement led by Nestor Machno) to the
shocking events in Spain where the fratricidal clash between anarchists and
communists in the days of Barcelona’s mayo sangriento emblematically
represented the end of revolutionary hopes. And yet, in struggles, these
same anarchists often stood side by side with communists, councilists
and socialists, beginning from the foundation of the First Interna-
tional. Furthermore, thanks to its theorists (first Kropotkin, who was an
exponent of anarcho-communism) and militants, anarchism has invested
passion and sacrifice in the cause of libertarian communism, in Europe
and in the Americas.
How should these terms be used today, when any choice of one or the
other re-opens old wounds, feeds long-standing divergences and thwarts
new alliances? In a distant past, in the last thirty years of the sixteenth
century when religious wars were spreading blood across Europe, some
figures who today we would call “intellectuals” (including Michel de
l’Hospital and the famous Jean Bodin) proposed an original ethical solu-
tion to move towards establishing peace and saving the basic conditions of
civil life: to delve into the roots of faith and seek its common foundations.
They were called “politiques” because they did not propose to sweep away
the past, and yet they were equally concerned about the present and the
disastrous consequences a permanent conflict might have had on their
world. They thus looked on these doctrinal disputes with a disenchanted
gaze. This analogy is merely evocative, in part because socialism, commu-
nism and anarchism are certainly not (or should not be) faiths. On closer
inspection, however, these “politicist” thinkers with their primary focus
on the commons have something to offer any contemporary observer
who is aware of the vertical crisis of capitalist civilization, a civilization that
appears devoid of alternatives and seems to constitute an insurmountable
horizon in which the new “normal” features both war and terrorism and
refugee and migrant detention camps—a civilization in which resignation
reigns in the face of crisis or mass youth unemployment in the “central”
countries and endemic poverty in the “peripheral” countries of the glob-
alized world, in which it is acceptable to repress dissent while politics is,
at best, reduced to mere public entertainment.
If this is the external enemy, the memory of the communists’ “perma-
nent night of St. Bartholomew”—as Boris Souvarine defined the Stalinist
purges that decimated generations of Bolsheviks, beginning with the old
guard (Souvarine 1983, 766)—should serve to make those still yearning
to overcome capitalism aware of the dangers hiding in the revolutionary
process itself whenever a specific party, or worse, an individual, is assigned
1 INTRODUCTION 11
the role of repository of historical truth. In the light of these histor-

ical experiences, and in the face of the civilizational void generated by
post-democratic capitalism, it is unavoidably disheartening to watch the
spectacle of constant quarrelling between representatives of the “class-
oriented” left (we use this term well aware of the varying meanings both
the term left and the concept of class can assume, as we hope will clearly
emerge in the following pages of this book).
Surely opposition to the present state of affairs does exist, but it
appears to be literally pulverized: looking at Europe, there are dozens
of acronyms (parties, groups, coordinating committees, study centres,
etc.) that somehow refer to communism. There are also a number of
perspectives that can be identified as different forms of anarchism and
political groups campaigning in elections at different levels still make
continuous references to Trotsky—think of France, for example. Except
for rare and ephemeral exceptions, however, the various groups with links
to the different meanings of socialism have gradually lost any sentimental
connection with the lowest strata of their people; they take a stand,
lobbing accusations back and forth, to protect their own sectarian identity.
Perhaps it would be useful to move beyond the obvious jokes about
the divided left to reason about the historical, and possibly even anthro-
pological, factors behind what appears to be an original curse. It is not in
any way our intention to identify extenuating circumstances that would
excuse the cultural, and sometimes human, pettiness of the leadership of
the class-oriented left. However, it is worth recalling that those tasked
with administering the existing world do not have to invent anything;
they only have to remember, bolstered by their economic, cultural and
coercive supremacy, to oil the gears in the most profit-maximizing way.
Anyone, be they party or movement, who instead would like to build
another world is obliged to make it up out of thin air or nearly so while
grappling with such inferior mediatic, financial and “military” resources
that their work remains almost invisible.
3 A New Path to Self-Government

If “socialism” means building a community based on equality, i.e. self-
government and social control of the economy, then we may argue that
the term has not remotely lost its explanatory and evocative significance;
rather, even a century after the “mother of all revolutions”, it continues
to effectively express the drive to critique the current world order (call it
neoliberalism or turbo-capitalism) and the need to transform it. Both the

Social Democrats and the Leninists equated the socialist movement with
a regime—the Soviet one. In reality, however, both before and after the
USSR, this movement has actually proven capable of developing theo-
ries and giving rise to actions that engage with the problem of the state
and forms of political democracy but also go beyond them. They have
been able to envision a community for which exhausting the function
of the state is not the aim of more or less rigid “historical laws”, but
the result of experiments and struggles carried out in the immediacy of
clashes between the classes.
This book proposes an eccentric perspective on the tradition of
twentieth-century socialism, taking the term in its broad sense to encom-
pass currents of communism, anarchism, social democracy and their
various adaptations. In so doing, it seeks to break down the identity-
based boundaries which, in some cases, have represented the richness
of the proposals put forward by often-divergent individual thinkers or
schools of thought yet also created the structural boundary of a tradi-
tion complete with a consolidated “gallery of heroes” (from Lenin to
Gramsci, from Laski to Latouche, etc.), inflexible distinctions (Western
socialism vs. real socialism, for example) and disputes. At first glance, this
is an audacious endeavour: What do figures with such different intellectual
training, party affiliations and historical backgrounds have in common? A
vague longing for social justice? Positionality at the margins of consoli-
dated traditions? Perhaps an ethics that, in the rigid correlation between
means and purposes of action for social and political change, characterizes
the project-oriented aspect of their socialism?
The methodological hypothesis that French sociologist Michael Löwy
formulated at the end of the 1980s aids us here. In striving to study the
relationships between a diverse group of Jewish and libertarian thinkers
in the context of Mitteleuropa between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, he proposed a radical—although ultimately overlooked—shift
in historiographic and linguistic perspective. Introducing the volume
Redemption and Utopia (1988), he pointed out that the social sciences
insist on using a positivist type of lexicon, frequently used by physics or
biology: causal relationships, dependency relationships, cause-effect rela-
tions, or even influence and dependence. In fact, the very field in which
words are applied seems to force scholars to manoeuvre within the narrow
boundaries of reassuring traditions. Löwy therefore suggested tapping
into a more extensive and meaningful linguistic constellation and, in case
1 INTRODUCTION 13
studies, to employ the concept of “elective affinity” in order to observe

