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Title: Partition & Entanglement
Author: William Gillis
Date: January 11th, 2022
Language: en
Topics: anarchism, national liberation, anti-nationalism, Nandita Sharma, migration, immigration, indigenous, settler colonialism
Source: Retrieved on September 21st, 2022 from https://c4ss.org/content/55841.

William Gillis

Partition & Entanglement

“The entire, eons-long practice of human movement into new places was

pushed out of our imagination — or, perhaps more accurately, was

reimagined as a national security threat. In the process, stasis was

glorified as the normative way of being human.”

“Only after the death of the national liberation project can we renew

our commitment to decolonization.”

Many years ago a latinx friend of mine designed stickers that simply

read “Migrants Welcome, Against Borders” (versions in English and

Spanish) under a circle-A and the two of us covered the Bay Area with

hundreds of them. Amusingly, this provoked the ire of a prominent white

anarchist who denounced the phrase as pro-gentrification. She

emphatically preferred “Refugees Welcome” because it distinguished those

who are coercively displaced from their proper homes by various forms of

western imperialism in contrast to those who voluntarily choose to

migrate, like (her example) those moving to the bay for tech jobs.

My friend found this preposterous; we already have lines of critique to

deal with the privileges of the gentrifier class and the negative

structural mechanisms of gentrification. Virtually no one in the

American context calls white tech bros “migrants” — the term has almost

exclusively valences of brown skin and manual labor. The average

American who runs across a “Migrants Welcome” sticker knows immediately

what it means (and gets mad about it), whereas the term “Refugees” is

much more sparingly used and in many cities is far less contentious or

even that meaningful. This isn’t an abstract sense, but something

empirically visible: in San Francisco and Portland white yuppies would

ignore “refugees welcome” stickers my friends ordered from European

antifa distros, but frequently tear down “migrants welcome” — sometimes

even leaving racial slurs scrawled in their place.

Further, my friend argued, surely as anarchists we support the freedom

of individuals to move for whatever personal reason, not just when they

are formally categorized as “victims.” The response was sharp, no, she

emphasized, neighborhood communes should have the power to

democratically decide who is allowed in.

Nandita Sharma writes from the context of a different intersection of

struggles. Sharma is an anarchist, activist, and academic whose family

was shaped by the traumatic partition of India and their immigration to

so-called Canada. In the dedication to Home Rule: National Sovereignty

and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, she relays her mother’s

dismay at the suppression of a Mohawk revolt: “Us and them, same, same.”

This is the central focus of Home Rule: to ruthlessly criticize and

deconstruct the migrant versus indigenous conceptual dichotomy rather

than ignore it. Whether such categorical distinctions come “‘from above’

or ‘from below,‘” from the right or from the ostensible left.

It is not a rejection of specific claims or a sweeping leveling of

complex differences in historical injustice. Struggles for land and

liberation, for the defense of culture violently suppressed, in response

to the traumas and particularities, are obviously vital and important.

But Sharma is not tip-toeing around, timidly qualifying statements so

much they say nothing, as so many writers in this space do. Her target

is all nationalism, and ultimately all parochialism, all regionalism,

explicitly including the nationalism of the oppressed, and her argument

is that for all the leftist discursive trappings, such a framework

reproduces the structures of an existing postcolonial order that has

simply laundered power and domination, rather than abolishing it. To

truly break the legacy of colonialism we must break entirely with the

frame of nationalism and the idea of discrete peoples each inherently

“of some place,” cultivating instead, a more complex global commons.

Central to Sharma’s argument is that notions of nativeness do violence

to the complexities of the actual human tapestry — to fix some people as

being “of a place” and others as aliens to it — is a simplification that

benefits power and hierarchy. While the mistaken frame of sovereignty

has spontaneously emerged in various places for thousands of years (to

inevitable damage and horror), today’s global interlocking nationalist

order is a direct continuation of the imperial and colonial process of

legibility construction.

Home Rule is a book that refreshingly says something, not just with

hyper-particularity, but with general conclusions.

This has been a hard review to write because I unabashedly love this

book and have spent over a year urging every academic anarchist I know

to read it — to universal followup thanks and praise. There are plenty

of merely good books that merely retread or repackage important

positions and critiques, the activist press is filled with them.

Perfectly enjoyable books that get consumed on a monthly subscription

basis by thousands to little fanfare or impact. Rare is the book like

Debt: The First 5000 Years or Caliban And The Witch that become lasting

centers of gravity in the left. And rarer still is the book that doesn’t

just meet the radical left where much of it already is, but pushes it

further. I am not given to hyperbole in praise, so let this serve as a

high water mark in a decade of lengthy reviews: Home Rule feels like a

worthy sequel to The Many Headed Hydra.

This may seem a little non-sequitur given how directly Home Rule leans

on a lot of established work in postcolonial studies, but thematically

and ideologically, it’s plain throughout the entire text that Sharma is

tightly aligned with Linebaugh and Rediker. And while their famous

collaboration developed over a series of engaging historical anecdotes

or studies weaving together into a broader picture of universal struggle

for the commons and against power, Sharma’s is more of a meticulously

broad weapon, rigorously covering a sweeping global history of empire

and the rise of various nationalisms over the last two centuries. Entire

eras in the development of individual nations are sometimes given merely

an incisive paragraph. Sharma strings the reader along with as many

engaging examples and detailed contrasts as she can, but her need to

provide exacting scope leaves much of Home Rule a ratatatat of

globetrotting examples and citations as she presses her general point.

Yet the passionate universalism, the sense that the struggle against

domination is one timeless struggle at the heart of humanity, fills your

chest in a way few other books even bother to attempt.

Sharma’s approach in Home Rule is to demonstrate 1) How historically

useful the divisions of nationality, of foreigner and native, were to

the European imperialist project. 2) The complex ways that settler

colonial ideology is parasitic on this framework and reproduces it. And

3) how the modern paradigm of a checkerboard of nations covering the

planet was the continuation and — in many ways — intensification of the

logic of prior imperialist horrors.

Today there’s widespread interest in either painting nationalism as a

timeless reality of human nature and innate community structures, or in

overly distinguishing the particular norms of the westphalian

nationstate system as some kind of totally unique phenomenon. Sharma is

clear that nations in the broader sense have an unfortunately long

legacy reaching back thousands of years, but at the same time European

imperialism played a significant role in deepening the poison. Virtually

all the modern associations we have with borders as well as the

repulsion of non-natives, have their genesis in the administrative needs

of empire.

In the US context we often forget or ignore historical developments

beyond our borders, turning the slave trade into an entirely US-centric

story, for example, and ignoring worldwide phenomena that we weren’t

central to. But Sharma draws out how, on the global level, the

abolishment of slavery in the British Empire led to a calamitous decline

in the productivity of centralized capital intensive projects like

plantations, as former slaves focused on efficiently satisfying their

interests as small farmers or paid laborers. Since these decentralized

forms of economic activity are both less taxable and less legible and

more facilitative of resistance and power erosion… as always, the

misfortune of high-capital projects means the misfortune of the state.

And of course, low-capital projects like small farmers have little

capacity to capture political power for themselves to stop the state

from recoiling.

The replacement of slave labor with “coolie” labor from India and China

filled the same boats, and served the same economic niches, and was

conditioned and controlled through indenture and immigration controls.

