Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

188 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

talking was concerned with adumbrating the world as a single developing organism within which he located the various schemes for restructuring the economic and political systems of society—through guild socialism, monetary reform, federation and devolution—at the core was the concern with the individual in relationship with others: the creation of a truly human family or household unconfined by ties of blood and kin, reconstructing the cells of a regenerated social order. It was Mitrinovi¢’s insight, which he shared with those other ‘utopians’ of the Blutbund Gustay Landauer and Martin Buber, that a new cooperative order cannot be imposed from above, but must grow organically from the grass-roots upwards—sustained and strengthened by the daily collaboration and comradeship of individuals. He realised, along with others before him and since, that the creation of a society free from domination and exploitation cannot be achieved unless the values of freedom and fellowship are embodied in the actual process of creation. Such values cannot be imposed, neither can they be created by mere talk: they must be lived in the daily round of one’s life.

Landauer depicted the state as “a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”'* In other words, so long as people confront each other as alien and separate individuals, failing to actively acknowledge their common humanity, they make the coercive order of the state necessary. Such an imposed domination can be overcome only to the extent that we form new kinds of relationships that render the coercive power of the state unnecessary. Landauer used the term “People” to depict this new relationship, arguing that socialism would only become a reality to the extent that people came together as a ‘People, “growing together into an organism with countless organs and members.” From this perspective we are always helping to destroy the state, making space for a new social order, to the extent that we actively enter into cooperative caring relationships with our fellows.

Ina way, the bulk of Mitrinovi¢’s life and work can be read as an exploration of the ways and means of creating such truly human relationships between people—a human household within which differences are acknowledged and respected, difficulties and disagreements honestly faced, but underpinned in the final analysis by a fundamental commitment of each to the other as people, as individual members of the wider human family. Like others within the libertarian tradition, Mitrinovi¢ looked to “the renewal of society from within, by a regeneration of its cell tissue,”?° recognising that revolutions are rarely acts of social creation, but rather of deliverance, making free the space for the full flourishing of the new social forms developing within