“convergence”, the “combination”, “confluence” or “attraction” among
phenomena, processes, actors, cultures and so on. “By ‘elective affinity’ I
mean a very special kind of dialectical relationship that develops between
two social or cultural configurations, one that cannot be reduced to direct
causality or to ‘influences’ in the traditional sense” (Löwy 1988, 6). Löwy
stressed the relationship between cultural forms, libertarian social utopia
and Judaism displayed by a series of intellectually and politically eminent
individuals, providing a number of clarifications regarding the geograph-
ical context (Mitteleuropa) and temporal context (the period between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in which the two cultures encoun-
tered each other, clarifications which were needed to avoid falling into
genericism. We do not seek to imitate the French scholar’s approach, nor
to hold him responsible for our deductions; however, we cannot deny
that reading those pages of his work motivated our efforts to under-
stand how figures that are seemingly unrelated yet advocate for analogous
theoretical and political ideas may be situated side by side. In following
the paths connecting up the main arteries of twentieth-century socialist
tradition, therefore, we have identified relations of elective affinity among
figures who at first glance may seem distant and dissimilar, sometimes
not only chronologically and geographically: the anarchist Landauer and
social democrat Meidner or the conciliarist communist Mattick and Italian
socialist Panzieri, to mention only two such eccentric combinations. Of
course, all the thinkers treated in this book share the powerful idea that
the socialism of the future should be based on the self-organization of
social subjects.
The unprecedented, and thus risky and debateable, nature of our
endeavour should not, however, be taken as mere intellectual divertisse-
ment: we are convinced, in fact, that today both the messianic wait for a
socialism updated for the twenty-first century and the dogmatic repetition
of whatever “Leninist”, “Marxist” or “Social Democratic” orthodoxy are
forms of reactionary utopia. Recovering the word “socialism” to indicate
the common purpose shared among our authors, that of building a society
under the banner of equality, thus seemed to us an unavoidable necessity.
The fact that most of the thinkers included in the volume are dead,
and indeed have been so for some time, should be seen, we suggest, not
as a sign of the outdated nature of socialism, but as proof of the conti-
nuity of the social, economic, ethical and environmental problems that
capitalism generates and which cannot be resolved within the scope of
its boundaries. We have chosen “minor” and/or minority thinkers in the

light of the observation that the dominant currents of twentieth-century
socialism (Leninism, on the one hand; Social Democracy, on the other)
have failed to offer an alternative that is simultaneously viable and radical
to the inequalities that capitalism, in its changing forms, constantly gives
rise to. Our “frontier” socialists deviate from the classical tradition: they
are often pluralist, even experimentalist, as far as organizational forms are
concerned; they are democratic, including through the often (but not
always or necessarily) difficult form of conciliarism, a form that repre-
sents one of the more advanced manifestations of democracy (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985; Rancière 1995; Abensour 2004; Breaugh 2007). They
do not believe that “simply” seizing political power will carry us to the
“rising sun”, nor do they believe, therefore, that the revolution will be
a sudden event and violent rupture of the historical trajectory. They are
intellectuals, in a non-academic sense, and all of them, with no excep-
tion, are militants. Militant socialist intellectuals, in any sense of the
term (communist, anarchist and so on), are not those who illuminate the
path—the figure Michael Walzer described in evoking the Platonic myth
of the cave (Walzer 1991)1 to bring elements of truth (or revolutionary
consciousness) to the ignorant, unaware and foolish masses deceived by
the shadows. Militant socialist intellectuals, in short, are not people who
draw on the superordinate world of knowledge—always elitist and, after
all, always bourgeois—for slices of truth, systems of ideas or programmes
of action to hand down to their subordinates. Militant socialist intellec-
tuals are there in the fray alongside their subordinates, because political
ideas are not the prerogative of a narrow circle of elect individuals; such
ideas are also formulated and assessed in places distinct from studios or
libraries, and in ways that are unusual: in taverns, bars, factories and
working-class neighbourhoods; in workers’ clubs, mutual aid societies,
trade unions, party schools or popular universities—the kinds of places
that our “troupe” attended frequently.
In this book, however, we do not propose to invent a new tradition
or a different identity some sect can then invoke, perhaps to comfort
themselves in the face of their failure. We humbly propose a route,
one that may be—and hopefully will be—enriched by figures, moments,
movements and currents that we have neglected or overlooked (Poggio
1 Unlike the Italian translation, the original edition The Company of Critics (New York,
Basic Books, 1988) does not mention the term “militant intellectual”.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
2010–2016). Our research, therefore, does not seek or claim to be

exhaustive; we are aware, for example, that its approach is Eurocen-
tric (although the sections on Chile and Rojava were among the most
engaging for us to write). After all, we had to come to terms with our
own possibilities and capabilities; our research interests and, above all,
our political passions. And the reader should keep this in mind.
We are likewise aware of the polysemic character of terms such as self-
government, self-organization and self-management which we cite or use
extensively in this volume. While self-government especially in its English
interpretation has a long history that blends with the idea of local institu-
tional autonomy from the central power in keeping with the principle of
people’s direct participation in the res publica, in the history of the work-
ers’ movement this term has indicated a new form of government, the
“self-government of producers”, an expression used by Marx (and later
borrowed by Lenin) to refer to the Paris Commune. This use of the term
implies an ascending conception of power, a decentralized institutional
organization and the possibility of directly choosing officials and delegates
in accordance with the imperative mandate. In his work (especially from
the Two Red Years), Antonio Gramsci views the self-government of the
working class as the embryo of the new order, which for him also means
the new state. The expression “self-organization”, for its part, recalls the
idea that the working class can and should directly express its political
ability without the intermediation of the upper classes, as enshrined in
the Communist Manifesto: “The proletarian movement is the indepen-
dent movement of the immense majority in the interest of that majority”.
It is also true that in the second half of the twentieth century, espe-
cially the years of mass protest, references to self-organization carried
with them a critique or refusal of the party-form as the specific mode of
class organization. Finally, the self-management lemma, mostly found in
the economic sphere, has over time been widely used and even superim-
posed on the other terms, at least in its general meaning of subordinates’
ability to take over the management of their own affairs. Of course, the
word self-management has been used in opposition to the bureaucrati-
zation and hierarchy of political parties and trade unions, observed in
both the Social Democratic and Leninist traditions, but it manages to link
the economic sphere of labour liberation to political and social liberation
through worker democracy, a direct and participatory form of democracy:
In this perspective, self-management may be defined as the encounter:

of a project to radically transform society, its structures, behaviours and
representations; of a specific form of organization of social relations inside
and outside of labour, based on the recognition of people’s fundamental
equality and respect of differences […]; of a constituent movement that
denies all processes of institutionalization and separation seeking to perpet-
uate or renew hierarchical relations of command, bureaucratic structures
and all the ways in which power and knowledge are expropriated; this
gives rise to its counter- and unconstitutional spheres. (Corpet 1982, 74)
In contemporary so-called Western countries, any organizing by subal-

