Erich Muhsam was born in Berlin in 1878 into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. Soon after his family moved to Luebeck in north Germany where his father worked as a pharmacist (in fact the pharmacy is still there).
He hated the school where he was sent, which was known for its authoritarian discipline and its unsparing use of corporal punishment. Erich was often a victim of “the unspeakable flailings which were supposed to beat out of me all my innate feelings” because his rebellious nature often clashed with the school regime. In 1896 he wrote an anonymous piece for the socialist paper Luebecker Volsboten denouncing one of the school’s most brutal teachers. This caused a scandal and Erich was expelled for taking part in socialist activities.
Erich had wanted to be a writer and poet from an early age and he left Luebeck to pursue this aim in Berlin in 1900. He got involved in a group called Neue Gemeinschaft (New Society) which combined socialist ideology with experiments in communal living. Here he met Gustav Landauer who introduced him to anarchist communist ideas. Muehsam contributed to Kampf, the anarchist paper of his friend Senna Hoy, who later died in terrible conditions in a Russian prison.
In 1904 Erich went to Ascona in Italian Switzerland to live in the artists’ colony of Monte Verita (the writer Herman Hesse, the dance theorist Laban, the psychotherapist Otto Gross and many Daddaists and Expressionists lived there at one time or other).
He began writing plays there, the first of which, The Con Men, mixed new political theory with traditional dramatic forms. He also continued contributing to many anarchist papers, which drew the attention of the German authorities. He was considered one of the most dangerous anarchist agitators.
He moved to Munich in 1908 and took part in the cabaret movement. He did not care much for writing cabaret songs, but he achieved much notice because of them.
In 1911 he founded the paper Kain which advocated anarchist communism. He castigated and ridiculed the German state, fighting capital punishment and theatre censorship, and prophetically analysing international affairs. The World War that he had predicted led to the suspension of Kain.
At first Erich publicly supported the war, but by the end of 1914 was persuaded that he had been wrong, saying that, “I will probably have to bear the sin of betraying my ideals for the rest of my life”. He threw himself into anti-war activity taking part in various actions. He supported the strikes that were beginning to break out. As these became more widespread and began to take on a revolutionary nature, Erich was among those arrested and imprisoned in April 1918, and then freed in November.
With the fall of the Kaiser and King Ludwig of Bavaria, Munich burst into revolt. Muehsam and Landauer as well as Ret Marut (later known as the novelist B. Traven) were among those agitating for the setting up of Workers Councils which led on to the founding of the Bavarian Council Republic. This lasted only a week. The Social Democrats, terrified by the thought of revolution, allied with the right. The Freikorps, a reactionary militia organised by the socialist minister Noske and composed of right wing military and students, crushed the Council Republic. Landauer died under the blows of rifle butts and boots.
Muehsam escaped but was later captured and sent to prison for 15 years. In prison, Erich continued with his writing, composing many poems and the play Judas. Released in the amnesty of 1924, he returned to a Munich in the grip of apathy. He joined the Anarchist Communist Federation of Germany (FKAD). He restarted Kain but this failed after a few issues. He then brought out Fanal (The Torch) where he attacked both the Communists and the far right. His openly revolutionary tone and his attempts to stop the rise of the right made him a hate figure among conservatives and Nazis.
He used satire to ridicule the Nazis with short stories and poems. This came to the personal attention of Hitler and Goebbels, arousing their anger. He agitated for the freeing of the revolutionary Max Hoelz and wrote a play, Staatsraeson (For reasons of State) in defence of Sacco and Vanzetti), in 1928.
In 1930 he completed his last play Alle Wetter (All Hang) which called for mass revolution as the only way to stop the seizure of power by the radical Right.
A few hours after Van der Lubbe had set fire to the Reichstag in February 1933, Muehsam was arrested and then spent the last 17 months of his life in the concentration camps of Sonnenburg, Brandenburg and Oranienburg. His teeth were smashed in with rifle butts, his scalp was branded with a swastika from a red-hot iron and he was hospitalised. He was forced to dig his own grave for a mock execution, and his body became a mass of bruises and wounds. His tormentors tried to force him to sing the Nazi song the Horst Wessel Lied. He refused to give in and sang the International. " Thanks to his will power he resisted all attempts to humiliate him" (Augustin Souchy).
Despite these tortures Erich remained intransigent to the end. Finally he was tortured and murdered on the night of 9th July 1934. After beatings, a Stormtrooper leader administered a lethal injection and then a suicide by hanging was faked.
Never in my life have I learnt
To submit to anyone
Here I am locked up,
Far from my home,
My wife, my workshop.
And even if they kill me,
If I must die,
To give up is to lie!
…
But if the chains broke
Then I would breathe in sunshine
At the top of my lungs- Tyranny!
And I would cry to the people: be free!
Forget to submit yourselves!
To give up is to lie!
From Muhsam’s poem The Prisoner
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Anarchist Federation Biography of German Anarchist Erich Muhsam from AF publication Organise in 2006
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Mühsam, Erich: His life, his work, his martyrdom - Augustin Souchy
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No current struggle session discussion here on the new general megathread, i will ban you from the comm and remove your comment, have a good day/night :meow-coffee:
new mega meow
Are we the same nerds we were in the last megathread?
You can never post in the same megathread twice
In how many threads
Must a nerd post in
Before you can call
Them a nerd?
