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Title: South Asian Anarchism Author: Michael Schmidt Date: July 17, 2012 Language: en Topics: South Asia, anarchist movement, anti-imperialism, book review Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/23404 Notes: Meditations on Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (AK Press, USA, 2012) and her Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (California World History Library, USA, 2011) – by Michael Schmidt, founder member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), and author of Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). This piece was kindly edited by van der Walt.
What the Institute for Anarchist Studies’ Maia Ramnath has achieved with
these two books whose angles of approach differ yet which form companion
volumes in that they intersect on the little-known anarchist movement of
South Asia, is a breathtaking, sorely-needed re-envisioning of
anarchism’s forgotten organisational strength in the colonial world
which points to its great potential to pragmatically combat imperialism
today.
To paint the backdrop to Ramnath’s work, we need to break with
conventional anarchist histories. Lucien van der Walt and Steven
Hirsch’s Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial
World (2010) states: “The First International provided the womb in which
the anarchist movement emerged, but the formal meetings of the
International, its press, and its debates were located within the body
of a dynamic global working class and peasant network. Anarchism had an
organised presence in Argentina, Cuba, Egypt and Mexico from the 1870s,
followed by Ireland, South Africa and Ukraine in the 1880s. The first
anarchist-led, syndicalist, unions outside of Spain (the Spanish
Regional Workers’ Federation, 1870) and the USA (the Central Labor
Union, 1884) were Mexico’s General Congress of Mexican Workers (1876)
and Cuba’s Workers’ Circle (1887). These were the immediate ancestors of
the better known syndicalist unions that emerged globally from the 1890s
onwards. To put it another way, anarchism was not a West European
doctrine that diffused outwards, perfectly formed, to a passive
‘periphery.’ Rather, the movement emerged simultaneously and
transnationally, created by interlinked activists on [four] continents –
a pattern of inter-connection, exchange and sharing, rooted in ‘informal
internationalism,’ which would persist into the 1940s and beyond.” They
concluded that to “speak of discrete ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ anarchist
and syndicalist movements’” as is common in contemporary anarchist
discourse, “would be misleading and inaccurate.”
It cannot be overemphasised how for the first 50 years of its existence
as a proletarian mass movement since its origin in the First
International, the anarchist movement often entrenched itself far more
deeply in the colonies of the imperialist powers and in those parts of
the world still shackled by post-colonial regimes than in its
better-known Western heartlands like France or Spain. Until Lenin,
Marxism had almost nothing to offer on the national question in the
colonies, and until Mao, who had been an anarchist in his youth, neither
did Marxism have anything to offer the peasantry in such regions –
regions that Marx and Engels, speaking as de facto German supremacists
from the high tower of German capitalism, dismissed in their Communist
Manifesto (1848) as the “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries.”
Instead, Marxism stressed the virtues of capitalism (and even
imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping stone to socialism.
Engels summed up their devastating position in an article entitled
Democratic Pan-Slavism in their Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 14 February
1849: the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and invasion of
Mexico in 1846 in which Mexico lost 40% of its territory were applauded
as they had been “waged wholly and solely in the interest of
civilisation,” as “splendid California has been taken away from the lazy
Mexicans, who could not do anything with it” by “the energetic Yankees”
who would “for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to
civilisation…” So, “the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and
Texans may suffer because of it, in some places ‘justice’ and other
moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such
facts of world-historic significance?” By this racial argument of the
“iron reality” of inherent national virility giving rise to laudable
capitalist overmastery, Engels said the failure of the Slavic nations
during the 1848 Pan-European Revolt to throw off their Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian and Russian yokes, demonstrated not only their ethnic
unfitness for independence, but that they were in fact
“counter-revolutionary” nations deserving of “the most determined use of
terror” to suppress them.
It reads chillingly like a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ racial
nationalist arguments for the use of terror against the Slavs during
their East European conquest. Engels’ abysmal article had been written
in response to Mikhail Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian
Patriot in which he – at that stage not yet an anarchist – had by stark
contrast argued that the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps
were divided not by nationality or stage of capitalist development, but
by class. In 1848, revolutionary class consciousness had expressed
itself as a “cry of sympathy and love for all the oppressed
nationalities”. Urging the Slavic popular classes to “extend your had to
the German people, but not to the… petit bourgeois Germans who rejoice
at each misfortune that befalls the Slavs,” Bakunin concluded that there
were “two grand questions spontaneously posed in the first days of the
[1848] spring… the social emancipation of the masses and the liberation
of the oppressed nations.”
By 1873, when Bakunin, now unashamedly anarchist, threw down the
gauntlet to imperialism, writing that “Two-thirds of humanity, 800
million Asiatics, asleep in their servitude, will necessarily awaken and
begin to move,” the newly-minted anarchist movement was engaging
directly and repeatedly with the challenges of imperialism, colonialism,
national liberation movements, and post-colonial regimes. So it was that
staunchly anti-imperialist anarchism and its emergent revolutionary
unionist strategy, syndicalism – and not pro-imperialist Marxism – that
rose to often hegemonic dominance of the union centres of Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in the
early 1900s, almost every significant economy and population
concentration in post-colonial Latin America. In six of these countries,
anarchists mounted attempts at revolution; in Cuba and Mexico, they
played a key role in the successful overthrow of reactionary regimes;
while in Mexico and Nicaragua they deeply influenced significant
experiments in large-scale revolutionary agrarian social construction.