tern subjects that diverges from the forms of the dominant party or
trade union is viewed with mistrust because it potentially challenges
the fragile political and social structures that currently prevail. While
“official” trade unionism is recognized by power and often inclined
to negotiate rather than contesting the conditions of labour exploita-
tion, workers self-organizing around their interests are often criticized
for representing a return to corporatism or, worse, for undermining and
potentially subverting democratic structures. Who knows, a strike might
even be called for without previous authorization by the state and the
bosses!
Local struggles linked to environmental concerns and advocating for
a model of community life alternative to capitalist forms challenge hege-
monic conceptions of “development” as they defend the health of the
majority and the environment. An example is the No Tav (No to the
High-Speed Train) movement and its more than twenty years of activism
between Italy and France. Such struggles are likewise very often accused
of being subversive and potentially “terrorist”, and their most visible
participants sentenced to many years in prison by a rigid and cruel judi-
ciary system in collusion with the dominant powers. These reactions
stem precisely from the fact that such movements display original and
autonomous forms of organization that run counter to the canons of
existing parties and organizations.
Thinking about ways of organizing struggles and aspects of life that are
intertwined with struggles (mutual aid to resist police repression and cope
with criminal trials or to ensure decent living conditions for those who
lose their jobs after a court sentence or are forced to leave their homes
and jobs after being subjected to a residence ban, etc.) is a priority for all
those who criticize capitalism and imagine a life beyond it: “our” thinkers
1 INTRODUCTION 17
tried to do so, with different outcomes but converging in the belief that
emancipation from capitalism cannot occur under the leadership of the
ruling classes or in the forms that they impose on political and social
conflict. It is a matter of retrieving and updating the concept of the self-
praxis of the proletariat that Marx had indicated to the subaltern classes
of his time as the way to transform the world (Rubel 1976, 127–146).
We chose a hybrid approach, selecting both theoretical insights and
some concrete cases of self-organization and self-management. As for the
former, we have not set out to provide a one-dimensional portrait; on the
contrary, we have stressed the contradictions and unresolved questions
not driven by meticulous severity, but rather because we ourselves share
these same doubts, and we are convinced that it is only by setting off from
the issues that our militant intellectuals tried to deal with, often without
succeeding in delivering definitive answers, that we can re-launch a discus-
sion about socialism. How can the self-management accompanying the
initial phase of a change process be institutionalized, without subjecting
it to bureaucratization and, thus, distorting it? How should we set it up
so that, on the one hand, it can withstand the reactions—including armed
ones—of the capitalists and, on the other hand, is it able to administer an
economy as complex as that of the twenty-first century? Is it possible to
do without an organization (be it defined as a party or in some other
way) whose raison d’être consists in bringing together the plurality of
instances of self-management as part of the process of socializing the
economy? These instances, if not coordinated, risk ending up like islands:
they may initially be happy, but eventually they would be doomed to
shipwreck—or worse, reabsorption by the market economy: “many revo-
lutions have broken out spontaneously, but never has a revolution been
won spontaneously” (Mandel 1973, p. 52).
Our heretical socialists have pondered these issues in historical contexts
marked by deeply different challenges: Gustav Landauer and Alexandra
Kollontai lived through the incubation phase of the October Revolu-
tion (and Kollontai also experienced its downward trend); Paul Mattick
and Raniero Panzieri witnessed the extraordinary capacity of monopo-
listic capitalism in bringing about ideological mobilizations and, at the
same time, the irreversible detachment of Soviet socialism from its social
base; Rudolf Meidner and Nicos Poulantzas experienced the apex of the
cultural hegemony of the workers’ movement and, at the same time, the
dawn of its crisis, due to both exogenous factors (production transforma-
tions) and endogenous ones (the “rivalry” with other, newly-born social
movements). In the 1970s, the fragmentation we have described in the

second-to-last chapter (which is intentionally dedicated not to a single
author or social movement but rather to a series of trends along with
Alain Bihr’s assessment of them) displayed innovative and radical features:
it marked the end of a long era which not only bore a series of real and
metaphorical collapses but also offers some lessons which can be useful for
the future and, perhaps, show that not all hope of redeeming the subor-
dinate classes is lost, as we have tried to suggest in the final chapter (here
as well, with a certain humbleness and without claiming to write recipes
“for the taverns of the future”).
In relation to the cases of self-organization we have chosen to dwell
on, titling them Intermezzos, we would like to specify that it was not our
intention to offer a summary of the history of the Spanish Republic nor
of Lotta Continua, overviews that other authors have already provided
and in more extensive forms. Rather, we seek to ponder the challenges
that these movements had to face: identifying a revolutionary subject
(traditional or innovative? Unitary or plural?) and consequently defining
a politics of alliance; transitioning from spontaneity to more structured
forms of struggle and self-management (in short, the Gordian knot of
organization); relations with institutions; the issue of violence (enacted
both against and by the movement); and the contents of a future society,
with a specific focus on the relationship between bottom-up democracy
and representative democracy.
In relation to the most recent protest movements (which have been
numerous and creative, though often invisible and scattered: move-
ments of Roman artists or undocumented Mexican immigrants, Italian
researchers or Argentinean workers, to provide only a few examples) and
those to come, our position is that:
One could say, “but oh, they do not last,” and sink into a sense of futility;
but that sense of loss is countered by the anticipation of what may be
coming: “they could happen at any time! (Butler 2018, 20)
1 INTRODUCTION 19
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Gesellschaft und Demokratie nach dem globalen Kapitalismus. Berlin: Kai
Homilius Verlag.
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Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.
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CHAPTER 2
“Revolution Is Not What the Revolutionaries

Believe It to Be”: Gustav Landauer
(1870–1919)
1 Life and Works

Born in Karlsruhe in 1870, Gustav Landauer received his political educa-
tion in Berlin in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a key period for
the development of political Marxism and the German Social Democracy
party (SPD) that took Marxist thought as an ideological polestar.
Bismarck promoted special legislation to suppress this incipient
socialism, positioning it on the wrong side of legality in the name of
the struggle against “terrorism”. In 1890, after twelve long years of
this repression, Wilhelm II’s ascent to the throne marked the begin-
ning of a completely new phase. The workers and their organizations
regained vitality, and along with this shift a series of conflict points that
had long been latent erupted to the surface. One of these in particular
was a current of opposition consolidated within the SPD that an elderly
Friedrich Engels had defined with a hint of contempt as “the revolt of
men of letters and students”. Newspapers, specialized journals and some
very active militant intellectuals targeted the party and its programme with
harsh critiques, arguing that it led workers to integrate into the system.
Aiming to recover the revolutionary spirit of the early days that had
been betrayed by high-ranking bureaucracy, the so-called Young sought
to create a new political formation, the Union of Independent Socialists
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_2
(1891–1894). This group failed to consolidate into an actual organiza-

tion, however, instead of maintaining the structure of a rather fragmented
movement without the drive needed to expand nationally.
It was in this context that Landauer appeared on the political stage as
a collaborating author with and, later, the editor of a weekly periodical
that was popular in Berlin and beyond. Although it bore the name “Der
Sozialist” (the socialist), this weekly soon became markedly anarchist.
His positions were rather peculiar, however, positioned on the boundary
between anarchism and socialism, and they remained so even later in life.
At the beginning of the new century, Landauer temporarily withdrew
from public life following the failure of the first attempts to reignite
the German and international revolutionary movement: in Germany, the
reformist and revisionist perspective represented by Eduard Bernstein
took hold in practice if not in theory; at the European level, instead,
the move to expunge anarchists from the Second International (Landauer
himself was present at the famous congresses in Zurich in 1893 and
London in 1896) marked a serious fracture in the socialist world. He
turned to philosophy, his great and perennial passion, focusing in partic-
ular on positivism and the cult of progress that prevailed at the time. On
the political level, instead, he engaged with the “propaganda of the deed”,
especially in a brief but incisive text entitled Anarchist thoughts on Anar-
chism (Landauer 2010, 84–91), published in 1901. In general, however,
he maintained a marginal position in the debates of the German anarchist
world. He returned to the fore in the period between the publications of
two key texts, his most important book Revolution published in 1907 and
Call to Socialism, the text of a conference he held in 1908 in Berlin and
then replicated many times even outside Germany, published in 1911. In
1908, he also founded the Socialist Alliance, an anarchist organization
based on federalist ideas that had its own press outlet, “Der Sozialist”
(1909–1915), which carried on the legacy of the old newspaper by the
same name published between 1891 and 1899.
Finally, the heretical character of his anarchism emerged during the
1918–1919 German Revolution: he took part in the second phase of the
Bavarian Soviet Republic, holding ministerial positions, and during the
repression, he was brutally killed by counterrevolutionary troops.
2 “REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES … 23
2 A Road for the Liberation of Workers