It was an explicitly racialized system that in many cases amounted to

contract slavery, but added token paperwork (a contract in an alien

language stamped with your fingerprint and an early passport) and

shifted around (de facto) slave flows to benefit British interests.

Essentially: first you conquer the world, then you slice it up into

little prisons and refuse to allow people to seek economic opportunities

across your new prison walls unless they have certificates that are only

given to those with indenture contracts. Since people have always moved

to seek opportunities, you have a base population of workers, but since

it’s always nice to keep the labor market completely desperate, you also

implement policies of vicious enclosure, dispossession, repression, and

famine-making.

This is the essential thing to understand: even as Americans we live in

the continuation of a global system created in large part by the British

Empire. A system that became so globally encompassing it could do away

with the traditional focus of states or nations on limiting exit and

instead shift to now limiting entry between subdivisions of the empire.

Through systematic dispossession almost every region produced displaced

and desperate workers for the global benefit of the empire, but rather

than have their origin region administrate their distribution to other

regions, it was recipient imperial regions that oversaw admissions.

To be clear — the British themselves didn’t need to cover literally

every square inch of the planet, merely a sufficient fraction of it so

as to crystalize a new world system, partially of imitators and

partially of regimes around the periphery who — still focused on

preventing the exit of their own populations — saw the benefit. So, for

example, the nominally independent Chinese government actively

collaborated with this new immigration control system since it offset

the costs of preventing its population’s escape.

Moreover, paternalistic liberal reformism reinforced this new system,

taking the existing (racialized) internal barriers to movement and

strengthening them. The liberal imperialist declared that Indian and

Chinese migration must be stopped for their own good, so the systematic

dispossession and immiseration of colonial occupation continued, but now

even sharper constraints were put up against rational relocation.

Liberals found the new immigration-regulatory state form quite amenable

to these reforms because it served state and capitalist power.

Sharma emphasizes that these practices of imperialism weren’t confined

to contexts like India where partition makes them blindingly apparent,

they were also critical to white settler states like the US, and liberal

paternalistic reformism (intersecting with state needs) likewise played

an important role, although with some limited inversions.

Since local populations (often with access to commons, ecological

knowledge, wider community support, etc.) were at least perceived as

distinctly resistant to work and thus obliging the importing of various

forms of coerced and dispossessed labor, and because their existence

threatened certain mobilizing narratives, a distinct approach was taken

with them. “Definition, segregation, protection, and immobilization”

were repeatedly shepherded by liberal paternalism, flattening the

complexities and dynamism of pre-columbian societies into a fetishized

place-bound ideal of stasis. Notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’ were

leveraged to patronizingly preserve ‘tradition’, in ways that

systematically suppressed the native to extremely limited means or modes

of engagement, while stripping anyone who wandered outside those borders

of native status. So for example in Canada,

“Indians needed a permit from a government Indian agent to sell, trade,

or barter (Opekokew 1980; Sluman and Goodwill 1982). Obtaining a

university degree or voting in a Canadian election was declared to be

“un-Indian” and, if practiced, would, until 1960, result in the loss of

“Indian” status.“

Meanwhile across settler states it was generally decided that a woman

who married a white man lost her legal “native” protections.

“Protection” meant segregation, and “tradition” meant deprivement of

wider mobility, solidarity, and economic access.

This suppression of potential market activity no doubt helped

monopolistic ambitions of white capitalists, but it’s a stark comparison

to the forced entry into labor markets going on elsewhere. Sharma roots

the explanation in terms of legitimization processes distinct to white

settler societies.

If the arc in the surrounding British imperial world started with forced

assimilation and then transitioned to the construction of nativism, in

general terms the US and other white settler states went from the

construction of nativism to forced assimilation. These divergent paths

were related to the need of white settler states to construct their own

nationalist sovereignty and identity to bind disparate whites against

the migrant labor being imported. As the pivot from empire to

nationalism took place globally, with for example the US revising its

self-perception into a nation rather than aspiring empire, the white

dominated colonies focused on constructing whiteness as a native

identity (erasing prior complexities and divergences in origins and

motivations).

“what makes White Settler colonies distinctive is not that, from the

start, imperial states wanted to extinguish Native life in order to gain

territory to populate with Europeans. Instead, what is unique about them

is that the Whitening of one portion of the working class sowed deep and

long-lasting divisions between workers… Arguably, the success of

strategies used to Whiten workers was an initial moment in the imperial

turn to biopower and informed all subsequent “define and rule”

strategies of indirect-rule colonialism across the empire.”

This inevitably meant championing not just the nationalistic and native

paradigms, but also a framework of extermination, assimilation, and

“preservation” that framed prior populations as static snapshots and

objectified them in terms of identification with place and history — to

be treated as museum curios on the side of the road — rather than agents

capable of an active conflicting claim to nativeness. White settlers

could then be constructed as uniquely native and migrant by removing the

agency and presence of existing native populations. And insofar as those

populations were to achieve agency or capacity for self-alteration they

were to be forced into whiteness.

Thus a major byproduct of constructing white settler national identity

as “natives” was the construction and reinforcement of national and

native frames in actually native populations. Some of these dynamics are

well known. Policies like the Dawes Rolls incentivized deep alignment

towards the state’s notion of “indianness” by tribal leaders and many

individuals. Blood quantification and discreteness of “membership” were

but part of a wider array of incentivized dynamics in the construction

of identity.

And this followed imperial and colonial patterns worldwide:

“Colonialism was now portrayed as necessary, not to change

Indigenous-Natives (e.g., to “civilize” them), but to preserve their

(often invented) traditions and customs as they encountered the “modern”

world”

Reservations confined survivors to remove them from attention and

facilitate cultural extermination, but they also reinforced and even

created identifications of peoples with place. Imperialist and

settler-colonial practice thus shaped and constructed indigenous

subjectivities. This is both a trivial and a sharp claim, and Sharma

leans into the latter.

The forcible crushing of cultures and knowledge erased much, but it also

imposed opportunity costs. What is lost to western imperialism is not

just what was, but what might’ve grown on their own or in varying

degrees of collaborative contact with distant cultures. The pathways of

exploration and creation — the consensual syntheses and wildly divergent

children — that were made impossible. Such is also the legacy of

colonization.

This is an image of colonialism not just as imposed contact, but

actually as violent segregation. This picture of colonization is the

suppression of meshing networks, instead violently affirming

simplifications and removals. Anything to stop hybridization and complex

cyborg flows or diversifications of agential currents. White settler

society could only hold itself together if it removed all fluidity and

activity from those it wanted to steal “nativeness” from. Ratcheting up

the definition and immobilization inherent to any construct of

nativeness, hoping to impose such to the point of rigor mortis.

The Third Reich would infamously later take up this ideological drive

into an explicit institutional crusade for the ‘preservation’ of local

cultures against the ‘imperialism’ of global culture. Such

hyper-paternalistic reduction of diverse, mobile, and fluid populations

into fixed eternal peoples with similarly eternally fixed traits and

behaviors was, we must remember, cast as a noble struggle of resistance.

Part of what made national socialism so potent was its self-narrative as

standing up for the little guys worldwide. Germany sincerely saw itself

as defending the indigenous nations of Europe against globalism,

universalism, and foreign corruption. And, just as in the settler states

it took partial inspiration from, this meant concentration camps and

mass murder.