The anarchist movement also established smaller syndicalist unions in
colonial and semi-colonial territories as diverse as Algeria, Bulgaria,
China, Ecuador, Egypt, Korea, Malaya (Malaysia), New Zealand, North and
South Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively), the Philippines,
Poland, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South-West Africa (Namibia), and
Venezuela – and built crucial radical networks in the colonial and
post-colonial world: East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East,
Central Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, South-East Asia, and
Ramnath’s chosen terrain, the South Asian sub-continent. In recent
years, there have been several attempts to take on the huge task of
researching and reintroducing anarchists, syndicalists and a broader
activist public to this neglected anti-authoritarian counter-imperialist
tradition: Lucien van der Walt’s and my two-volume Counter-power project
is one global overview; the book edited by van der Walt and Hirsch is
another; and there are important new regional studies such as Ilham
Khuri-Makdisi’s, Levantine Trajectories: the Formulation and
Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo and
Alexandria 1860–1914 (2003), and Benedict Anderson’s study of the
Philippines, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial
Imagination (2005).
But so far, research into historical anarchism and syndicalism in South
Asia (in Ramnath’s pre-Partition terminology, India) has been lacking.
In part this is because it was an immensely fragmented sub-continent,
with three imperialist powers, Britain, France and Portugal, directly
asserting dominance over a multiplicity of principalities and other
indigenous power-structures, often integrated into the European empires
through alliances and indirect rule, a patchwork not unlike Germany
prior to Prussian expansion in the mid-19^(th) Century: Ramnath calls
India’s pre-colonial structures “a range of overlapping, segmentary,
sovereign units oriented towards different centers”. This “beehive”
polity was further fractured and complicated by religion, language,
colour, and caste, so it is arguably difficult to scent the anarchist
idea and its diffusions in such a potpourri.
Then again, van der Walt and my experience in researching Counter-power
over 12 years has suggested that the lack of knowledge of the Indian
anarchist movement is probably simply because (until Ramnath), no-one
was looking for signs of its presence. While the history of Indian
Marxism has been well documented, the anarchists have been ignored, or
conflated with the very different Gandhians. For example, it was obvious
to us that the strength of the French anarchist movement in the first
half of the 20^(th) Century definitely implied that there must have been
an anarchist or syndicalist presence or impact on the French colonial
port enclave of Pondicherry; and indeed Ramnath now confirms that
Pondicherry was at least a base for anarchist-sympathetic Indian
militants.
There were, of course, very real structural obstacles to the diffusion
of anarchism and syndicalism in colonial South Asia. Much of India was
pre-industrial, even semi-feudal; and while there was a large mass of
landless labourers, capitalism had a limited impact. Despite the
misrepresentation of anarchism and syndicalism in mainstream Marxist
writings as a refuge of the declining artisanal classes, and as a revolt
against modernity, it was primarily in the world’s industrial cities –
Chicago, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, São Paulo, Veracruz,
Glasgow, Barcelona, Essen, Turin, Yekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovs’k), St
Petersburg, Cairo, Johannesburg, Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Yokohama,
Sydney and so forth – that the movement raised strongholds: the ports,
slums, mines, plantations and factories were its fields of germination;
and it was the shipping lanes and railways that were its vectors. Its
agrarian experiments were also centred on regions where old agrarian
orders were being shattered by imperialism, capitalism and the modern
state, like Morelos and Pueblo in Mexico, Fukien in China, Shinmin in
Manchuria, Aragon, Valencia and Andalusia in Spain, Patagonia in
Argentina, and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. So in some respects, India’s
colonial fragmentation and level of development can be seen as similar
to contemporary West Africa, where syndicalist unions only sprung up in
the 1990s in Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
Yet India was also very much part of the modern world, its older systems
being transformed by imperialism as well as the rising local
bourgeoisie; the “jewel” of the British Empire, it was locked into late
nineteenth century globalisation as a source of cheap labour (including
a large Diaspora of indentured migrants), raw materials and mass
markets; Indian sailors were integral to the British fleets and Indian
workers and peasants were integral to British industry; Indian workers
and intellectuals resident in the West were heavily involved in radical
milieus and alliances. So I am fairly certain, given that syndicalism
was propagated incessantly in the pre- and inter-war period by Indian
revolutionaries, and given their links to the British working class, the
leading edge of which in the pre-war period was syndicalist, that
someone actively looking for de facto syndicalist unions in India’s port
cities would unearth something of interest.
Briefly, Decolonizing Anarchism looks through what Ramnath calls “the
stereoscopic lenses of anarchism and anticolonialism” for both
explicitly anarchist as well as less explicitly libertarian socialist
approaches, in the words and deeds of a wide range of local thinkers and
activists, from the Bengali terrorists of the early 1900s, to the
Gandhian decentralists of the mid-century Independence era, and to the
non-partisan social movements of today. This is an important recovery of
a tradition that rejected the statism of both the Indian National
Congress, and of Communist traditions, and that raises important
questions about the trajectory of Indian anti-imperialism.
Her Haj to Utopia explores the closest thing that colonial-era India had
to an explicitly anarchist-influenced sub-continental and in fact
international organisation, the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party. This took its
name from the 1857 “Mutiny” against British rule, an uprising revered by
Indian revolutionaries of all ideologies, as reflected in Ghadar’s fused
and phased mixture of syndicalism, Marxism, nationalism, radical
republicanism, and pan-Islamicism. The two books intersect in the figure
of Ghadar Party founder Lala Har Dayal (1884?- 1939), a globe-hopping,
ascetic Bakuninist revolutionary and industrial syndicalist, secretary
of the Oakland, California, branch of the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) and founder of the Bakunin Institute near that city. Har
Dayal is of interest to van der Walt and I, in writing the South Asian
section of Counter-power’s narrative history volume Global Fire because
he was explicitly anarchist and syndicalist and because he was a true
internationalist, building a world-spanning liberation movement that not
only established roots in Hindustan and Punjab, but which linked
radicals within the Indian Diaspora as far afield as Afghanistan,
British East Africa (Uganda and Kenya), British Guiana (Guiana), Burma,
Canada, China, Fiji, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya (Malaysia), Mesopotamia
(Iraq), Panama, the Philippines, Siam (Thailand), Singapore, South
Africa, and the USA, with Ghadarites remaining active in (for example)
colonial Kenya into the 1950s.