Cooperativism was at the foundation of Landauer’s vision and political
action. He approached it at the end of the nineteenth century, both to
delineate the contours of a free and egalitarian future society and to indi-
cate the means for achieving this objective. There is a clarification to make
regarding this point, however. The cardinal element of the ethical concep-
tion of Landauerian anarchism lies in coherence between the means and
the ends of action directed at changing society, and this coherence had
direct repercussions on the “policies” of the movement and its critical
stance towards so-called authoritarian currents. In reality, it is true for
every anarchist that the means employed to dismantle existing society
must prefigure the life of the future: if the future society is to be founded
on self-government, the means employed to build it cannot be politics,
that is, parliament, the government, etc. Furthermore, it is completely
inconsistent to yearn for a society without a state and pursue this aim by
trying to seize political power, thereby reinforcing the same apparatus of
oppression that anarchists actually seek to erase. Of course, having estab-
lished this general principle, flesh-and-blood anarchists have always had
to deal with the real, everyday experience of men and women fighting
for change, and from time to time, in their concrete actions, consider
and even accept the extent of what is realistically possible. In some cases,
for instance at the time of the attacks between the last part of the nine-
teenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, anarchists found
themselves in a difficult position, with a strategy hinging on bombs and
revolvers to create the conditions for a harmonious and peaceful world,
and employing extreme practical individualism to achieve the utopia of
libertarian communist society. Although some observers judged such acts
to be at least morally justifiable, soon after prestigious figures such as
Kropotkin, Malatesta and Landauer himself distanced themselves from
violence against men and symbols of power as inconsistent with the
foundations of anarchist ethics (Adamo 2004).
When Landauer tried to map out “A Road for the Liberation of
Workers” in 1895, delineating a pathway for consumer and production
cooperatives to follow to pave the way for a free and egalitarian society, it
was these premises that constituted his point of departure.
The young, passionate anarchist certainly did not view the revolution,
understood in the broad sense as a profound process of liberation of
the exploited and oppressed, as the outcome of historical evolution or
a spontaneous event: rather, he saw it as the undisputed result of a vast

effort of creating material and spiritual conditions that transcended the
restricted sphere of the “political”. Therefore, he believed, it should not
be prepared exclusively or even mainly within political parties, nor did
it lay in the conquest of state power. In “A Road for the Liberation
of Workers”, unsigned brochure bearing the significant date of “1 May
1895”, Landauer stated that society had to be transformed beginning
with the creation of autonomous class power, separate from the forms of
established power.
Any temptation to enter the system at any level was to be rejected. A
serious transformative movement must refuse to take action through the
“circles of rulers” and instead concentrate on consolidating alternative
forms of association. It was this current of thought that reinforced ideas
of “practical socialism” and “positive political work” (Landauer 1895,
7). Landauer targeted authentic revolutionaries, those who eschewed the
high-sounding phraseology of storming heaven, and sought to draw their
attention to this thinking. It was a matter of creating “a space in which
we can move ‘freely’”, he argued, with “organizations that in some way
protect workers from the exploitation, violence and deception to which
the holders of economic power expose them” (Landauer 1895, 6). This
conviction gave rise to the principle of self-organization, understood as
both the aims and the means of social transformation: this principle was
to both shape actions and organizations in the present as part of a patient
project of reforming and reconstructing society, and mould the future
society founded on the inseparable values of equality and freedom.
Landauer appreciated the trade unions’ preferred forms of action,
especially boycotts, precisely because he considered it an instrument of
struggle that framed workers as consumers. In his analysis, therefore,
he distinguished between passive boycotts, those that consist in simply
refusing to buy or consume a specific commodity, and active boycotts,
instead involving a broader mobilization of worker-consumers bound
together in consumer cooperatives. This step would make it possible, first
of all, to marginalize all commercial intermediaries, actors who Landauer
considered real “parasites” of market society. Workers’ autonomous orga-
nization of consumption would pave the way for the self-organization of
production: in this case as well, it was not a matter of conquering industry
in order to manage it on the basis of new principles, but rather of building
a parallel economy completely different to the economy dominated by
modern capitalists. Ultimately, the problem of capitalism concerned not
only the modalities and quantities of production (the “how” and the
“how much” that define the exploitation of live labour), but also its aims
(i.e. “what” it produces and “for what ends”). It was this understanding
that led Landauer to argue that the objective must extend beyond devel-
oping a dense network of consumer cooperatives; it should also include
the idea of creating production cooperatives alongside them, built using
the savings obtained from the former and supported by the work of their
members. In line with these premises, Landauer did not imagine that
cooperatives would operate under the protection of the state, as one of the
founding fathers of social democracy, Ferdinand Lassalle, had theorized in
the past, nor in a hypothetical period of transition. He likewise did not
believe that they should be set up to compete in the market, in contrast to
certain exponents of anarchism, especially overseas, who later emphasized
and in some cases even extolled the virtues of market competition. In his
perspective, rather, “cooperativism absolutely presumes the overcoming
of commercial traffic and so-called free trade” (Landauer 1895, 19).
This vision clearly displays some naïve features, however, such as envis-
aging that “bourgeois society will have before its eyes in all its imposing
greatness its heir, free socialism, when all the workers with the possibility
to do so will have joined together to satisfy their consumption directly
at the source, evading intermediation”. Yet Landauer also came to terms
with reality when he stated that “It is not yet a socialist society, but only a
society of workers, isolated as much as possible in itself, within bourgeois
society. Certainly, much more than any revolution, a society of workers
represents a first step in the direction of the socialist society” (Landauer
1895, 22) in which work will be reunited with its conditions of existence,
the means of work and the profound essence of human beings.
In short, cooperativism for Landauer represented an opportunity to
develop socialism within existing society and, at the same time, the long-
sought-after economic form of future society. At this level of examination,
however, his analysis displays some theoretical weaknesses. Even assuming
that a cooperative system was actually implemented, what relationship
would it have with the existing state? And again, if the aim of socialism
was to build a stateless society, how was the state to be overcome? And
what form of organization of the “social power” would be instituted to
replace it?
Unlike many anarchists, Landauer did not believe that a powerful mass
movement would demolish the state through revolts and insurrections.
Regarding this point, he was puzzled by the theoretical void he detected
in the founding “fathers” of the doctrine: Bakunin himself, who in his