It’s important to highlight however, that such define-and-rule

paternalism wasn’t just the invention of some happenstance global norms

or conventions constraining the arrival of immigrants, it was also bound

up with the wider imposition of capitalist dynamics that incentivized

the perpetuation and reinforcement of these new norms even once the

regional prison administrators had autonomy.

The imperialists put the system into place but could then, in the

twentieth century, step back and let it perpetuate itself.

To put it in more concretely theoretical terms: it took the genocidal

engines of imperialism to push most of the world into a profoundly

suboptimal equilibria state. A new configuration that resisted

transformation and pulled anything nearby into its own destructive form.

Indeed, having brutally reshaped the world into this new norm of states

policing entry, the ruling imperial powers increasingly found it

advantageous to remove their own administrative overhead once a region

had been integrated into the new global system.

That the project of imperialism became constructing these discrete

“nations” was explicit in many ways. The League of Nations openly framed

the role of Empire as the development of nations, the “tutelage” of

populations into becoming distinct “Peoples” and then nations.

Of course FDR used British desperation in and after World War 2 to

strong-arm the UK into effectively turning their empire over to the US,

but this wasn’t a change of the foundations. The US model was a

decentralized next step in the British approach to administration: where

discrete national prisons were administered through the UN and brought

to heel via one-sided open trade with the US — the last standing

industrial and financial powerhouse — but retained enough independence

to resiliently keep the whole system afloat. It was the intensification

of the British policy of getting Natives to continue the process of

empire themselves. Struggles of resistance, having now aligned with US

power and aspirations, were then able to create a checkerboard of

postcolonial nations.

This escalated processes of enclosure and suppression because local

rulers had local knowledge and were now embedded in more totalizing and

resilient wider incentive structures.

When U Nu, the nationalist first prime minister of Burma, described the

UN charter as “one great mutual security pact” he was not speaking of

the security of nations against one another, but of the security of

power in the face of that which would dissolve it. In this sense the

interlocking national structure was not a matter of securing peace (wars

continued unabated), but of securing domination itself from the spectre

of revolution, insurrection, and revolt.

Power embraced decentralized fragmentation (according to a fixed logic)

to avoid dissolution.

Natural systems, left to their own devices, will generally entangle.

When ink disperses into water the result is a dissolution of simplistic

discrete categories and structures. This is the opposite of

nationalistic fragmentation which continues the construction of

legibility started by Empire. If the preservation of “order” requires a

fractal subdivision of humanity — the forced relocations and

dispossessions of countless souls in endless partitions — then all the

worse for any actual living breathing individual human beings. Humanity

must be fed into the meatgrinder of simplistic abstractions.

Sharma is quite clear that, in her mind, the term “imperialism” poorly

characterizes the US-created postcolonial system. The US was a hegemonic

locus of power that extracted absurd concessions and material wealth

from the rest of the world, spread its bases everywhere and bombed

civilians, but the global nationstate it built was significantly

different from all prior empires. Sharma is without mercy in her

description of the machinations of the US (and USSR), but it’s still

deeply unsettling to read a leftist author put “US imperialism” in scare

quotes, so deeply has the anti-imperialist frame of analysis become

hegemonic. In Sharma’s insistent frame, neither the US nor the USSR were

“empires,” they were rather postcolonial powers, a classification which

she seeks to give equivalently negative valences.

Sharma is concerned that the “imperialism” frame centers foreigners

invading and controlling natives, an analysis that both misses critical

dynamics of the Postcolonial New World Order and reproduces the

nationalism it is dependent upon. In her ideal world we would recognize

the “postcolonial” system as a distinct and arguably worse evil.

I am, it must be said, not sanguine about this rhetorical strategy.

Whatever our ideal language might be, activist usage largely does not

follow academic invention, but is shaped by and responds to pragmatic

needs and pressures, constantly collapsing to the most succinct frame

that makes intuitive use of existing language. Complex formal

definitions rarely win against general resemblances. And it is simply a

fact that capital flows continue to be centralized in imperial

metropoles. Why shouldn’t we speak of the US, USSR, and PRC as empires

and imperialist projects? Their economic as well as political

centralization and direct military domination has clearly followed

longstanding imperialist patterns. Comparisons to imperialism are

inherent because the term has widespread negative cachet in general

populations. There is no feasible pathway to establishing similarly

potent valances for “postcolonial” on its own; we struggle mostly within

the language we are given.

Sharma confidently claims that global inequality is worse today than in

the age of empire.

“Between 1960 and the late 1990s, a significant widening of world income

distribution took place. Indeed, the extent of the disparities surpassed

those during the Age of Empires”

But I find such quantifications suspect. One can point to all manner of

depredation and slaughter today, but can anyone really say with any

certainty that today’s world is more unequal than when the Belgians were

chopping off hands and feet in Congo? This is not to entirely foreclose

the possibility, but it seems like the sort of claim that’s impossible

to establish. In short it collapses tangles of complexities much the

same way nations collapse the complexity of our social relations. Never

mind the discontinuities of measuring wealth over a period where the

fine-grained legibility of title itself has changed, or the

incomensurabilities papered over by “inflation adjusted” figures. Even

pointing out the enclosure of the dark parts of the map sweepingly

described as “commons” proves very little about relative degrees of

access and power within said old commons. I simply can’t imagine a

single unified measure of “inequality” or any bundling of an aggregate

measure that could even remotely establish this claim. (Much less by way

of citation to Samir fucking Armin, a Khmer Rouge and Putin defending

wingnut.)

This is not necessarily to push back on the idea that the creation of

postcolonial national regimes made things overall worse, when examined

within a certain window, but as an argument it’s a quagmire. What sort

of time window should we be using to evaluate this? From one side

someone could make the argument that national liberation struggles led

to a gradual weakening of imperial power long before flags formally

changed on a map, from the other side the nationalist ideologues could

just as easily say “undoing imperialism is just really hard, we need

another five centuries before things get net positive, but then things

will get truly good.” There’s no winning once we get bogged down into

arguing over which timescale and period to measure over.

It’s certainly true that many things have gotten worse in the

postcolonial era. For example, where colonial administration hadn’t

managed to implement border controls, the newly “liberated” nationstates

acted quickly to create them. This meant that the transition from

colonial rule to postcolonial rule in for example much of Africa saw the

sudden creation of constraints on movement that had been free throughout

prior history. In this respect Sharma is correct in identifying the

postcolonial system as even worse than the imperialist system,

intensifying its logic of domination rather than breaking from it. And

similar analysis can be made in terms of the formalization of new

property regimes and the intensifying legibility of claims at the cost

of the old support mechanisms of the commons.

But this doesn’t necessarily prove an overall devolution.

Regardless of whether national liberation was a net advancement or a net

escalation of horrors, I am frankly quite sick of common leftist

rhetoric that dismisses things like the abolition of chattel slavery as

an irrelevant trick of smoke and mirrors. Radicals often feel we have to

pretend we live in the worst of all possible worlds because if people

feel there’s any advantages to our present order they might not want to

risk toppling it. This is a path by which radicalism perversely ends up

generating reactionary frames at least as noxious as nationalism. The

sloppy leftist dismisses the immense suffering under for example

monarchy and slavery and the awe-inspiring, hard-won social

transformations away from them, declaring instead that all progress so

far has been illusory, even that things have gotten worse. It is true of

course that power has gotten more dextrous, more insidious, and its

function more complex. But that retreat to complex mechanisms is itself

a sign of power on the back foot.