Oddly, Ramnath often uses the formulation “Western anarchism” – by which
she says she means a Western conception of anarchism, rather than a
geographic delimitation. Yet her own work underlines the point that
anarchism/syndicalism was a universal and universalist movement, neither
confined to nor centred on the West, a movement sprung transnationally
and deeply rooted across the world. Of course, it adapted to local and
regional situations – anarchism in the Peruvian indigenous movement was
not identical to anarchism in the rural Vlassovden in Bulgaria, or
amongst the Burakumin outcaste in Japan (this latter having implications
for the Dalit outcaste of India) – but all of these shared core features
and ideas. Anarchism in South Asia is a small but important link in the
vast networks of anarchism across the colonial and postcolonial world. I
feel Ramnath could have benefited from a deeper knowledge of the
movement’s historical trajectories across and implantation in colonial
Asia, not least in China, Manchuria, Korea, Hong Kong, Formosa (Taiwan),
Malaya (Malaysia), the Philippines, and the territories of Tonkin, Annam
and Cochinchina (together, Vietnam) – but then our Global Fire is not
yet published.
Lucien van der Walt and my books have challenged the narrow, North
Atlanticist bias of most anarchist historiography, and were written from
such a perspective because we live in post-colonial Africa, and we
needed to rediscover and re-establish the legitimacy of the
anarchist/syndicalist praxis in our own region – where, for example,
syndicalists built the what was probably the first union amongst Indian
workers in British colonial Africa in Durban, South Africa, in 1917 on
the IWW model, and where we work alongside Indian Diasporic militants
today. It is hugely to Ramnath’s credit that the implications of her
work in restoring to us the contemporary relevance of South Asian
libertarian socialism far exceed her own objectives. Despite her
location in the imperialist USA, her motivations appear to be similar to
our own: a rediscovery of her own people’s place in anti-authoritarian
history. And despite the fact that our approach favours what David
Graeber calls “big-A anarchism” – the organised, explicitly anarchist
movement of class struggle – and hers what he calls “small-a anarchism”
– the broader range of libertarian and anarchist-influenced oppositional
movements – our objectives coincide; taken together, her and our
trajectories amount to a Haj, a political-intellectual pilgrimage,
towards recovering a viable anarchist anti-imperialist praxis.
Just as she has introduced us to the details of the life of the
ubiquitous figure of Mandayam Parthasarathi Tirumal “MPT” Acharya
(1887–1954), a life-long anarchist, and, ironically, Lenin’s delegate to
the Ghadar-founded “Provisional Indian Government” in Kabul, so we hope
to introduce her to ethnic Indian revolutionary syndicalists such as
Bernard Lazarus Emanuel Sigamoney (1888–1963) of the IWW-styled Indian
Workers’ Industrial Union in Durban. In many respects, we have walked
the same paths, for we too needed to assess the Bengali terrorists who
interacted with British anarchists like Guy Aldred, to ascertain whether
they were ever convinced by anarchism, beyond the simple and dangerous
glamour of “propaganda by the deed”. We too have weighed up whether
Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) can be claimed – as in Peter Marshall’s
Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism (2008), a magisterial
work, yet flawed in its definitions – as “the outstanding libertarian in
India earlier this century”. This same argument has been made by the
late Geoffrey Ostergaard, who called the Gandhians “gentle anarchists”.
Ramnath writes of Gandhi that he “harboured a deep distaste for the
institution of the state”. This is unquestionable and it is important to
recall that there was an anti-statist strand in Indian anti-colonialism.
Yet anarchism is more than simply anti-statism: it is libertarian
socialist, born of the modern working class. Gandhi’s anti-statism was
really a parochial agrarianism and Ramnath is correct to group him with
the “romantic countermodernists”; it never translated into a real vision
of national liberation without the state as its vehicle, and never had a
real programmatic impact on the Congress movement. Ramnath is more
convincing than Marshall in showing the libertarian socialist nature of
Sarvodaya, the Gandhi-influenced self-rule movement of Jayaprakash “JP”
Narayan (1902–1979).
Gandhian Sarvodaya falls outside of the anarchist current, but initially
appears, like anarchism, to be part of the larger libertarian socialist
stream within which one finds the likes of council communism. There are
some parallels between Gandhi’s vision of “a decentralized federation of
autonomous village republics” and the anarchist vision of a world of
worker and community councils. Yet this should not be overstated.
Gandhi’s rejection of Western capitalist modernity and industrialism has
libertarian elements, but Ramnath perhaps goes too far to conclude that
he had a clear “anti-capitalist social vision” that could create a new,
emancipatory, world – a world in which modernity is recast as
libertarian socialism by the popular classes. By her own account,
Gandhi’s opposition to both British and Indian capital seems simply
romantic, anti-modern and anti-industrial, a rejection of the blight on
the Indian landscape of what William Blake called the “dark Satanic
mills”. Absent is a real vision of opposing the exploitative mode of
production servicing a parasitic class, of seeing the problem with
modern technology as lying not in the technology itself, but in its
abuse by that class.
Gandhi’s libertarianism leads easily into right wing romanticism.