youth had sanctioned the principle of “creative destruction” (Bakunin
1842, 1002),1 failed to provide any more precise indications.
First of all, Landauer did not consider the state to be a simple “thing”,
i.e. a set of institutions that compel individuals through coercion, but
rather a historically-determined social relation. As such, in his view the
state was not eternal, not something that had existed forever and ever.
He attributed its birth to the decline of feudal society that had given rise
to modernity, erasing in the process communal-type secular forms of life.
He wrote in 1907:
The Christian era was not represented by the feudal system; nor was it
represented by the village or district organization with its commonly owned
land and its common economy; nor the Reichsversammlung; nor by the
church and monasteries; nor by the guilds, crafts, and brotherhoods with
their own judiciary systems; nor by the independent streets, precincts, and
parishes of these towns; nor by the unions of towns or the unions of
knights; nor by any exclusive and independent forms of social organization.
The Christian era was characterized by the totality of these forms – forms
that were interrelated and organized without ever creating a social pyramid
or totalitarian power.
The social priority of the Middle Ages was not the state but society, or, to
be exact: the society of societies. What was it that united all these wonderful
multiple social forms, allowing them to proceed to higher forms of unity
without them becoming uniform? What allowed them to form social insti-
tutions without hierarchical domination? It was the spirit that came from
the individuals, their characters, and their souls. It was this spirit that filled
the social forms, and that returned from there to the individuals with even
more strength. (Landauer 2010, 130–131).
Now, this spirit, this sense of belonging to the universe and form of coex-
istence and this set of reasons for life and criterion for organizing (or
“stratifying”) interests were replaced by the state, a mere surrogate; due
to its provisional nature, however, the state cannot be considered illegit-
imate. Moreover, Landauer did not pass moral judgement, either on the
1 J. Elysard alias Bakunin clearly states: “The impulse to destroy is an impulse to create
as well”.
era that preceded the state (which, as he knew very well, was also charac-
terized by misery, exploitation, degradation and religious oppression) or
on the age of the modern state. Above all, this comparison is aimed at
underlining that the state is always a social relation which cannot simply
be destroyed but must at most be replaced with a different social relation.
Therefore, the state is legitimate to the extent that associated individuals
are unable to build an alternative relation to one characterized by domi-
nation, oppression and exploitation, a relation characterized instead by
solidarity, reciprocity, equality and freedom. This is why Landauer insisted
on the emancipatory character of cooperation: separating oneself from
state-based community in his view did not mean so much (and only)
moving to the countryside, away from laws and gendarmes; rather, it
meant immediately starting to build different social relationships within
socialist communities, spaces where the goods necessary for life would
be produced in harmony and according to the agreement between
producers, thereby making capitalism and its state superfluous.
The link between cooperation, communitarianism and critique of the
state represents the essence of Landauer’s socialist and anarchist thinking,
a vision that is clearly alternative to that conveyed by the hegemonic
Marxist currents of the time.
Landauer engaged with Marxism and Marx’s conceptions in Call to
Socialism, which reads:
Karl Marx artificially bridged the two components of Marxism, science and
the political party, creating something apparently completely new, which
the world had never seen before, namely scientific politics and the party
with a scientific basis and a scientific program. That really was something
new and, moreover, modern and timely, and furthermore it flattered the
workers to hear that precisely they represented science, indeed the very
latest science. If you want to win the masses, then flatter them. If you
want to incapacitate them for serious thought and action and make their
representatives archetypes of hollow infatuation, mouthing a rhetoric which
they themselves at best only half understand, then convince them that
they represent a scientific party. If you want to fill them completely with
malicious stupidity, then train them in party schools. The scientific party,
thus, was the demand of the most advanced men of all times! (Landauer
1978)
The problem is this: on the one hand, Marx believed that he had discov-
ered the fundamental laws determining the movement of society, which
necessarily pushed towards socialism; on the other hand, however, the

protagonist of the movement is the political party of the working class, a
party that was, however, subordinate to that same science of society.
Landauer was correct about the fact that Marxism, as a party ideology,
could be bent to justify contingent policies based on the opportunity
of the moment or to distinguish friends and enemies both inside and
outside. Of course, always operating in the name of Marxism, the party
had succeeded over time in organizing workers, keeping them united in
the dark periods of Bismarck’s exceptional laws. The party had success-
fully built class alliances, beginning with the peasants, and had set up a
dense network of schools to provide both factory and agricultural workers
with a basic education, as well as mutual-aid or recreational associations:
in short, it had built a sort of parallel society within the official nation.
On the other hand, it had laid the foundations for that “negative inte-
gration” that a later twentieth-century scholar, Günther Roth, identified
as a way of subjecting the working class to dominant bourgeois values,
imbued with nationalism, imperialism and militarism (Roth 1963). Faced
with such ambivalence, and despite having before him all the elements for
a more nuanced evaluation, in his 1911 writing Landauer felt the need
to affirm that Marxism—his true target of theoretical critique—was the
legitimate offspring of Karl Marx, thereby attacking the figure of Marx
himself.
It is interesting to note that, in the world of anarchism, there seems to
have been a repeated need to personalize the attack by targeting a histor-
ical ideology. Nonetheless, a keen and original thinker and militant activist
such as Landauer could have recognized that Marx’s thought displayed
points of continuity with a tradition, Humanism and Renaissance, which
he himself valued in his writing about Revolution. It was not the unknown
genius Étienne de la Boétie, who did not appear in the Marxist library,
but rather the pragmatic visionary Niccolò Machiavelli who provided an
interpretive key for understanding the relationship between determinism
and will in history, the focal point of Landauer’s critical analysis.
In The Prince (chap. 6), Machiavelli stated that:
But let us turn to Cyrus and the others who acquired or founded king-
doms. They are all most admirable. […] If we examine their actions and
lives, we see that the only gift that Fortune accorded them was the oppor-
tunity that gave them the substance they could mold into any form they
Another random document with
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POISONING BY CORROSIVE SALTS OF
MERCURY.
Calomel with muriatic acid, corrosive sublimate, mercuric chloride, iodide,
nitrate, cyanide. Fatal dose. Symptoms: anorexia, salivation, thirst, emesis, colic,
diarrhœa, rumbling, debility, tremors, stupor, death. Lesions: corrosive whitening
of gastro-intestinal mucosa, congestion, ulceration, blackening, bloody, glairy
ingesta. Treatment: albumen, emesis, demulcents, chlorate of potash, bitters, iron
sulphate. Test: copper and muriatic acid.
Calomel in itself cannot be looked on as corrosive, but in
ruminants in which it is retained in the system for 3 or 4 days it is
largely resolved into mercuric chloride by the free gastric acid and
alkaline chlorides. It has therefore been largely excluded from the
materia medica of these animals. When in these or other animals it
produces corrosive action, the operation is essentially that of
corrosive sublimate.
The corrosive salts of mercury likely to be taken by animals are
corrosive sublimate now so largely used as an antiseptic, the nitrates
and iodides, and cyanides of mercury used as local applications or as
antiseptics.
Mercuric chloride may be taken as the type. It has proved fatal
to the horse in a dose of 2 drs.; to the ox in 1 to 2 drs.; to the dog in
doses of 4 to 6 grs.
Symptoms. Loss of appetite, salivation, thirst, emesis in vomiting
animals, colics, diarrhœa, often bloody, weak perhaps imperceptible
pulse, hurried breathing, much rumbling of the abdomen, debility,
trembling, stupor and death.
Lesions. Escharotic whitening in patches of the mucosa of the
mouth, throat, gullet, stomach and intestines, with acute congestion,
ulceration and ecchymosis, and sometimes blackening by the
formation of the sulphide. The contents of the bowels may be serous
or bloody and more or less glairy. Like arsenic, mercuric chloride
concentrates its action on the intestinal canal by whatever channel it
may have entered the body.
Treatment. The mercury should be precipitated in an insoluble
form and then eliminated by emesis or by the stomach pump. White
of eggs is usually the most available agent producing the albuminate
of mercury. This is, however, still soluble in acid and alkaline liquids,
in chlorides of potassium, sodium or calcium and even in excess of
albumen. Vomiting may be favored by tickling the fauces, or by
hypodermic injection of apomorphia. This may be followed by boiled
flaxseed or copious drinks of rain water. When the mercury has been
largely eliminated the salivation may be controlled by chlorate of
potash, and the digestive disorder met by bitters and iron sulphate.
Test for Mercury. Place a few drops of the suspected solution on a
clean surface of copper; acidulate with muriatic acid; then touch the
copper through the liquid with a piece of zinc; a silver colored stain
will be formed easily dissipated by heat.
POISONING BY SULPHUR.
Fatal dose, horse 16 ozs. Symptoms: dullness, anorexia, colic, diarrhœa, sulphur
odor. Lesions: congestion, desquamation, ulceration of gastro-intestinal mucosa,
sulphur odor in flesh, blood nearly fluid, blackens silver. Treatment: chloride of
lime, oil, puncture rumen or colon, stimulants.
In excessive doses this is irritant. The horse is poisoned by 16 ozs.
(Tabourin): violent colics follow a dose of 12 ozs. (Collaine). Cattle
are less susceptible.
Symptoms. Dullness, anorexia, colic, pulse small and quick, skin
cold and clammy. Fœtid flatus and profuse diarrhœa, are marked
symptoms.
Lesions. Injection of the gastro-intestinal mucosa, shedding of the
epithelium, ulceration, and sometimes gangrene. Sulphur is found in
the ingesta and fæces and a sulphur odor is prominent, not only in
the bowels but also in the flesh. Tympany from H2S is common. The
blood is mostly fluid, and ecchymosis is shown on heart, lungs and
other internal organs. The tissues blacken silver.
Treatment. Chloride of lime, oleaginous laxatives, use trochar and
canunla for tympany. In prostrate conditions give stimulants
(alcohol, ether).
POISONING BY BROMINE AND IODINE.
Poisoning by these agents is rare in domestic animals. Bromine 2