When the mechanisms of power are forced to adopt greater internal

complexity they lose efficiency and either become more brittle or open

up more space for erosion. Power may survive in the face of resistance

by mutating and trying to co-opt or misdirect that resistance, but that

is not necessarily to say it ends up on a stronger footing. Merely that

the strategic landscape changes.

The Left spent the last half of the twentieth century in a tizzy about

insidiously complex systems of control like advertising and the

construction of desire that end up being largely paper tigers. It

convinced itself that progress was impossible, that Moloch had perfected

titanic systems to generate false consciousness, even while progress was

being made in myriad places, often without the help of leftist or

radical theorists. This is not to suggest that nationalism of the

oppressed is a necessary step towards progress, nor that no one knew

better — many anarchists at the time certainly did and far too many paid

with our lives for the sin of correct prognostication — but I do think

we can’t afford to ignore or discard the positive currents and

improvements that got mixed up in the noxious morass of national

liberation struggles.

A significant aspect of Sharma’s argument is that no nation escaped

neoliberalism because in fact nationalism and neoliberalism each imply

the other. In her account national liberation states didn’t “sell out”

to western imperialists, rather they continued the logic of nation

building, that is to say building infrastructure and exclusionary power

systems necessarily provoked positive sum (for capitalists and rulers)

collaboration between nations. Sure the Washington neoliberal

institutions profited immensely, but so too did the “national

liberation” projects, once you realize what nation building means. And

Sharma’s right that in many contexts the most supreme and omnipresent

power in people’s lives was national.

Indeed one of the ways national liberation states benefit from the

horrors of global apartheid is by externalizing costs: the rule of

autocrats depends upon exporting the unemployed and dissidents they

create. That those people are made desperate by immigration restrictions

in other countries and at best become a deeply policed inferior class

helps maintain order at home. Obey and stay or else get thrown into a

meatgrinder. Submit to the prison at home, or else become a prisoner

completely without rights or even voice in the global system. The

project of national control is only stabilized by the ability to eject,

to make alien or immigrant, those in the fuzzy areas (which are

ultimately almost everyone). The nationalist and the capitalist both

need the dispossessed underclass inherent to the construction of borders

and national identities.

Sharma drills down in particular on how the specific term

“neo-colonialism” was invented and theorized by Kwame Nkrumah who ruled

Ghana and served as a major figure in the Non-Aligned Movement. Nkrumah

only wrote and publicized his theory after he had already destroyed the

homes of tens of thousands for a dam to power a smelter for Kaiser

Aluminum, a U.S.-based corporation and then created permanent economic

catastrophe by nationalizing much of the economy into a command system.

Every step of the way Nkrumah’s ruling circle enriched itself while

exacerbating inherent state dysfunction. The national liberation regime

sweepingly tried to do big things with the blunt instrument of the

state, externalizing the costs to the people, while profiting from the

asymmetries. The analysis of “neocolonialism” thus emerged from the

outset as an apologia and deflection by those in power.

In contrast to this theorizing-from-above, Sharma emphasizes how the rot

of the entire postcolonial system was focused on and critiqued by

theorists-from-below like Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah as having always been

lying in wait in the national liberation project.

In short, our postcolonial hellworld isn’t perversion or undermining of

national liberation, but its natural culmination.

Under the postcolonial order all legitimacy lies in being a discrete

People “of place.” Such Peoples can make political claims, declarations,

demands, but the same is virtually unthinkable for migrants, those “out

of place”.

“while the “human rights” of many National Citizens were not recognized,

respecting such rights for foreigners was always out of the question”

Further, the power structures, the lines of domination that persisted

under or were necessary for the “nation” were framed as “peoples’

power.” The very possibility of abolishing power itself was thus made

increasingly unthinkable. Rather, the fascistic philosophy shared from

Engels to Schmidt became hegemonic: ‘there is nothing outside

domination, only questions of who wields it.’

The paradigm of national liberation thus is the paradigm of postcolonial

apartheid, not of actual decolonization.

In Sharma’s account the postcolonial period of nationalization was

necessarily a ratcheting of the violent hierarchies introduced or

intensified by colonization. By splintering the world into competing

nations every nation was forced into a “development” arms race that

intensified processes of enclosure. If imperialism had partially

dispossessed a subsistence farmer the nationalist project only furthered

this suffering. Just as capitalism depends on simplistically slicing up

collectively managed commons into fungible and alienable parcels, the

entire paradigm of “the nation” works to slice apart different natives,

and create a fungible underclass out of everyone too entangled to fit in

these boxes.

Migrant labor is thus the gasoline that drives the world power system,

while native labor helps structure, condition, direct, and control it.

The global patchwork of discrete nations necessarily creates migrants by

their existence, slicing up (violently simplifying) the inherently more

complex network that is humanity as well as obviously stripping options

and agency from individuals.

All this has deep implications and insights with regard to the turn to

patchwork micronationalism intensifying among most currents of

reactionaries and fascists since the 80s. Obviously a strategy of

fractal secession would only further deepen the creation of oppressed

migrant classes. The micronationalists frequently act like the problem

with existing nationalisms is that they encompass too much complexity

and so the logic of nationalism should be pushed further to the point of

every town, every neighborhood a nation. The fractal checkerboard of

Iraq and Syria emphasizes that this doesn’t bring peace, it brings

displacement and more directly attentive gang rule. And, of course, a

mass refugee crisis.

Today’s reactionaries often fetishize “exit” on the premise that folks

can vote with their feet and thus minimize the harms of governments, but

the incentive structures of nationalism at the margins, as economists

say, don’t work that way. Rather, constructed minorities are targeted

and pushed out of one region on the premise that they have less

legitimate “claim” to belonging and then no other region has incentive

to provide them full citizenship. Elevating a stranger to equivalent

political power and rights as you is rarely worth that person’s marginal

economic contribution to your nation. Thus the global ratchet is towards

intense hierarchies of Nth-class noncitizens. A patchwork of democracies

or populist dictatorships thus rapidly converges on arbitrary class

ladders with the enfranchised few shrinking and the base of exploited or

just suppressed constantly expanding.

It’s easy to lose legitimacy as a “native” but almost impossible to gain

it.

Of course it should always have been trivially apparent that a patchwork

of states would be inclined away from freedom. A market with 200 hundred

competing buyers and seven billion competing sellers is always going to

be skewed to the buyers. When what’s being sold is labor and the system

iterates constantly the emergence of essentially slavery conditions is a

foregone conclusion. Even if there were two million buyers the asymmetry

in bargaining power will remain pertinent.

This authoritarian ratchet of the inter-national system was what we

opposed in the streets of Seattle fighting the WTO, a system of

“globalization” that used national barriers to reinforce power globally.

The only way to stop the race-to-the-bottom enabled by the interlocking

system of “nations” is to abolish them entirely. Sharma is quite clear

that reinforcing borders doesn’t protect local workers, it is an

essential component of the overall downward spiral.

If we start from the perspective that the world is an irreducibly

complex network, then it’s preposterous to think that such a network can

be decomposed into a set of discrete villages or cliques. Rather, with

every subdivision forcibly sliced through the tangled knot of humanity,

lives are cut short and single threads cast loose. Fractal secession or

subdivision is thus the most damaging, most harmful, strategy possible.