Ramnath admits this, and is unusually frank in noting that there are
strands in the Indian anti-colonial matrix that can provide the seed-bed
from which both leftist and rightist flowers may sprout. As she notes in
Decolonizing Anarchism, “it is a slippery slope from the praise of a
völkisch spirit to a mysticism of blood and soil, to chauvinism and
fascism”. Although her example of that French prophet of irrationalism
and precipitate violent action, Georges Sorel, overinflates his
influence on the syndicalist workers’ movement (he was uninvolved and
marginal), she is correct in saying that “certain [historical]
situations create openings for both right and left responses, and, even
more importantly, that the “rejection of certain (rational, industrial,
or disciplinary) elements of modernity, became for Indian extremists and
Russian populists a proudly self-essentializing rejection of Western
elements”, and constituted “a crucial evolutionary node, from which
Right and Left branchings were possible.”
This contradiction is at the very heart of the Gandhian Sarvodaya
movement. On the one hand, it has a healthy distrust of the state. On
the other, it retains archaic rights and privileges, traditional village
hierarchies and paternalistic landlordism – in line with Gandhi’s own
“refusal to endorse the class war or repudiate the caste system”. In
practice, Ramnath warns that the traditional panchayat “village
republic” system from which Sarvodaya draws its legitimacy “is far from
emancipatory… women who hold seats are frequently chosen more for their
potential as puppets than as leaders.” By contrast, anarchist agrarian
revolutionaries like the Magónista Praxedis Guerrero fought and died to
end the gendered class system, and to create genuinely free rural
worlds, free of feudalism and patriarchy as well as capitalism – not to
revert to feudalism over capitalism. Gandhi’s embrace of caste,
landlordism, and opposition to modern technologies that can end hunger
and backbreaking labour, is diametrically opposed to anarchist
egalitarianism.
Moreover, the mainstream of the anarchist tradition is rationalist, and
thus opposed to the state-bulwarking mystification of most organised
religion, whereas Gandhian Sarvodaya explicitly promoted Hinduism as
part of its uncritical embrace of traditionalism. So what do we make of
Gandhi himself? Speaking plainly, I do not like Gandhi because I am a
militant anti-militarist who believes that pacifism enables militarism.
I am very suspicious of Gandhi’s central role in midwifing the Indian
state. On balance, in his völkisch nationalist decentralism, I would
argue for him to be seen as something of a forebearer of “national
anarchism,” that strange hybrid of recent years. Misdiagnosed by most
anarchists as fascist, “national anarchism” fuses radical decentralism,
anti-hegemonic anti-statism (and often anti-capitalism), with a strong
self-determinist thrust that stresses cultural-ethnic homogeneity with a
traditional past justifying a radical future; this is hardly “fascism”
or a rebranding of “fascism,” for what is fascism without the state,
hierarchy and class, authoritarianism, and the führer-principle?
Turning to the Ghadar movement: besides unalloyed anarchist and
syndicalist national liberation figures such as Nestor Makhno
(1888–1934) of the Ukraine, Shin Chae’ho (1880–1936) of Korea, Mikhail
Gerdzhikov (1877–1947) of Bulgaria, and Leandré Valero (1923–2011) of
Algeria, Ghadar can be located within a larger current of anti-colonial
movements that were heavily influenced by anarchism, yet not entirely
anarchist in that they were influenced by a mixture of beliefs current
in their times. For example, Augusto Sandino (1895–1934) of Nicaragua,
was influenced by a mélange of IWW-styled industrial syndicalism, ethnic
nationalism, and mysticism. Phan Bội Châu (1867–1940) of Vietnam was
influenced by anarchism, radical republicanism and, for temporary
tactical reasons, was a supporter of the installation of a Vietnamese
monarchy. Clements Kadalie (1896–1951) in South Africa drew on the IWW
as well as liberalism and Garveyism to organise workers.
In Haj to Utopia, Ramnath notes that “Ghadar was the fruit of a very
particular synthesis; of populations, of issues, of contextual frames,
and of ideological elements. It is precisely the richness of this
combination that enabled it to play the role of missing generation in
the genealogy of Indian radicalism, and of medium of translation among
co-existing movement discourses.” Likewise, in South Africa, through
figures like Thibedi William “TW” Thibedi (1888–1960) we can trace a
vector of revolutionary syndicalism from the Industrial Workers of
Africa, into the early Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and into
Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Union which established an
organisational presence in the British colonies as far afield as North
Rhodesia (Zambia), that survived into the 1950s in South Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe).
What is of interest to van der Walt and I is not so much the ideas of
individual Indian libertarian socialists – where these are legitimately
identified – but rather whether those ideas motivated any mass
movements; broadly because anarchism is only relevant if it escapes
ivory towers and self-absorbed radical ghettoes and organises the
popular classes, that is, the working class, poor and peasantry; and
narrowly because it is important in engaging with ethnic Indian
militants today to know of historic Indian anarchism and
anarchist-influenced currents. So it is here that both the pre-war
Ghadar and post-independence Sarvodaya movements need to be assessed in
their own right as living social instruments that developed beyond their
founders’ ideas, and also – and this is important – to learn from both
their successes and failures. Of Ghadar, Ramnath argues in Haj to Utopia
that it was not only a party, but also “a movement, referring to an
idea, a sensibility and a set of ideological commitments that took wing
– or rather, took ship – exuberantly outrunning their originators’
control.” The same can also be said of Sarvodaya. So what are we to say
about Ghadar and Sarvodaya as organisational tendencies, in terms of
their practices which overspilled the original visions of Har Dayal and
Gandhi?