drs. killed a dog in 5 hours: 10 to 12 drops in 1 oz. water
intravenously killed a dog suddenly, and 5 to 6 drs. of iodine by the
mouth killed in a few days (Orfila). A horse had colic from taking ½
oz. iodine (Tabourin), others died from the effect of 2 drs. doses
intravenously (Patu).
Symptoms. Violent colicy pains, salivation, emesis in vomiting
animals, diarrhœa, iodine or bromine odor, acute coryza, red eyes,
dilated pupils, weakness, debility, vertigo, convulsions. If the patient
survives the glandular system undergoes atrophy, with emaciation
and scaly skin eruptions.
Lesions. After large doses there are congestion, ulceration,
corrosion and sloughing of the œsophagus, gastric and intestinal
mucosa, and more or less yellow discoloration of the parts. The odor
is characteristic. With iodine there may be blue iodide of starch in
the ingesta.
Treatment. Favor emesis by tickling the fauces and giving tepid
water, or apomorphia subcutem. Boiled starch is the best antidote
and may be given freely, both by mouth and rectum. Opium is often
called for to relieve suffering.
POISONING BY COPPER.
Copper sulphate: Fatal dose, horse, dog. Symptoms: Dullness, colic, blue or
green vomit, diarrhœa, straining, weakness, spasms, palsy, albuminuria, icterus,
hæmoglobinuria, impaired appetite, emaciation, spasms. Lesions: Redness,
softening, ulceration, sloughing of alimentary mucosa, methe-globinæmia, fatty
liver, enlarged spleen, ingesta give copper film on polished iron. Treatment:
Albumen, milk, mucilage, iron filings, sulphur, magnesia, laxatives, opium. Avoid
acids.
The common copper poisons are the sulphate and acetate. Copper
alum, oxide or carbonate of copper and paints with a copper base are
less frequently taken.
Sulphate of copper 1 ounce has proved fatal to the horse. In
dilute solution or with mucilaginous liquids it is much less injurious.
Ten grains to 2 drachms subcutem have killed the dog. (Tabourin.)
Symptoms. Dullness, colics, emesis of blue or greenish matter in
vomiting animals, diarrhœa, tenesmus, weakness, trembling,
spasms, trismus, paralysis, small, weak pulse, hurried breathing. In
experimental chronic poisoning in the sheep, albuminuria, icterus,
hæmaglobinuria, hæmaturia, impaired appetite and rumination,
constipation followed by diarrhœa, great emaciation and weakness
and finally convulsions. (Ellenberger and Hofmeister).
Lesions. Redness and softening of the alimentary mucosa,
ulceration, sloughing, perforation. In the chronic forms methe-
globinæmia, free hæmatin as crystals in liver, spleen and kidney,
nephritic extravasation, fatty degeneration of the liver, enlarged
spleen, and catarrhal changes in the intestinal mucosa. Polished iron
placed in the gastric or intestinal contents becomes coated with
copper.
Treatment. White of egg, milk, mucilage, iron filings, sulphur,
calcined magnesia, laxatives. Opium may be required to calm
suffering, but acids must be carefully avoided.
POISONING BY ZINC.
Sulphate and chloride poisonous, less potent oxide and carbonate. Symptoms:
colics, emesis, congested alimentary mucosa, diarrhœa, cramps, weakness, paresis,
anæmia, emaciation. Lesions: white, leathery, sloughing or ulcerated alimentary
mucosa, strictures. Treatment: emesis, demulcents, tannic acid, sodium carbonate.
The sulphate and chloride are the most likely to be taken in
dangerous amount, the former being mistaken for Glauber salts.
Three ounces of sulphate intravenously in the horse has proved fatal,
or 10 to 50 grains in the dog. In the vicinity of zinc ore furnaces the
agent is taken in on the fodder as oxide or carbonate.
Symptoms. There is much abdominal pain, emesis in vomiting
animals, quick pulse, congested mucosæ, diarrhœa, cramps,
weakness, and paresis, and if the patient survives, anæmia and
emaciation.
Lesions. The mucosa of mouth, gullet, stomach and perhaps
duodenum is white, opaque, hard, corrugated, leathery, sloughing, or
ulcerated. Congestion is well marked. Strictures may appear in
chronic cases.
Treatment. Give tepid water and tickle the fauces. Use white of egg
or milk freely and mucilaginous agents. Tannic acid, or carbonate of
soda are antidotal by tending to precipitate insoluble compounds.
POISONING BY SILVER.
Toxic doses of silver come mostly from materials used in the arts.
The photographer uses chiefly the nitrate, iodide, bromide, cyanide
and chloride. Taken into the stomach the silver salts are less
poisonous because they are largely precipitated as insoluble chloride
or albuminate. The chloride and albuminate are, however, soluble in
solutions of alkaline chlorides and hence even they may poison.
Symptoms. Colic, emesis in vomiting animals the vomited matters
blackening in the light, diarrhœa, great muscular weakness, paresis,
weak clonic spasms, and disturbed respiration. The nervous
symptoms are very prominent (Rouget and Curci). Chronic
poisoning produces emaciation and fatty degeneration of liver,
kidneys and muscles (Bogoslowsky).
Lesions. Patches of congestion and of white corrosion on the
buccal œsophageal and gastric mucous membrane, the presence of
the curdy white chloride of silver adherent to the gastric mucosa. In
chronic cases the visible mucosæ and white skin may have a slaty
color.
Treatment. Emetics in vomiting animals. White of egg, common
salt largely diluted and followed by milk as antidotal, demulcent and
nutritive agent.
POISONING BY BARIUM.
Poisonous salts. Symptoms: spasms, peristalsis, defecation, urination,

