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Title: Anarchism in India Author: Jean Drèze Date: 2014 Language: en Topics: India, anarchist movement Source: Retrieved on 4th March 2021 from http://www.raiot.in/anarchism-in-india/
In India as elsewhere, anarchist thought is widely misunderstood. As
Bhagat Singh, one of the few Indian revolutionaries who had explicit
anarchist leanings, put it: “The people are scared of the word
anarchism. The word anarchism has been abused so much that even in India
revolutionaries have been called anarchist to make them unpopular.”
How and why the anarchist tradition came to be comprehensively sidelined
in India is not entirely clear. The fact is that very few left leaders,
writers or activists in India think of themselves as anarchists. And yet
it seems to me that many of them have drawn inspiration from anarchist
thought in one way or another, and that we would greatly benefit from a
more explicit recognition of this anarchist influence – actual and
potential.
There are varieties of anarchist thought (some are pretty weird), just
as there are varieties of socialist thought; my concern here is with
what one might call cooperative anarchism or libertarian socialism. This
is more or less the opposite of what anarchism is often claimed to mean
by those whose aim, as Bhagat Singh put it, is to make revolutionaries
unpopular. This aim is typically achieved by portraying anarchists as
impulsive bomb-throwers who want to destroy the state through violent
means.[1] Resistance to state authority and oppression is certainly one
of the core principles of anarchism. It is also true that many
anarchists believe in the possibility of a state-less society, and
perhaps even in the need for a violent overthrow of the state. But
anarchist thought certainly does not start from there. In fact, as
Chomsky has argued, it is even possible for a committed anarchist to
lend temporary support to some state institutions vis-à-vis other
centres of power: “In today’s world, I think, the goals of a committed
anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack
against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more
meaningful public participation – and ultimately, to dismantle them in a
much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be
achieved.”[2]
If anarchist thought does not begin with the idea of a state-less
society, let alone the violent overthrow of the state, where does it
start from? It starts, I believe, from the same point as these lectures
– a deep suspicion of all authority and a principled opposition to the
concentration of power, whether it is the power of the state, the
corporation, the church, the landlord or the head of a family. As
Chomsky argues, this does not mean that all authority and power is
illegitimate, but it does mean that if it cannot be justified, it must
be dismantled.
Some people believe, against all evidence, that power becomes harmless
if it is exercised on behalf of the working class. This is the basis of
the hope that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would pave the way for
the withering away of the state and a state-less society. The dangers of
this idea were exposed early on by anarchist thinkers such as Michael
Bakunin, a contemporary of Karl Marx, who said: “I wonder how Marx fails
to see that… the establishment of such a dictatorship would be enough to
kill the revolution and distort all popular movements”.
The fact that anarchist thinkers predicted with great clarity what would
happen in societies based on an apparent dictatorship of the proletariat
is not the least reason why it is worth paying more attenion to them.
Similarly, anarchist thought can help us to develop a healthy suspicion
of various forms of vanguardism, including the notion that left
intellectuals are the vanguard of the proletariat. This notion is of
course a terrific deal for intellectuals, since it puts them in command.
Vanguardism found a fertile soil in India with its long tradition of
Brahminism, guru worship, and deference to authority in general. It is
at variance with the spirit of anarchism, which includes a basic faith
in people’s ability to take charge of their own lives and struggles.
Indeed, anarchist thought and libertarian socialism are not limited to a
fundamental critique of power and authority – far from it. They also
build on constructive ideas about social relations and economic
organization, including voluntary association, mutual aid,
self-management, and the principle of federation. The basic idea is that
a good society would consist, as John Dewey put it, of “… free human
beings associated with one another on terms of equality”.
One of the most eloquent exponents of the power of free association and
voluntary cooperation was Peter Kropotkin, the 19^(th)-century anarchist
and author of Mutual Aid. A zoologist and geographer by profession,
Kropotkin spent many years in Siberia, where he observed countless
examples of mutual aid among animals. Just to give one example, he
observed how, just before the winter, large numbers of deer would gather
from hundreds of miles around and congregate at the precise point of a
river (the Amur) where it was narrow enough for a large herd to be able
to cross it safely and reach greener pastures on the other side.[3] He
concluded that cooperative behaviour is a plausible outcome of
biological evolution – an idea that is being rediscovered today by
evolutionary biologists and game theorists.
Kropotkin went on to study cooperation in human societies (which
involves much more than biological evolution) and documented in great
detail how mutual aid played a pervasive role at all stages of human
history, despite being often repressed by the privileged and powerful.