It looks at the harm caused by nationalism, by borders slicing up the

world, displacement, genocide, and war, and thinks the solution is to

double down.

Instead of framing things in terms of a “right to exit” we must realize

that the modern nation paradigm is predicated on a claimed “right to

eject” that is to manage populations by violently subdividing them, by

the construction of “the inside and the outside.” The nationalist takes

the nation as given but there is no such cohesive simplistic discrete

set of people. Not even a “family” has an a priori inside and outside,

lines of connection and association are always graduated and intermeshed

in complex ways that defy simple accounts. The nationalist’s given is

not a reflection of reality, it is an idol he is asserting, an idol

whose “rights” inherently require human sacrifice.

It’s beyond critical that we emphasize this, because the fact that a

structure emerged out of a specific historical context doesn’t mean it

wouldn’t and hasn’t emerged in other contexts. An intellectual fascist,

upon reading Sharma, would no doubt see her argument about the

historical roots in imperial bureaucratic management as beside the

point.

The specificity of “nationalism” as a word and ideological history has

become blurred out in popular perception to virtually any and all

projects of usness versus themness. The modern proponent of nationalism

would look at two germanic tribes warring with one another thousands of

years ago and see two “nations.” And it is not clear to me that such a

wider definition is “objectively” wrong. For what it lacks in congruence

with the historical emergence of the term, it can be argued the more

generalized definition does a better job at cutting reality at the

joints. Beyond the relevance of popular usage, to achieve the generality

and universalism of a truly radical analysis, our words should arguably

try to pick out perpetually emergent dynamics, rather than exclusively

tracing out particular usage within a specific historical context.

William C Anderson reminds us of all this in general terms in his

critique of Ashanti Alston’s sympathies for black nationalism, writing

in The Nation Of No Map, “some of us are descended from the enslaved

because of the betrayal of nations, one group of people pitting

themselves against another for dominance… our past is a cautionary

tale.” [emphasis added] While many horrible particular norms of the

present postcolonial nationstate system were created by Empire, that

system itself had roots in the generalized logic of nations and

division. The pull of simplicity driving clustering dynamics and closed

communities aren’t a cure for Empire, they’re what gave rise to it in

the first place.

Sharma doesn’t deny the widespread tendency to chauvinism, but she

doesn’t directly address that in Home Rule, being instead at pains to

undermine our current reception of Native and Migrant conceptual

categorizations as timeless, putting their present use in historical

context as products of specific power systems and interests. And, as a

correction Home Rule can at least emphasize that the particular potency

of nationalism and native identification today is overwhelmingly propped

up by a specific history of power. But, while the problem posed by human

inclinations towards clustered communities and simplistic cognitive

abstractions of groups (in-group or out-group) is an eternal threat that

can obviously reproduce territorial barriers and the like on its own,

the history that Sharma highlights has clear general implications.

Even in those cases where a nationalistic tendency is not carrying a

legacy of imperialist managerial needs, the fact that managers love the

nation form and that such can only be cleaved out of humanity’s tangles

via systemic violence is relevant. While there may be a cognitive

laziness in humans that eternally pulls us towards the mistake of

nationalism, this is not at all to say that nations are natural or good,

any more than a common illusion or confusion is.

Common fantasies of a return to perfectly uniform and closed communities

of fixed traditions are motivated by fear of complexity and a hunger for

the abolition of thought and responsibility. This is not to suggest that

complexity is innately good, or truth not often quite simple, but

nations are the product of valuing simplicity as an ends almost unto

itself. They’re not about accurately mapping what is true, they’re about

imposing a reduction of complexity. This is the common goal of would-be

slaves and rulers, and so the historical equivalence and

ever-more-deepening ties between nationalism and various forms of

authoritarianism is unavoidable. The imperialist and post-colonial

leader obviously share in a need to impose simplicity to build power

structures, but so too does a certain type of revolutionary or insurgent

have an investment in making the battlefield simple.

Today if it is said that we can no more envision the end of capitalism

than the end of the world, we can even less envision the end of

nationalism. The only alternative to European imperialism folks can

imagine under its spell is often just European feudalism, re-baked as a

kind of voluntary micronationalism. But the manors of feudal Europe —

with their aspiration to operate villages as closed social universes in

ways wildly different from how bands and sedentary communities have

emerged in other societies — are not some natural configuration emergent

from free association and personal preference. They were, themselves,

the historical product of imperialism and maintained through immense

violence, serving the ends of power.

And this is a critique that can be turned back, to some degree, on

Sharma’s appeal to and valorization of the commons.

There’s a broad metanarrative in circulation, especially among Marxists

looking for a way to ditch their historical materialist baggage by

focusing on the end of the first volume of Capital, that once upon a

time “the commons” provided freedom, security, and community, only to be

brutally sliced up at the onset of capitalism, dispossessing and

creating the working class. As an account of the enclosures this is

certainly quite accurate. And it’s easy to see the congruities between

this aspect of capitalism and what Sharma focuses on in the construction

of nationalism. Similarly the core of her argument that the postcolonial

nation system is worse than imperialism is that it has enabled more

dextrous enclosures. Distant imperial bureaucrats couldn’t dream of

incentivizing and handling the construction of modern property norms to

the same extent as local rulers shouting about national honor and

growth.

Libertarians tend to treat Lockean property titles as unalloyed

positives, arbitrarily selecting a thin slice of possible property norms

as the most ideal, in no small part — even when they hide such

consequentialist roots to this position — because it facilitates

fungibility and investment and ideally thus rapid “development.”

Part of what is glossed over is the cost of such imposed

orthogonalization in property titles. Whereas while every society has a

property system of some kind, claims are usually far more entangled than

anything like the cleanly separable ones of Lockean norms. As claims of

ownership originally emerged in bottom up processes of widely or

mutually useful detentes, they kept all sorts of artifacts of their

context. Someone’s title to their house might not be exclusive or apply

in every dimension. This impedes selling property, staking it as

collateral, etc, if only because one person’s title claim is not

something entirely in one’s own hands, and is also ultimately dependent

upon the aggregate acceptance of countless individuals in one’s

community.

Further, sure, this entanglement in conventional property impedes rapid

“development,” but when the state violently slices through those

entangled connections to impose one universal and fungible map it can

only assure “development” in a similarly slapdash and unilateral form.

Instead of distributed weighing of every individual’s context and

desires, these violently “optimized” market processes can only serve the

hamfisted ends of power. That is to say: there are very different

directions and branches of “development” possible, serving very

different interests.

But this brings us to some frictions in the popular “lost commons”

narrative. Firstly, many societies do not have commons in anywhere near

the same sense as the feudal villages often treated as prototypical.

Even the egalitarian !Kung San hunter-gatherers traded overlapping

titles to regions of land and all their benefits within their gift/debt

system. While their specific individual ownership system and market

norms are quite foreign to our own, they said they found the concept of

“collective ownership” particularly repugnant and hard to conceptualize,

even finding much of the current global norms of property and market

exchange liberating. This is in no remote sense to minimize the

repression that the !Kung San have faced as a minority and the

shittiness of the capitalist dynamics many have been forced into, but

the point is that our world does not have a uniform history and cultural

inheritance.