restlessness, prostration, emesis, weak pulse, coma. Lesions: Moderate congestion
of gastro-intestinal mucosa. Treatment: alkaline sulphate, anodynes, demulcents.
The salts of barium are irritant with a special action on the nervous
system shown by weakened action of the heart and spasms or paresis
of the muscles. The chloride is used in staining wool, the nitrate and
chlorate in producing green colors in fireworks, the oxide and
carbonate in glassmaking, the chromate by painters, and the
sulphate for giving weight and body to various white powders. The
chloride is now largely used to stimulate intestinal peristalsis in
animals.
Symptoms. Barium chloride hypodermically produces tonic and
clonic convulsions, increased peristalsis, discharges of urine and
fæces, great restlessness, muscular prostration, emesis in vomiting
animals, hurried, shallow respiration, weak, thready pulse, asthenia,
coma, and death.
Lesions. There is congestion of the gastric and intestinal mucosa,
but this is rarely violent, and corrosion and ulceration are almost
unknown. The agent indeed seems to act more energetically upon the
nervous system than on the mucosa of the alimentary tract.
Treatment. This consists in giving an alkaline sulphate (sulphate
of soda, potash, or magnesia), to precipitate the insoluble barium
sulphate, with anodynes (opium) and mucilaginous agents.
POISONING BY IRON.
Sulphate and chloride on empty stomach poisonous. Symptoms: Colic, emesis,
rumbling, purging. Treatment: Alkaline or earthy carbonates, tannic acid,
albumen. Opium.
Sulphate and chloride are the principal poisonous compounds.
Both are comparatively harmless even in large doses taken on a full
stomach, while on an empty stomach they may cause violent gastro-
enteritis.
Symptoms. Colicy pains, purging, emesis in vomiting animals,
more or less tympany and rumbling of the bowels, and surface
coldness.
Treatment. Give carbonates of the alkalies, magnesia or lime to
precipitate the comparatively insoluble carbonate or oxide; or tannic
acid or infusion of oak bark or galls. White of egg, milk and
mucilaginous agents, and opium may be required to allay irritation.
POISONING BY CHROMIUM.
Chromic acid, chromate and bichromate of potash. Corrosive. Cause: Gastro-
intestinal inflammation, albuminuria, hæmaturia, emaciation, digital ulcers and
sloughs, colic. Diarrhœa, vertigo, stiffness, weakness. Lesions. Treatment: Emesis,
stomach pump, demulcents.
Bichromate of potash is used extensively in dyeing, calico printing,
in the manufacture of porcelain, in chemistry and photography, and
to a slight extent in medicine, while lead chromate (chrome yellow) is
a valuable pigment. Chromic acid is one of the most potent caustics,
at a moderately high temperature dissolving all animal products that
may be subjected to it. The chromate and bichromate of potash are
only less violently caustic, producing deep and fistulous sores on the
hands of the dyers, and acting in a similar manner on the mucosa of
the alimentary canal. Twenty-eight grains of the bichromate given by
the stomach killed a rabbit in two hours, while 45 grains of the
chromate had no such effect (Gmelin). Pelikan found that the
bichromate acted like arsenic or mercuric chloride, producing violent
irritation of the stomach and intestines, followed by albuminuria,
hæmaturia and emaciation: 1 to 5½ grains proved fatal to rabbits
and dogs.
Workmen inhaling the bichromate dust, have inflammation,
ulceration and finally destruction of the nasal septum, together with
skin eruptions and ulcerations.
Horses working at the factories have intractable ulcers of the skin
and sometimes shed the hoofs (B. W. Richardson).
Symptoms. Taken by the mouth the bichromate causes colicy
pains, emesis in vomiting animals, diarrhœa, great prostration, cold
extremities, vertigo, stiffness or weakness of the hind limbs, dilated
pupils, weak pulse and death. If protracted the urine may be bloody
and albuminous.
Lesions. There is more or less intense congestion of the stomach
and intestine, yellow shrunken mucosa, abrasions, sloughs, and
ulcers, and congested kidneys with yellow cloudiness of the
epithelium of the convoluted tubes and congestion of the glomeruli.
Treatment. Wash out the stomach by emesis or the stomach pump
and use albuminous and mucilaginous agents freely.
POISONING BY CARBOLIC ACID.
Susceptibility of cat and other animals. Fatal dose. Effect of dilution and gastric
plenitude. Concentrated is corrosive. Symptoms: Salivation, dysphagia, anorexia,
thirst, emesis, colic, arched back, odor of the acid, dark, greenish brown,
albuminous urine, tremors, lowered temperature, debility, stertor, stupor, coma.
Lesions: Whitened corroded mucosa, inflammation, ecchymosis, dark, liquid
blood, brain effusions or extravasations, nephritic congestion. Treatment: Vinegar,
alcohol, emesis, demulcents, Glauber salts.
The cat is the most susceptible to this poison. For dogs, cats and
rabbits from 3 to 4 drops per pound, is the minimum fatal dose. For
an ordinary dog the lethal dose is ½ to 1 drachm. The horse has
taken 3 ounces without fatal results, and 15 ounces in a week
(Munk). Much depends on the dilution of the agent and the
plenitude of the stomach. In a concentrated state it acts at once on
the mucosa as a caustic abstracting the water and forming a white
eschar.
Symptoms. The concentrated acid causes salivation, dysphagia,
anorexia, thirst, emesis in vomiting animals, colics, arched back,
retracted abdomen, odor of the acid in the breath, dark or greenish
brown albuminous urine, trembling, lowered temperature, debility,
stertorous breathing, clonic or tonic spasms, paralysis of the hind
limbs, stupor, coma and death.
Lesions. In the mouth, throat, stomach and intestines are whitish,
cauterized patches, with active inflammation beneath and around
them, and ecchymosis. The blood is fluid and dark colored,
extravasations or effusions on the brain or in the lateral ventricles,
with pulmonary congestion and parenchymatous nephritis.
Treatment. If available, give vinegar proportionate to the amount
of carbolic acid taken. Alcohol is a good substitute. Emesis should be
encouraged when available. Next mucilaginous agents and bland oils
to dilute the acid are required. Glauber salts may assist in
neutralizing and expelling the acid.
POISONING BY CREOSOTE.
Irritates, coagulates albumen, and blood, arrests heart, colic, emesis, salivation,
labored breathing, vertigo. Lesions: Congestion, corrosion, dark clotted blood,
odor. Treatment: Mucilaginous agents, emesis, oily laxatives.
On the mucous membrane creosote has a very irritant action,
coagulating the albumen, causing violent inflammation. It also
coagulates the blood and when injected into the veins, stops the
action of the heart. Taken by the mouth it causes violent colics,
emesis in vomiting animals, salivation, laborious breathing,
convulsions, vertigo and death. At the necropsy the stomach is found
congested of a dull red color, and corroded, and the vessels contain
dark clotted blood. A dog died from a dose of 2 drachms. The odor of
creosote is marked.
Treatment. Emesis, white of eggs, mucilaginous liquids, and oily
laxatives.
POISONING BY SEEDS OF RICINUS
COMMUNIS.
Superpurgation. Poison in seeds. Diluents, demulcents, stomach pump, laxatives
if necessary.
An overdose of castor oil may kill by gastro-intestinal congestion
and superpurgation. Apart from the oil however the seeds contain a
very active poison, which has been fatally ingested by horses with
grain or otherwise. Five and a half ounces of the seeds have proved
fatal. (Pelletier. Wende).
The symptoms are those of acute colic and gastro-enteritis. The
indications are to wash out the stomach by abundant demulcents
and the stomach pump, and if necessary to hasten the expulsion of
the offensive matters by bland laxatives (olive oil, Glauber salts).
POISONING BY CROTON SEEDS AND OIL.
Fatal dose without water. Vomiting animals. Superpurgation. Lesions.
Treatment: diluents, demulcents, stomach pump. Opiates.
One drachm of croton seeds given to a horse, without water proved
fatal in 24 hours (Morton); 2 drachms followed by all the water the
horse would drink produced most violent catharsis followed by
recovery (Hughes). Twenty to thirty drops of croton oil proved fatal;
8 drops in the jugular vein caused death (Hertwig). It is much less
fatal to cattle. Dogs and pigs vomit it so readily that they usually
survive with profuse catharsis.
The symptoms are profuse watery diarrhœa with tenesmus,
congested mucosæ, rapidly increasing weakness and small pulse,
becoming imperceptible.
The lesions are violent congestion of the mucosa of stomach and
intestines, concentrated very largely on the cæcum and colon.
Treatment consists in abundance of mucilaginous liquids, which
the animal readily drinks, and washing out the stomach with the
stomach tube or pump. Opiates may be demanded to calm the pain.
POISONING BY EUPHORBIA.
In Europe euphorbia lathyris has been found to produce in
animals, colic, constipation, tympany, followed by bloody diarrhœa,
stupor and hæmaturia. In America the euphorbia corollata (large
flowering spurge) and euphorbia ipecacuanhæ (ipecacuanha spurge)
though less potent have a similar action. Treatment consists in
favoring elimination by emesis, and abundant mucilaginous and
demulcent agents.
POISONING BY BOX LEAVES.
The leaves of buxus sempervirens, used as a border in gardens,