For both movements, the question is inflected with shifts of emphasis
over their decades of development, but in the case of Ghadar, its
anarchist provenance is clearer and Ramnath argues that this was a very
coherent movement: “though many observers and historians have tended to
dismiss Ghadar’s political orientation as an untheorized hodgepodge, I
believe we can perceive within Ghadarite words and deeds an eclectic and
evolving, yet consistently radical program.” She argues, for example,
that Ghadar’s “blending of political libertarianism and economic
socialism, together with a persistent tendency toward romantic
revolutionism, and within their specific context a marked antigovernment
bent, is why one may argue that the Ghadar movement’s alleged
incoherence is actually quite legible through a logic of anarchism… not
only did Ghadar join the impulses towards class struggle and civil
rights with anticolonialism, it also managed to combine commitments to
both liberty and equality. Initially drawing sustenance from both
utopian socialism and libertarian thought, their critique of capitalism
and of liberalism’s racial double standard gained increasingly
systematic articulation in the course of the [First World] war and the
world political shifts in its aftermath.”
Ghadar’s “indictment of tyranny and oppression was on principle globally
applicable, even while generated by a historically specific situation
and inflected in culturally specific terms; moreover they increasingly
envisaged a comprehensive social and economic restructuring for
postcolonial India rather than a mere handing over of the existing
governmental institutions.” A “proper Ghadarite” was, she states,
anti-colonial, passionately patriotic, internationalist, secularist,
modernist, radically democratic, republican, anti-capitalist, militantly
revolutionist, and “in temperament, audacious, dedicated, courageous
unto death” – all virtues that can honestly be ascribed to all real
revolutionary socialists, including the anarchists – but with Ghadar’s
aim being “a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, and
an end to all forms of economic and imperial slavery anywhere in the
world.” Thus, despite its heterodox sources of inspiration, Ghadar, in
its decentralist, egalitarian, free socialist, anti-capitalist,
anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and universalist yet culturally-sensitive
vision, closely approximated “big-A” anarchism.
As an organisational model, she says that “Ghadar is often positioned as
a transitional phase between two modes of revolutionary struggle,
namely, the conspiratorial secret society model and the mass
organizational model, which is also to say the voluntarist and
structuralist theories of precipitating change.” However, she writes,
Ghadar was a distinctly different and “relatively stable mode” that
involved a necessary articulation between the two other modes, between
what we would call the specific organisation (of tendency) and the mass
organisation (of class).
To expand: in most sub-revolutionary situations, specific anarchist
organisations organised workers at the critical fulcrum of exploitation
by creating syndicalist unions, unions to defend the working class but
with revolutionary objectives. As these movements of counter-power
developed, they went beyond the factory gates, to build revolutionary
class fronts embracing (for example) rent strikes, neighbourhood
assemblies, subsistence food-gardens, popular education, proletarian
arts, and popular councils (soviets, we might say, although that term
has been severely abused by awful regimes). As this grassroots
counter-power and counter-culture became a significant threat to the
ruling classes, armed formations (militia, guerrilla forces, or even
subversive cells within the official army and navy) were often formed to
defend the people’s gains. And lastly, at this matured, the productive,
distributive, deliberative, educational, cultural and defensive organs
of counter-power would be linked into regional and national assemblies
of mandated delegates. This enabled the co-ordination of a social
revolution over a large territory, and the transformation of
counter-power into the organised democratic control of society by the
popular classes. This was the ideal route, aspired to by most anarchist
movements; we can see elements of it in the Ghadar sensibility and
aspirations too.
But the world does not always work as planned, of course, and sometimes
anarchists, like the Bulgarians who fought for the liberation of
Macedonia from Ottoman imperialism in 1903, were forced by living under
imperialist circumstances into different routes – in this case, creating
popular guerrilla formations first in order to wage anti-colonial war,
only paying attention to industrial organisation in subsequent years.
This is similar to the path taken by Ghadar, which focused on military
and propaganda work, including the subversion of Indian colonial troops
(Indian servicemen returning home from defending the British Empire were
receptive to Ghadarite stresses on the contractions between their
sacrifice and their conditions at home). This was clearly informed not
only by the insurrectionary tendencies of the day (including strands of
anarchism), but also the objective difficulties of open mass work
against colonialism in a largely agrarian context.
With the formation of an independent Indian state in 1947 under the
Congress party, supported by Gandhi, conditions changed again. Ghadar
was, by this stage, still operational but increasingly intertwined with
the Communist Party, which in turn, had a complex on-off relationship
with the ruling Congress party – yet “Ghadar’s influence,” Ramnath
writes, “continued to echo long after independence. The Kirti Party and
later the Lal Communist Party espoused a heterodox socialism that
resisted the diktats of CPI correctness and retained characteristically
Ghadarite elements of romantic idealism.” Veteran Ghadarites came to the
fore again when the CPI Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) split from the Party
in the 1960s, and in 1969, a Communist Ghadar Party of India (CGPI) was
founded among the Indian Diaspora in Britain and Canada with
“anticapitalism and opposition to neocolonialism in India and antiracism
and the struggle for immigrant rights in the West” as its key goals. The
best epitaph of Ghadar appears to be that of Rattan Singh, quoted by
Ramnath as saying the party consisted of “simple peasants who became
revolutionists and dared to raise the banner of revolt at a time when
most of our national leaders could not think beyond ‘Home Rule’.”
Beyond Ghadarite echoes within heterodox communism, did libertarian
socialism implant itself within post-Independence India in any way? To
answer this question, we have to turn to Sarvodaya as a movement. I must
say that Ramnath makes a strong case that its key interpreter in his
later years, JP Narayan, had moved from Marxism to a position far to the
left of Gandhi, of de facto anarchism, by Independence. Narayan was a
founder in 1934 of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), then a left
caucus within the Indian National Congress. Ramnath makes no mention of
the inner dynamics of the CSP, which make for intriguing reading.