One huge lurking danger to the valorization of the commons is that to

many the takeaway is always that everyone was at least better off in

subsistence farming villages and should have more or less remained there

in some kind of essentialistic and static natural relationship. Of

course that so many people dig their feet in there is understandable if

the only other pole is to uncritically embrace more or less the exact

infrastructural norms of dominant modernity and say “look destroying

thousands of villages for some dam is obviously a net positive.” If

these are our only two options then we are indeed in trouble. Hence why

a crucial response to the claims of national liberation states that they

promoted development is to contest what sort of development in what

direction, at what cost. To specify which pathways were available and

which were derailed, by whom. Just as nationalism erases all other modes

of resistance to imperialism, collapsing our options into just

replicating a unified state or “people” with a military and economy that

fight with (eg interface with) foreign ones on their terms, so too does

it erase all pathways to material abundance that are not in the interest

of power. The problem isn’t that infrastructure and property relations

changed after independence, it’s how they were changed. Just as we must

defend the right to move and freely associate globally we must defend

the freedom to evolve, hybridize, and reconfigure ourselves.

Another danger in popular narratives that focus on the enclosures is to

view complexity and illegibility as ends in themselves. In this frame

the commodification eating the world is a matter of increasing precision

and detail in our map of things, going from a lackadaisical commons

where no accounts are kept, to a stressfully overly quantified world

where every single individual grain of rice is indexed, tracked, and

purchasable with a personal loan for a low annual rate. Yet, there is

value to clarity, reconfigurability, and material capacity. Elinor

Ostrom emphasized that not only is the tragedy of the commons a real

danger that communities around the world have long been quite familiar

with, but people solve such in bottom-up ways through a diverse variety

of often overlapping means, including strategies that increase clarity

and even parcel out the commons. Further, being able to extract oneself

from social contexts, to sell one’s stake in a clean manner has clear

liberatory aspects. Sharma mentions urbanization in the list of effects

of national “development” and neoliberal reforms, and there’s a serious

danger here of building a narrative against urbanity itself. We must not

pretend that every dynamic driving urbanization was violent or created

by imperial interests, the interconnection of a globalizing world was in

part facilitated by voluntarily adopted technologies and individuals

embracing exit from parochial communities closed as a result of their

own power structures and material constraints. Choice in one’s social

relations has been an incredibly liberating experience for many and is

deeply related to why migration isn’t just an inextricable component of

human existence, but a freedom to be encouraged. And part of having

choice is knowing what the choices are. Legibility and even simplicity

can thus be liberating, in the right contexts.

This is why I’ve emphasized a focus on positive freedom and a network

lens. While I have no doubt Sharma would not embrace any of the

nefarious takes above, she has certainly gotten fastidious about the

dangers of myriad language choices like “global south” and so I must

interject that talk of a global commons does carry its own dangers.

There has never been a true global commons, because we have never been

as strongly and directly connected to one another. Every historical

instance of “commons” was inherently, and usually quite explicitly,

partially closed and parochial. Historically access to the commons of a

village is usually tied to membership within that village, or even one’s

property title within it. We have never had a global commons in anywhere

near as direct a sense and so the concept is a cipher that people will

take different assumptions and priorities into.

Sharma looks back to the radical aspirations of the Diggers and Ranters,

enormously influential seventeenth century precursors to the modern

anarchist tradition who conjoined a fight for land with grand

aspirations for a world without exclusion or territory. For the Diggers,

“an essential aspect of this freedom/mobility was the ability to change

or shift one’s identity” and for the Ranters “the people in England,

France, and Turkey [must become] one people and one body, for where the

one lives there liveth the other also.” I have long shared in a deep

admiration and love for these proto-anarchists who emerged endogenously

within the belly of European empire at the dawning of capitalism. For

two decades have I teared up while belting “this earth divided / we will

make whole” but the devil is in the details.

My concern with Sharma’s framework is that while it correctly objects to

the forcible creation of markets and the forcible creation of

dispossession and enclosures, as well as the construction of titanic

industrial infrastructure along a single innovation pathway, her

narrative risks empowering reactive or clumsy rhetorical corrections.

Choice is not quite the same thing as commons, although they can be

allies. In some contexts it can be useful to disentangle local knots so

as to enable more global connections. I have no sweeping answers or

blueprints for property norms, but I know that orthogonalizability is

not always evil. The broad strokes of the historic enclosures at the

dawn of capitalism were surely quite evil in most means and

consequences, similarly the followup processes of enclosures that were

applied beyond Europe by imperialists and then postcolonial

nationalists, but these broad strokes eclipse the people from below who

sincerely and for good reasons pushed for changes in their existing

property norms in ways that included dividing and individualizing some

things. That they didn’t get the direction and types of reforms they

wanted nor the results, trammeled over by the powers who orchestrated

and profited from enclosures, doesn’t mean they should be erased from

our understanding. I don’t think we have to pose their struggle for

liberation against the liberatory aspirations of the Diggers. The truth

here is more complicated. To shift identity and context, to sincerely

struggle to step into alien perspectives, is at the core of building a

better world and resolving the wounds that have been sliced into us by

empire and nation alike. But such individual mobility can require

slicing us free of inherited community, picking up our things and

departing, and in so doing can be quite at odds with many venerations of

“the commons.”

To connect globally, to build the tower of Babel that Sharma so

resonantly speaks of and quotes Toni Morrison on, should not involve the

flattening or smothering of diverse experiences and views, but the

integration of them. And that includes those who want independence, or,

perhaps better put, a different and more far-reaching type of

interdependence than that provided by the commons of old.

These are of course very broad points, about very broad narratives and

concerns, but the most refreshing thing about Home Rule is the degree to

which it audaciously embraces radicalism, which, lest we forget, is not

a synonym for extremism or coolness but is about getting to the root.

Sharma’s book contrasts with for example Harsha Walia’s recent Border &

Rule, which, while powerful in its lists of horrors, avoids comparably

“abstract” discussion of underlying roots to instead focus on relatively

more particular associations and mechanisms. Where Home Rule traces how

underlying ideas, identities, policy orientations, and narratives came

into being, Border & Rule focuses more on the myriad examples of how

specific border policies functionally interface with or reproduce

patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, etc. — the long menagerie of

formal oppressions we already instantly recognize as bad — and generally

function as part of a control apparatus to brutally manage the global

workforce. This is certainly valuable, and Walia is a rightfully beloved

figure in the movement, but her words at points reveal, I think, a

difference in philosophy between the two books:

“I align with a leftist politics of no borders, since the borders of

today are completely bound up in the violences of dispossession,

accumulation, exploitation, and their imbrications with race, caste,

gender, sexuality, and ability.” (emphasis mine)

Walia is seemingly not foreclosing support for borders in some other

context, merely our own. Similar arguments and lines have been used by

Marxists to endorse “all cops are bastards” and “prison abolition”

solely in our present historical and social context, and not universally

as anarchists do. They align with those politics here, today, but make

no promises about tomorrow.

Arguments that critique cops, prisons, and borders, solely because of

their present genealogies, affinities, and structural role leave open

the door to schemes to implement them in the future, “beyond

capitalism,” “beyond settler colonialism,” etc. The anarchist project,

however, is not to critique the symptomatic expressions of power in our

time, but the lines of underlying rot that inexorably drive new

expressions as contexts change.