contains an acrid principle. After eating 1½ lb. a horse had colic,
tympany and enteritis. After death the lesions of gastro-enteritis
were found (Weiss). Treatment would be by stomach pump,
laxatives, demulcents and anodynes.
POISONING BY DAFFODILS. (NARCISSUS
POETICUS, AND NARCISSUS PSEUDO
NARCISSUS).
These common denizens of gardens produce intense gastro-
enteritis, profuse diarrhœa, spasms, stupor and weakness.
Treatment will not differ materially from that advised in box
poisoning.
POISONING BY RANUNCULUS.
The ranunculus acris (tall crowfoot), repens (creeping crowfoot),
sceleratus (cursed crowfoot), and bulbosus (butter cup), are all more
or less acrid and liable to produce gastro-enteritis when taken in
quantity. They are usually avoided by animals but will sometimes be
taken by accident with other vegetation. Sheep are said to eat
ranunculus bulbosus with impunity (Daubenton). Both cattle and
sheep suffered from the other species (Delafond, Lipp, Brugnone,
Delplanque). There were salivation, colic, emesis in vomiting
animals, diarrhœa, vertigo, spasms, grinding of the teeth, arched
back and staring coat. Treatment would be emesis or the stomach
pump when available, mucilaginous drinks and enemata. Johnson
(Medical Botany of North America) had a herd of cows abort for
years on a field thickly set with ranunculus acris, but which ceased to
abort when removed to a field from which this weed was absent.
POISONING BY VERATRUM. VIRIDE.
AMERICAN HELEBORE.
Used in the early days by New England farmers to destroy birds in

the cornfields (Osgood). Taken internally it reduces the fullness and
frequency of the pulse, and if the dose be large excites nausea,
vomiting and purging with great prostration. In the horse I have
found anorexia, irritability of the bowels, and frequent retching. The
action is primarily on the heart and nervous system and incidentally
as an irritant on the gastro-intestinal mucosa. Treatment consists in
evacuation of the stomach and the free use of mucilaginous drinks
and diffusible stimulants. Helleborus Niger, viridus and fœtidus have
analogous effects.

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Frontier Socialism: Self-Organisation

and Anti-Capitalism Monica Quirico

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ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Cover credit: traffic_analyzer/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Image

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of

31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.),

Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary

Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist

Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philos-

Interlude 1: Resistance or Revolution? The Spanish Civil

Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: The Dilemmas of a

8 In the Midst of the Crisis 155

Monica Quirico is Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of

Gianfranco Ragona is Associate professor of History of Political

In this field, he has conducted lessons and seminars at national and

1 Hope and Disillusionment in Greece

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

while the number of unemployed rose. There were cries of humanitarian

Support for self-organization practices (mutual aid but also street

At the end of the first phase of negotiations, Tsipras, considering the

meantime). However, complying with the parameters imposed by credi-

Was it worth it? We do not have a definitive answer. It is worth

(the occupation of public space, permanent assemblies, autonomous

At the level of planning and organization, indeed, weakness and fragility

seemed to have aged as well (Dieterich 2006; The Invisible Committee

Second, it is encouraging that the outbreak of the pandemic prompted

2 What Socialism After Socialism?

As such, it was generally used in the field of religion and, especially,

the role of repository of historical truth. In the light of these histor-

3 A New Path to Self-Government

neoliberalism or turbo-capitalism) and the need to transform it. Both the

studies, to employ the concept of “elective affinity” in order to observe

its boundaries. We have chosen “minor” and/or minority thinkers in the

2010–2016). Our research, therefore, does not seek or claim to be

In this perspective, self-management may be defined as the encounter:

In contemporary so-called Western countries, any organizing by subal-

movements). In the 1970s, the fragmentation we have described in the

2017. Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe,

“Revolution Is Not What the Revolutionaries

1 Life and Works

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

(1891–1894). This group failed to consolidate into an actual organiza-

2 A Road for the Liberation of Workers

a spontaneous event: rather, he saw it as the undisputed result of a vast

in the founding “fathers” of the doctrine: Bakunin himself, who in his

necessarily pushed towards socialism; on the other hand, however, the

Poisoning by these agents is rare in domestic animals. Bromine 2

Poisonous salts. Symptoms: spasms, peristalsis, defecation, urination,

The leaves of buxus sempervirens, used as a border in gardens,

Used in the early days by New England farmers to destroy birds in

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