According to Maria Misra’s Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India since the
Great Rebellion (2008), the CSP “included both socialists and [after
1936] communists – following the recent U-turn in Soviet policy
encouraging communists to collaborate with nationalist parties. The goal
of this group was the continuation and escalation of mass agitation, the
boycott of constitutional reform and the inclusion of the trade unions
and kisan sabhas [peasant associations] in Congress in order to
strengthen the institutional representation of the radicals”. According
to Kunal Chattopadhyay in The World Social Forum: What it Could Mean for
the Indian Left (2003), after the Communists were expelled from Congress
in 1940 for advocating measures that would warm an anarchist heart (a
general strike linked with an armed uprising), a growing “anarchist”
influence led the CSP under Narayan’s leadership into a more strongly
anti-statist, anti-parliamentary orientation. A tantalising hint –
although much depends on what Chattopadhyay means by “anarchist”!
Then, after Indian statehood in 1947, the CSP split from Congress to
form a more mainstream Indian Socialist Party – and Narayan exited,
turning his back on electoral politics entirely. For the next 30 years –
before his return to party politics to rally the forces that defeated
the 1975–1977 Indira Gandhi military dictatorship – Narayan worked at
the grassroots level, together with fellow Sarvodayan anti-authoritarian
Vinoba Bhave (1895 -1982), pushing Sarvodaya very close to anarchism in
many regards. Ramnath quotes Narayan: “I am sure that it is one of the
noblest goals of social endeavour to ensure that the powers and
functions and spheres of the State are reduced as far as possible”.
Marshall traces the development of the post-Gandhi Sarvodaya movement
from the 1949 formation of the All-India Association for the Service of
All (Akhil Bharat Sarva Seva Sangh), an anti-partisan formation aiming
at a decentralised economy and common ownership, to its peak in 1969
when the Sarvodaya movement managed to get 140,000 villages to declare
themselves in favour of a “modified version of Gramdan” or communal
ownership of villages, although in reality only a minority implemented
this. Still, this push apparently “distributed over a million acres of
Bhoodan [voluntary landowner-donated] land to half a million landless
peasants”.
For Narayan, “decentralization cannot be effected by handing down power
from above”, “to people whose capacity for self-rule has been thwarted,
if not destroyed by the party system and concentration of power at the
top”. Instead, the “process must be started from the bottom” with a
“programme of self-rule and self-management” and a “constructive,
non-partisan approach”. Ramnath quotes him saying of the state that “I
am sure that it is one of the noblest goals of social endeavour to
ensure that the powers and functions and spheres of the State are
reduced as far as possible…”
In the Asian anti-imperialist context, the Manchurian Revolution
precisely demonstrated the possibilities of Narayan’s vision, but also
the necessity of this entailing a revolutionary struggle, rather than
mere moralistic appeals to exploitative landlords. This road was mapped
out by Ghadar as well as in the vibrant minority stream of East Asian
anarchism. In 1929, Korean anarchists in Manchuria, who were waging a
fierce struggle against Japan’s 1910 occupation of Korea, formed the
Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAF-M). The KAF-M and the
Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) reached agreement with an
anarchist-sympathetic general commanding part of the anti-imperialist
Korean Independence Army to transform the Shinmin Prefecture, a huge
mountainous valley which lies along the northern Korean border, into a
regional libertarian socialist administrative structure known as the
General League of Koreans (Hanjok Chongryong Haphoi) or HCH.
This self-managed anarchist territory was based on delegates from each
Shinmin district, and organised around departments dealing with warfare,
agriculture, education, finance, propaganda, youth, social health and
general affairs. Delegates at all levels were ordinary workers and
peasants who earned a minimal wage, had no special privileges, and were
subject to decisions taken by the organs that mandated them, like the
co-operatives. It was based on free peasant collectives, the abolition
of landlordism and the state, and the large-scale co-ordination of
mutual aid banks, an extensive primary and secondary schooling system,
and a peasant militia supplemented by fighters trained at guerrilla
camps. This vital example of an Asian anarchist revolution is grievously
understudied, but ranks with Ukraine 1918–1921 and Spain 1936–1939 as
one of the great explicitly anarchist/syndicalist revolutions.
The third Indian anarchistic organisation that Ramthath considers in
Decolonizing Anarchism is the “post-traditional communist” Shramik Mukti
Dal, which rose in rural Maharashtra in 1980. She quotes founder Bharat
Patankar saying that “revolution means… the beginning of a struggle to
implement a new strategy regarding the relationship between men and
women and between people of different castes and nationalities. It means
alternative ways of organizing and managing the production processes,
alternate concepts of agriculture, and of agriculture/industry/ecology,
and of alternative healthcare.” The Shramik Mukti Dal that emerges here
is one that goes well beyond a backward-looking idealisation of
tradition: its manifesto calls for a holistic and egalitarian
revolution, assaulting through the transformation of daily life, “the
established capitalist, casteist, patriarchal, social-economic
structure,” “destroying the power of the current state” and replacing it
with an “organized network of decentralized and ecologically balanced
agro-industrial centers” – with “a new ecologically balanced,
prosperous, non-exploitative society” as its aim. A de facto anarchist
position if ever there was.
Ramnath’s work has highlighted for me – by its absence – the question of
where were the leading women in these organisations, especially in light
of Har Dayal’s opposition to women’s oppression, and the awe in which
she says he held the likes of the Russian anarchist (later Marxist) Vera
Zasulich? Latin America saw the rise of many towering female anarchist
women, such as La Voz de la Mujer editor Juana Rouco Buela (1889–1969)
of Argentina and her close associate, factory worker and Women’s
Anarchist Centre organiser Virginia Bolten (1870–1960), syndicalist
Local Workers’ Federation (FOL) leader Petronila Infantes (1922- ) of
Bolivia, libertarian pedagogue Maria Lacerda de Moura (1887–1944) in
Brazil, Magónista junta member María Andrea Villarreal González
(1881–1963) and fellow Mexican, the oft-jailed Vésper and El Desmonte
editor and poet Juana Belém Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875–1942), an
indigenous Caxcan. In many Latin American countries, women’s workplace
strength was such that the anarchist/syndicalist unions had a Sección
Feminina, such as the FOL’s powerful Women Workers’ Federation (FOF) –
not as a gender ghetto, but because women workers tended to be
concentrated in certain industries, especially textiles.