Sharma on the other hand is repeatedly very clear that the logic of

nationalism and borders is rotten not just today, but inherently,

“national liberation did not result in decolonization, nor could it

have.” (her emphasis)

If Walia’s case is that borders are today interwoven with the function

of capitalism and that the displacement of migrants is coerced by war

and economic exploitation, Sharma’s argument is more that borders arose

as a symptom of an underlying viral way of thinking: of cutting the

world up into discrete regions with distinct “natives,” castigating and

often enslaving the exceptions to this schema as “migrants.” It is a

nuanced historical picture that traces the complications of white

settlers dancing back and forth between categories as need be to keep

their domination. But Sharma is interested in pushing a point that is

unfortunately novel and contentious in the wider left: “nationalism from

below” cannot offer us a break with the horrors we struggle against,

indeed it can ultimately only ratchet up those horrors.

Much structural violence is obviously involved in the displacement of

many migrants today, but Sharma warns against implicitly taking for

granted that people are or should be of some place.

Resistance to imperial domination and struggles embedded in specific

histories of trauma, genocide, and dispossession do not require ceding

to a fixation with collective priority and origin. We’ve repeatedly

seen, from the horrors perpetuated in Côte d’Ivoire between groups with

conflicting claims over who was more “native” to the genocide and ethnic

cleansing of the Rohingya as supposedly “illegal Bengali immigrants,”

that such frames are a fountainhead of oppression.

And it must be emphasized that “being of place” as an ossified

collective identity is quite distinct from active knowledge and love of

the land you work or a bioregion and a painstakingly built web of

ecological relationships. To liberate land, air, and water from those

who would control, monopolize and/or despoil them is not the same thing

as a struggle for territory and sovereignty, concepts inherently tied to

fixed relations, social discreteness, and functions of authority

(whether collective or not).

Sharma’s rejection of the former is sharp and motivated by a deep

concern that firstness and of-placeness are subsuming the radical

imagination and erasing or placing themselves before all other ethical

considerations. Worse, this replacement of other driving values is

happening in ways that places itself beyond discourse or consideration.

“All mobilizations of national autochthonous [nativeness] discourses…

view indigeneity as a first principle of political action… autochthony

is usually represented as “ ‘authentic,’ ‘primordial,’ ‘natural’ and

‘self-evident.’”

While it’s understandable that people leverage what claims are fecund

within an international liberal Wilsonian legal context, we must

undermine the supposed incontestability of this principle of nativeness

and origin. As such legitimization criteria is increasingly accepted as

the starting point of movements of resistance, to engage with critiques

of it increasingly verges on unthinkable. Nevertheless we must think it.

And say it.

We exist in a global discourse and community. Backing a generalized

muddle of autochthonous narratives and implicit first principles in

Turtle Island, for instance, has spillover effects that can hurt

migrants in Europe. For the first principle of nativeness applied

generally has quite noxious implications. Let me be very clear: no

European should ever have a nation, there is no amount of reparations

for the atrocities of imperialism that might “reset the clock” nor

excuse Fortress Europe’s exclusion of migrants. Fortress Europe is not

bad because of a specific history of European colonialism that they owe

reparations for and invalidates their nations, it’s wrong because fuck

nations, everyone has a right to migrate. While reparations and

liberation in the face of dispossession and oppression is essential, our

goal is not to restore some prehistoric balance wherein an indigenous

“Frenchness” can live alongside a checkerboard of other national

identities but to abolish all such discrete categories. To grant wider

and deeper options to everyone and escalate the dynamic swirling

complexity of humanity.

In land projects across North America and Europe it’s common to hear

ecofascists and green reactionaries speaking of seeking, reestablishing,

and defending an “indigeneity.” This can come either in the packaging

that “the first people colonized were whites by the Romans” (recasting

whiteness as a gateway to oppressed class status) or it can emerge from

a supposed imperative to land-based spirituality (implying that

constructing abusive mysticisms is a valid path out of white guilt).

The most facile response is to merely critique the absurd bundling and

recent lineage of “whiteness.” But rarely are the speakers already

unaware of such, nor would grounding one’s identity in some resurrection

of a more specific lineage and tradition (eg “viking-ness”) necessarily

avoid anything important. Nor is the important fact that these “land

projects” are often on stolen land and facilitating continued settler

colonial dynamics a sufficient response. One shouldn’t wish ecofascist

communes on the people of Denmark.

This is not merely two distinct uses and definitions of “indigenous” in

various languages — for example the chauvinist “here first” usage by

mainstream right-wing political parties in many countries versus a

philosophical or spiritual notion of “ecological relationship to the

land” usage increasingly pushed by younger activists across a subset of

colonized peoples — but in fact a more complicated matter of bleed,

appropriation, and opportunistic mutation. When many white scumfucks,

like infamous political prisoners Sadie and Exile, leaned into fascist

blood-and-soil mysticism they did so draped under the stolen language

and signifiers built up by indigenous activists, not beer-soaked Trump

chuds. And part of why so many US white radicals had trouble identifying

and expelling them was an increasing treatment of “indigeneity” — even

the pagan playacting of white settlers doused in fascist iconography —

like a third rail. A first principle or apex value that automatically

vanquishes all other considerations, removes all critical thinking and

turns people’s knees to jelly.

This is to say that while “lanes” and epistemic humility can have value,

we should not render ourselves completely useless in some performative

surrender of our minds and thus responsibilities. If white radicals fail

to recognize clearly dangerous invocations of “indigenous” we will be of

no use to anything or anyone. Sharma covers examples of intensely

reductive ideologies of indigeneity, from Patrick Wolfe declaring that,

“The fundamental social divide is not the color line. It is not

ethnicity, minority status, or even class. The primary line is the one

distinguishing Natives from settlers—that is, from everyone else. Only

the Native is not a settler. Only the Native is truly local.” to Métis

scholar Bonita Lawrence (and self-identified “Asian settler Colonist”

Enakshi Dua) arguing that because non-indigenous people of color are

functionally settlers “antiracism is premised on an ongoing colonial

project.”

It is, however, important for anarchists to challenge ourselves and read

charitably. Sharma focuses in on various examples of language like “We

must be the ones who determine who is and who is not a member of our

community, based on criteria accepted by our people,” but while the

inside-outside hierarchies of any sovereignty are inherently abusive and

unjust and it’s trivial to point to examples of First Nations

governments who have wielded access to tribal membership as a tool of

power or exclusion, it warrants emphasis that one of the most pressing

motivations for sovereign control over tribal membership is precisely to

make them more inclusive than settler governments allow. There is little

more universally reviled than the blood quanta system that essentializes

indigeneity as a matter of genes rather than culture and heritage. I

most commonly hear calls for sovereignty over tribal membership invoked

to resist various limits and restrictions imposed by settler

governments. The motivation of settler states is straightforward: not

only do they wish to see tribal membership ultimately evaporate, they

dare not risk a situation where tribal membership expands like a

corrosive acid of more complex overlapping jurisdictions.

I want to be absolutely clear that competitive governance is no grand

improvement, especially when territorial restrictions on scope remain in

play. But it’s easy enough to imagine an enlightened future where the US

faces a crisis of legitimacy and jurisdiction with mass settler

defection into the ranks of strong and expanding first nations. Where

various clear territorial claims break down into more complex and

overlapping communities. This would be far from anarchist ideals, but it

is not quite the same thing as nationalisms of territory and blood. Of

course virtually no one is proposing radical expansions of first nations

ranks divorced from cultural heritage, and unfortunately what Actually

Existing First Nation governments have focused on is quite different

from the idealism of those radical indigenous activists focused on

inclusion.