More than a hundred years after the publication of Mutual Aid, we have
many more examples of human activities and institutions based on
principles of voluntary association and mutual aid. Anarchist principles
of political action have played an important role in the international
peace movement, the environmental movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the Arab Spring, the Chiapas uprising, the World Social Forum and the
right to information movement in India. There have been vibrant
experiments with workers’ cooperatives and self-management in Spain,
Argentina, and Kerala, and also other examples of economic applications
of anarchist principles such as the free software movement. In India,
the social organization of many tribal communities is still based on a
strong tradition of mutual aid and participatory democracy, evident for
instance in institutions like exchange labour and Gram Sabhas.
Even the edifice of electoral democracy rests on a simple act of mutual
aid, namely participation in elections: voting does not involve any
personal gain for anyone, since a single person’s vote cannot influence
the outcome of elections, and yet most people do vote, often losing a
day’s wages and braving long queues, harsh weather or even physical
danger. Without mutual cooperation, there would be no democracy, even in
the most elementary form of electoral democracy. As this example
illustrates, mutual cooperation does not necessarily require altruism or
self-sacrifice; it can also build on simple habits of thought
(specifically, habits of sociability and public-spiritedness) that an
enlightened society should be able to foster.
Coming back to the left tradition in India, elements of anarchist
thought can be found in one form or another in the life and writings of
many Indian thinkers, even if they never thought of themselves as
anarchists, and indeed were not anarchists. I have already mentioned
Bhagat Singh, who had clear anarchist sympathies. Just to give one or
two other examples, Ambedkar was not an anarchist by any means and yet
we can find traces of anarchist thought in his writings, for instance
his notion of democracy as a “mode of associated living” based on
“liberty, equality and fraternity”. I think that many anarchists would
also be proud of Periyar, who taught people to resist the oppression of
caste, patriarchy and religion and have faith in themselves. Even some
leading Marxist thinkers belong here: for instance, Ashok Rudra’s
critique of “the intelligentsia as a ruling class” has some affinity
with Chomsky’s analysis of the role of intellectuals in the modern
world. Also within the Marxist tradition, here is something K. Balagopal
(one of India’s most committed and thoughtful left activists) wrote
around the end of his lifelong engagement with a variety of popular
struggles:
“What seems to be required are ‘localised’ (both spatially and socially)
movements that are specific enough to bring out the full potential and
engender the full self-realisation of various oppressed groups,
subsequently federated into a wider movement that can (in a free and
democratic way) channelise the aroused energies into a broad movement.
This is quite different from the Leninist notion of a single vanguard
party that would centralise all knowledge within itself and direct (top
down) the struggles of the suppressed masses. In such an effort, the
suppressed masses would not even be half awakened to their potential.
Even if such a party were to claim that it learns from the people, and
even if [it] were to honestly try to do so, the very strategy would be
inadequate. If there can at all be a single ‘party’ which would lead a
movement for social transformation, it can only be a federally
structured organisation, whose free and equal units would be the
political units, centred on the self-directed struggles of various
sections of the deprived.”[4]
This sounds to me like anarchist thought par excellence. As I have
illustrated earlier, anarchist principles are alive not just in Indian
political thought but also in social life and popular movements. None of
this is to say that the time has come to embrace anarchism (or
libertarian socialism) and give up other schools of thought. But greater
openness to anarchist ideas would certainly bring some fresh air. For
instance, I believe that anarchist thought could help us to think more
clearly about the relation between caste and class, beware of all
authoritarianism, enlarge our understanding of democracy, and open our
eyes to the workings of power (for instance, patriarchy and caste
discrimination) within our own movements. Last but not least, anarchist
thought can inspire us to change the world without waiting for state
power, and give us confidence that democratic struggles here and now can
be, as Bakunin put it, “the living seeds of the new society which is to
replace the old world”.
[1] Bhagat Singh did throw a bomb once (in the chamber of the Central
Legislative Assembly), but it was little more than a firecracker and the
gesture was largely symbolic. There were no casualties.
[2] Chomsky (1996), Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature
and the Social Order (London: Pluto), p. 75. This statement must be read
in the light of the distinction Chomsky makes between “goals” and
“visions” (p. 70): “By visions, I mean the conception of a future
society that animates what we actually do, a society in which a decent
human being might want to live. By goals, I mean the choices and tasks
that are within reach, that we will pursue one way or another guided by
a vision that may be distant and hazy.”
[3] Kropotkin, Peter (1902), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London:
Heinemann), Chapter 2.
[4] Balagopal, K. (2011), “Popular Struggles: Some Questions for
Communist Theory and Practice”, in Ear to the Ground (New Delhi:
Navayana), p. 375.