Is this absence of Indian women revolutionaries due to our lack of
sources, or did the anti-colonial struggle and the related national
question somehow limit women’s participation? Many of the most prominent
women anarchists and syndicalists outside of the West were in
postcolonial or in imperialist countries. In colonial Latin America, the
feminist syndicalist Louisa Capetillo (1880–1922) of Puerto Rico stands
out. Most of the prominent East Asian anarchist women of which we know
were located in imperialist Japan: the journalist Kanno Sugako
(1881–1911) who was executed for her alleged role in a regicidal
conspiracy; the anarchist-nihilist Kaneko Fumiko (1903–1926), who
committed suicide in jail after plotting to assassinate the Emperor to
protest against Japanese imperialism in Korea; the syndicalist Itō Noe
(1895–1923) who was murdered by the police; and writer and poet Takamure
Itsue (1894–1964).
There were, of course, outstanding Chinese anarchist women – notably He
Zhen – but of them we know precious little, beyond some of their
writings. Again, there are tantalising glimpses in colonial Asia: Wong
So-ying, who committed suicide in jail aged about 26 after attempting to
assassinate the British governor of Malaya (Malaysia) in 1925; the Lee
sisters, Kyu-Suk and Hyun-Suk, who smuggled arms and explosives into the
anarchist Shinmin zone in Manchuria in the late 1920s; and Truong Thi
Sau, who apparently commanded a guerrilla section of the anarchist
Nguyan An Ninh Secret Society in Cochinchina (Vietnam) in the mid-1920s,
languish in the margins of history and have yet to be adequately
studied. In India, it is perhaps significant that the lone early woman
anarchist-influenced militant, Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), was born as
Margaret Elizabeth Noble in Ireland. It still needs to be explained why
it was only in recent years that libertarian socialist Indian thinkers
such as the anti-imperialist writer Arundhati Roy (1961 — ), a staunch
supporter of Kashmiri autonomy – she has been called a “separatist
anarchist” by her enemies – have come to the fore.
Ramnath concludes Decolonizing Anarchism with a dialogue on the
practical applications of these historical experiences: the key question
arising from both volumes is the legitimisation of the anarchist project
through effective locally-grounded strategy coupled to effective
international solidarity. Her inspiration was partly derived from the
questions raised by the now-defunct Anarchist People of Color (APOC)
network in the USA, about how to deal with ethnic power differentials
within movements, how to relate the lessons of grappling with
ethnically-shaded internal neo-colonialism to international
anti-imperialist solidarity. The majority-black Workers’ Solidarity
Federation (WSF) in South Africa, in which I was active, clashed with
the ethnic separatist approach (later associated with APOC), because the
WSF stressed multiracial class unity due to its view of the primacy of
class as the spine of capital and the state which articulated all other
oppressions such as racism and sexism. The WSF’s successor, the Zabalaza
(Struggle) Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) has likewise based its
approach on the strategies of the Brazilian Anarchist Co-ordination
(CAB), which operates within a society with great similarities to ours,
of multiracial “social insertion” of anarchist practice within
multiracial popular classes.
In South Africa, one of the world’s most deeply ethnically fragmented
societies, this articulation is far from easy: any successful anarchist
project here will have to convince masses of the black, coloured,
indigenous and Indian popular classes, across lines of colour, but along
lines of class (building layers of militants-of-colour by social
insertion in grassroots struggles is the key ZACF strategy) so
anarchists cannot ignore the fate of the 3,3-million white African
workers and poor. The most obvious divide in South Africa today is the
world’s most extreme wealth-gap, slightly worse on the GINI scale than
Brazil, with the post-apartheid state in many ways structurally
indistinguishable from its apartheid predecessor. I feel my situation
analogous to that of Ramnath when she travels to Palestine to work
against the imperialism of her own USA, when travelling from the eroding
privilege of multiracial lower middle-class Johannesburg to the
shacklands of overwhelmingly black, excluded, underclass Soweto.
Ramnath speaks of her experiences, citing a Palestinian activist telling
US activists on a visit to rather “go back home and end U.S.
imperialism. Liberating ourselves is our job. Ending U.S. imperialism is
yours.” If as the saying goes the revolution begins in the sink, at
home, perhaps I need to make a start within my own community – a
notoriously reactionary one – and, if successful there, then widen my
scope. It’s a much harder option to do revolutionary work among people
who have the social power of proximity to hold you to account, compared
to the potential irresponsibility of rootless revolutionary tourism and
summit-hopping. Ramnath advises us to “look to your own house; work at
and from your own sites of resistance.” For Ramnath, her own house sits
at the intersection of the power of the US metropole and of her
exclusionary status as a person of minority Indian extraction. My own
house sits at the intersection between the subaltern SA periphery and my
declining power as a person of minority European extraction. Wrestling
with the traditional authoritarianism of my own white African people is
perhaps today of greater worth than my best-considered position on the
Palestinian question, which Palestinian statists will find offensive –
though they are ethically and consequentially linked.
Ramnath’s view is that international solidarity work is crucial, linking
struggles in imperialist and postcolonial countries, and that this
cannot mean only supporting struggles if they are explicitly anarchist.