You are making a semantic mistake. A mega thread is a place where posts go it is not the posts it contains. While the posts inside the megathread change they do not alter the fact that it is a mega thread. Even if the topic of this megathread were to change it would still be post/295450.
second
ok i pull up
First
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feeling miserable today for multiple personal reasons besides the usual background ones (the genocide in gaza and the western liberal capitalist states slowly revealing the more-facist-than-facism mask underneath) and all that on the day that i wanted to ask out my crush (if i don’t shoot my shot today im going to lose my fucking mind)
this is not cool, this is not nice and i don’t enjoy it at all
at some point i really need to do a longer post on how people cope because i have no fucking idea how to
For me, it’s Absurdism and remembering that England first invaded Ireland over seven hundred years ago, and now Sein Feinn is seizing control of England’s own colonial institutions of government that were installed to keep the rump colony of Northern Ireland under control while England free-falls in to disaster.
History never ends. Our ideas are not bound to any language, creed, or religion. Marxism is a scientific system of analyzing economic processes. The desire to seize control of those processes and steer them towards a better world will naturally arise in any population subjugated by capitalism when they develop a sufficiently complete analysis of capitalism. Even if they never knew we existed, even if they live on other worlds so distant they will never see the light of our sun, Marxism is a simple analysis of material reality. And people will take that analysis and try to do better, be better, help themselves and their neighbors. There’s no inevitable victory for us, but it’s real fucking hard to wipe us out.
Our ancestors have been fighting this war since the first landlord demanded a share of their crops fourteen thousand years ago, and our descendants will keep fighting until the last sun burns out. Hopefully we’ll win, again and again, all across the universe, for very very long periods of time. But we’re in this for the very, very, very long haul. It started before us and it won’t end until long after earth is a gravitational wobble in the outer atmosphere of a red sun.
Remember that picture made by a man dying from AIDS where the point was to show the paint dribbling down to signify how life their was being cut short? Then that AI bro finishes it, the patterns are all fucked up, and then asks a LLM to speak as if it’s the artist. It goes “omg, thank you! It looks great! I love the power of artistic cooperation!”
That shit FUCKING SUCKED.
Silver lining is these guys are probably getting terrible medical advice.
If I was a character in a dystopian horror this would be the event to set me off on my path of vengeance
Trying to get on some adhd treatment. I genuinely think I might become unstoppable once I can sit down and focus for more than 10 minutes
oh i just got finished getting diagnosed with adhd like thirty seconds ago and i think if i take meds its over for everyone. im gonna take over
we are gonna do a senator armstrong/raiden style fight for world domination on top of some destroyed giant mech
You were nerfed in a previous balance patch but the docs found an exploit to get you back to your previous glory
It’s pretty cool. I worked out my spending and budget!
I can speak about 5 languages to some extent (mostly fluent), hoping to get to 6 fluent and 10 to some extent
Everyone under the age of 18 was born post 2007
Imagine explaining the Obama campaign reactions to them
Haters really going through the archives. Be busting out the elder scrolls just to find something to use against me. Sad.
s’witEdit: I should have gone with “Fetcher.” Its really a funny insult for a video game full of fetch quests and I wonder if thats what they meant when they wrote it into the game.
It’s a shame the Gravel Institute is basically dead now
Little cake popping up by my name like I haven’t just forgotten my password like 5 times since 2020.
Oh boy laying in bed 240 calories under budget, time to fantasize about loudly slurping on a punch bowl full of pasta.
when dinner is less than you thought so you just have to sit there because you have nothing else to eat
I wanna go see the dinosaurs at the local museum but it’s too hot out.
Hunter Biden and Hunter Schafer should do a reality TV show where they wander around america doing adventures and shit
They could call it Hunter X Hunter
Reading some theory and a lot of theorists need to be reminded that theory is a model of the world based on the available evidence, not a cage made from the words of dead men. So many people are still drowning in the shit and mud of cold war ideologies, or even still fighting the battles of the 1910s and 20s. The way people still have personal affection for dead revolutionaries and get mad about them like they’re your favorite boy band is ridiculous. The ghost of Stalin is the most prominent one, people act like he personally shot their dog and is going to jump out of hte closet and yell “BOO!” any second. We’re still calling ourselves Leninists and Trotskyists when those guys have been dead for decades and their revolutions ultimately failed. We should be using the theory of those ages as a basis for analyzing the present, and instead many theorists are just circle jerking over who was the meanest leftist.
I’m probably just disconnected from shit happening on the ground in languages I’ll never learn to speak or read, but over in the Anglosphere it really feels like the tradition of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Yeah, you need praxis to develop theory. Visa versa too, but way too many people focus on getting theory right. It’s the easier thing to do of the two in the coddled west, so it’s what a lot of people have been doing for 50 years. I guess the people who did do praxis kept getting killed or imprisoned so there’s that
Beyond even doing cool shit with your friends I’ve read a bunch of stuff recently where people were doing a lot of “Well here’s what this guy from the 19th century would think” and it’s like who cares? What are our strategyic goals now? What tools do we have? What resources do we have to develop new tools? I don’t care what ancient dead germans think, what do people who are alive now think, and how’s it working out? Idk. Just frustrated. Tonights been a weird one.
Not even mimecraft stuff. Black Panthers breakfast program as part of their survival-pending-revolution was too much for the powers that be. The black lives matter protests in 2020 and earlier in Ferguson, that was too much and people got merced for it. Sending medical supplies to Cuba… like, nevermind the joy that could come from being a Modern Revolutionary you’re not even allowed to give people food who need it
True that.
It’s bizarre to me to see people refusing to work together because they disagree about who should have been Lenin’s successor.
Fuck you magic the gathering, just when I think I’m out you drag me back in
i love him
i am taking the flubs pill
The flavor text is so perfect for what he does!
Wetting my underwear every night before bed has really helped keep the heat at bay. My shirt, too.
I like putting a 2L bottle of water in the freezer and wrapping it in a towel to cuddle at night.
Strongly advise trying out some linen or linen blend sheets if it’s feasible. Linen’s properties make it excellent for hot weather bedding.
down with cis