Sharma zooms in on examples like the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke

stripping major rights from citizens who married non-citizens and

evicting their partners from tribal land, and — of course — the infamous

Cherokee exclusion of Freedmen. These are obviously horrifying and

reflective of real dangers, but it’s worth noting that many decolonial

indigenous activists who fought against such did so in the frame of

“nationalism,” however awkwardly. For example, Ellen Gabriel’s aghast

statement on the evictions of families in Kahnawà:ke over what amounts

to miscegenation correctly emphasizes that such constrained or

blood-based notions of identity were imposed by colonizers to whittle

away tribal membership, but she, at the same time, frames inclusion as

necessary to “rebuiding our nations from colonial genocide.” Of course

we might wish that statements like “For over a hundred years the Indian

Act has coercively indoctrinated Indigenous peoples into believing that

the colonizers definition of identity was true.” would also be applied

to the concept of nations too, but still language usage here can get

muddled and contradictory.

Of course, even if we were to cede that certain activists mean nothing

more than a sense of community with their usage of “nation” — there’s

little reason to think this personal or local redefinition will survive

and flourish. As I pointed out against Sharma’s attempt to change our

language around imperialism, history and popular usage creates certain

gravitational effects on words. The least complex, most intuitive, and

already familiar definition in a language tends to win out. Someone

could, for instance, try to reclaim or redefine the term “fascism” to

only mean “solidarity,” but the net effect of their particularized usage

is almost certainly going to be the legitimization of actual fascists

and actual fascism. And that’s hardly an extreme comparison.

“Nationalism” is pretty much politically interchangeable with “fascism”

(modulo a myth of palingenesis), with an even wider umbrella of

atrocities it has historically covered. There is no conceivable universe

in which nationalism pivots in its associations. As such, attempts to

gain standing within a wider dominant discourse of nationalism (and

imposed legal context where it has salience) are doomed to only

legitimize such, with all its baggage.

But sadly many in indigenous spaces of resistance don’t mean merely

community by their usage of “nation” and aren’t merely opportunistically

exploiting loopholes in the ideological framework of the colonizer,

rather struggles within the nationalist framework have in many cases

taken to heart the logics of national sovereignty, discreteness,

exclusion, and territory.

“Self-defined anarchist Taiaiake Alfred (2005, 266–267), for instance,

argues that supposedly distinct and discrete “nations” can and should

“move from colonial-imperialist relations to pluralist multinational

associations of autonomous peoples and territories that respect the

basic imperatives of indigenous cultures as well as preserve the

stability and benefits of cooperative confederal relations between

indigenous nations and other governments.” This vision is, of course,

the core of the Postcolonial New World Order.”

Again, such ghastliness isn’t to imply that there aren’t far more

enlightened, original, complex, and probing perspectives in the

impossibly complex expanse of varied experiences and positions thrown

haphazardly under the umbrella label of “indigeneity” (and Sharma cites

a wide array of literature across the board) but it does sufficiently

highlight that instances of mistakes exist. One need not point to

unquestionable fascists leveraging both their tribal membership and

frameworks of “indigeneity,” from the national-anarchist Vince Reinhart

to the neonazi Serafin Perez, for the general point about conceptual and

rhetorical dangers to be pressing.

“the differences posited between autochthons and allochthons—Natives and

Migrants—is a fundamental political, as well as ontological and

epistemological, challenge we must address to achieve something that can

live up to our aspirations for liberty.”

It is always hard to critique an ideology that has not yet widely taken

power or begun to implement its vision. When anarchists attacked Marx

for the coming catastrophic failings of his framework we were absolutely

right, but it still took decades for the mounting bloody evidence to

become overwhelming. Sadly, anarchists have not always had such

foresight, and those who participated in national liberation struggles

or made common cause with nationalists have always come to regret it.

Many Korean anarchists today denounce prior generations as fake

anarchists and embarrassments for even temporarily tolerating Korean

nationalism, nevermind how intense and pressing the boot of Japanese

Imperialism was.

While compassion, humility, and attention are extremely warranted when

navigating the complex and fraught complexities of situations of

oppression, I have long since renounced the lefty Irish nationalism I

grew up connected to and have no doubt that in the view of future

generations nationalism-from-below will always prove a grave and

harrowing mistake. I think a lot about Korean anarchists I’ve met who

grimaced in reference to their predecessors. I wonder how long it will

take us to truly learn our lessons.

I have already praised Home Rule as a thematic sequel to The Many-Headed

Hydra, but I worry that it will also take the place of Statism and

Anarchy as a text clarifying emerging fractures and perfectly predicting

mistakes to come, but trapped in the Cassandra gutter anarchists must so

frequently retreat to. Some warnings are as unpopular as they are —

consequently — necessary.

Since publication Sharma has caught some unfair and plainly dishonest

attacks that present her as unattentive to indigenous scholarship and

attempting to fight some kind of battle on behalf of migrants against

natives, when everything in Home Rule seeks to dispel that dichotomy.

“Us and them, same, same.”

This is not a cloak or defense for settler fuckery or a sameness that

erases differences, histories, lines of power, and important lessons.

It’s a call for solidarity with teeth and audacity. A swirling hurricane

of possibility, rather than a fractal landscape of micro tailored

prisons. Or at least enough audacity to see past lazy simplifications

and the limited imaginary bequeathed us by feudal chains and genocidal

empires.

If nothing else, many of the arguments in Home Rule at least provide a

counter to those who declare that the desire for mobility and wide

connection, thinking in abstract or universal terms rather than

place-based, etc, are all imperialist constructions. Maybe! But the same

can be said about the ideological elevation of local parochialism,

particularity, and fixedness. So let’s just clear out claims of

historical false consciousness and just make direct arguments for a

given value or approach.

The white anarchist who years ago denounced our oh-so contentious

“Migrants Welcome” stickers because she couldn’t imagine a world without

closed territorial communes of democratic tyranny and who couldn’t see

modes of resistance to yuppie fuckery that weren’t grounded in

territorial claims is a perfectly fine human being, sincerely trying her

best, her mistake was reflective of a widespread atrophy of our

imagination. And this is one of the worst crimes inflicted by our

rulers. We do not have to turn to fixed, simple models.

Imperialism and colonialism violently, unfairly, and inanely crushed

immeasurable knowledge and culture; healing that damage and tearing down

the power structures that perpetuate it is overwhelmingly in the

interest of all humanity. But ultimately no abstraction or set of

practices has value in and of itself, people matter, actual individual

human beings in all their rich complexity, their agency, their freedom,

is what we’re fighting for, and an ideology or a technology or a

practice or a belief or even “community” is only valuable insofar as it

furthers that. Healing is not the same thing as preservation. As some

indigenous anarchists have taken to saying a “tradition” is something

static and dead “that sits on a shelf,” in contrast a lifeway is

something that evolves and dances, intertwined and inseparable from the

knot of humanity and nature around us.

As Sharma puts it powerfully for anarchists, “an origin of “state” is

“stasis,” or immobility.”