I agree. Anarchists are fighting for a free world – not an anarchist
world. My greatest personal revolutionary model, that of the
Makhnovists, is of a politically pluralistic movement of the oppressed
classes that operated along free communist lines. This was, however, a
movement profoundly shaped by organisations of convinced anarchists –
and showed the absolute necessity and value of homogenous anarchist
organisations, inserted into mass movements, as crucial repositories of
the lessons of a century and a half of anarchist class struggle. The
Ukraine in which the Makhnovists operated had a long history of colonial
subordination to Russia (an imperialism reinforced by the Bolsheviks),
and a highly ethnically diverse population of Ukrainians, Russians,
ethnic Germans, Jews, Cossacks, Tartars, Greeks and others – and the
Makhnovists made a point of defending by force of arms ethnic pluralism
(ethnic Germans were only dispossessed as landlords), publicly executing
anti-Semitic pogromists.
Ramnath notes in Decolonizing Anarchism how the centralist Indian and
Pakistani states, having emerged from colonialism, continue to emulate
it with regard to their own minorities. In her view, these states’
behaviour towards regionalist, decentralist aspirations is “colonialism
plain and simple, complete with the illegal occupation of territory”
such as disputed Kashmir, the two states steamrolling over of many
Kashmiris’ own clear desire for autonomy. It remains to be seen what the
central South African state – which largely takes command-economy India
as its model – would do if ever its own ethnic minorities with their own
small-scale republican traditions such as the Boers or Griquas demanded
more autonomy by extraparliamentary means, though “democratic” SA’s
illegal invasion of Lesotho under Nelson Mandela in 1998 to crush a
pro-democratic mutiny gives a foretaste of the type of neo-colonial
response we can expect.
What is to be put in place of the centralised state in regions where
colonialism imposed borders that do not match the demographics of the
resident peoples? Ramnath shows how anti-colonial movements ended up in
statist dead-ends, yet she herself argues for the construction of a
Palestinian state, whose borders would be respected by the international
system of states, as a means to secure space within which a
decentralised and non-hierarchical socio-economic project may be
possible; not to do so risks reconquest or dissolution, she says. But
surely such a Palestinian state would itself conquer its own population,
and surely we already see the proof of this in embryo with the
Palestinian Authority? And the extrajudicial actions of imperialist
states against insurgent zones, such as the USA in Iraq, or of
sub-imperialist states such as SA in Lesotho, shows, to paraphrase
August Spies, the restraints of international law on the powerful to be
as cobwebs.
Anarchist revolutionary counter-power has historically achieved
territorial control over large areas through the primacy of its
egalitarian socio-economic project – not by the international system of
states respecting its juridical status. The tragic failure of the
Spanish Revolution lay precisely in the attempt to use the state system
to protect the revolution: allying with Republicans against Franco’s
forces, the anarchists found the Republican state would no more tolerate
a decentralised and non-hierarchical socio-economic project than would
Franco; the revolution and its territory were destroyed by the Republic
before Franco marched into Barcelona. The “fuzzy” border areas which
concern Ramnath for their indeterminacy were precisely the kind of
regions in which the Makhnovist and Manchurian anarchist zones of
7-million and 2-million people respectively were able to establish their
constructive social revolutions, which in turn underwrote the
territorial control that the RPAU army and HCH militia were able to
defend for several years.
Today’s borderlands no longer offer effective protection from the modern
state’s over-the-horizon intelligence/munitions reach (let alone that of
capital’s “private military companies”). Yet is it not precisely the
autonomous municipalities of the Zapatistas rather than its armed
forces, the EZLN, per se that have allowed them to secure some
territorial control and to force the Mexican and US states to take
Zapatista claims seriously? This is not the weak liberal concept of
“speaking truth to power,” but rather it is a demonstration of
pragmatic, egalitarian-revolutionary counter-power. Yes, both insurgent
Makhnovia and Shinmin were later defeated by Red Army and Japanese
Imperial Army imperialist invasions, but this simply shows that the
“international community” will not tolerate real challenges – they can
only be forced to respect them by force. And that requires counter-power
to be established territorially by an armed social revolution. Perpetual
“small a” opposition within the system of states, with no larger horizon
of revolutionary rupture, will not remove the basic causes of
oppression, and will not be perpetually tolerated either. Ramnath admits
that a multi-fronted approach is necessary: “There can be no
post-colonial anarchism in one country! No doctrine of peaceful
co-existence, but continuous world revolution!” Thus, the project of
counter-power: attempting to build tomorrow within the shell of today,
to actively dismantle statist borders by means of social reconstruction,
to defeat of the system, and to move beyond fond dreams to a genuine
anarchist anti-imperialist liberation of society.
Both of Ramnath’s books are brave, groundbreaking and vital
contributions to the liberation literature of an entire sub-continent.
My criticism of some points should not occlude this. Decolonizing
Anarchism is written from the perspectives and sensibilities of an
activist, while Haj to Utopia from those of a social historian. In some
respects, the latter, being the more academic work, is the more detailed
and solidly argued, whereas the prior relies to some extent on
statements of synthesis reflecting reductions of long internal and
external debates, of Ramnath’s personal journey of discovery. They are
packed with so many new vistas on the unknown South Asian aspects of
anarchist anti-colonialism that they demand repeated readings, which
never fail to delight. They should be read in tandem, as together they
retrieve a lost set of libertarian socialist (and anarchist) tools once
used within a vastly complex culture, and by this process relegitimise
and sharpen the potential today for such anti-authoritarian approaches
as multiple blades directed at the Gordian knot of ethnic identity,
post-colonial capitalism and neo-imperialism, within South Asia and
globally.