(en) Anarkismo.net: South Asian Anarchism: Paths to Praxis

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
r?volutionnaire (Lux ?diteur, Canada, 2012). ---- Setting South Asia ablaze: the Ghadar
(Mutiny) Party ---- 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.

Anarchism?s Anti-imperialism Enabled its Global Reach

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-19th 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 20th 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,
Valpara?so, S?o 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.

Introducing Ramnath?s Books

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.

Reassessing Gandhi?s ?Libertarianism?

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 v?lkisch
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 Mag?nista 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
v?lkisch 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 f?hrer-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 Leandr? 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 m?lange of IWW-styled industrial
syndicalism, ethnic nationalism, and mysticism. Phan B?i Ch?u (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).
Three South Asian Anarchist-influenced Movements
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?

a) Pre-Independence: Ghadar

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?.?

b) Post-Independence: Sarvodaya

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.

c) Contemporary: Shramik Mukti Dal

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.
Anarchist Women in the Colonial Context


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, Mag?nista junta member Mar?a Andrea Villarreal Gonz?lez (1881-1963) and fellow
Mexican, the oft-jailed V?sper and El Desmonte editor and poet Juana Bel?m Guti?rrez 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 Secci?n 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 It? 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.

Revisiting Anarchist Anti-imperialist Praxis

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.

Conclusion

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.

Bron : a-infos-en@ainfos.ca