Anarchist Interventions:
An IAS/AK Press Book Series
Radical ideas can open up spaces for radical actions, by illuminating hierarchical power relations and drawing out possibilities for liberatory social transformations. The Anarchist Intervention series—a collaborative project between the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) and AK Press—strives to contribute to the development of relevant, vital anarchist theory and analysis by intervening in contemporary discussions. Works in this series will look at twenty-first-century social conditions—including social structures and oppression, their historical trajectories, and new forms of domination, to name a few—as well as reveal opportunities for different tomorrows premised on horizontal, egalitarian forms of self-organization.
Given that anarchism has become the dominant tendency within revolutionary milieus and movements today, it is crucial that anarchists explore current phenomena, strategies, and visions in a much more rigorous, serious manner. Each title in this series, then, will feature a present-day anarchist voice, with the aim, over time, of publishing a variety of perspectives. The series’ multifaceted goals are to cultivate anarchist thought so as to better inform anarchist practice, encourage a culture of public intellectuals and constructive debate within anarchism, introduce new generations to anarchism, and offer insights into today’s world and potentialities for a freer society.
Introduction
The impulse for this intervention was twofold: to bring an anarchist approach to anticolonialism, and an anticolonial approach to anarchism. I tackle the first by addressing practices of historiography and active solidarity. Both interventions are linked through the need to know other histories besides the familiar European/North American one. Furthermore, recognizing those other histories as relevant to the anarchist tradition means seeing anarchism as one instance of a polymorphous engagement with certain key questions and issues, as one manifestation of a larger family of egalitarian and emancipatory principles.
The seeds for this writing were planted over a decade of involvement with global economic justice, antiwar, and Palestine solidarity work, all framed as part of an anti-imperialist analysis, and then fertilized during the better part of a year spent studying in India, 2006–7. It wasn’t my first trip to my father’s country of origin, and it wouldn’t be my last, as I hoped eventually to spend a significant amount of time there each year. With this in mind I set out to try to find my closest political counterparts and get a sense of where I might someday fit in the terrain of social movement activity. It quickly became clear that there was no simple one-to-one correspondence with the radical spectrum familiar to me in the United States. The histories and contexts were too different; the trajectories of the vocabulary too weighted with mutually illegible baggage. Sub- and countercultures as well as oppositional movements only have meaning when embedded in and against their respective hegemonic mainstreams, which are in turn deeply embedded in history, geography, and global political economy. This renders direct translation impossible.
Thus there was no group or formation that would be a perfect match for my U.S. political profile, and in any case it would be misguided—colonialist, you could say—to expect one. So the question shifted from “Where/who are my political counterparts?” to “What political niche makes sense for me here (as the half-breed, rootless-cosmopolitan, déclassé-intelligentsia, self-described anarchist daughter of a thoroughly acculturated, diasporic professional)?” My relationship to this context was that of a peculiar traveling cousin, neither an outsider nor a native, enjoying access but not total belonging. Based on the questions being asked and analysis made, issues raised and stances taken, organizing principles espoused and critiques rendered of the mainline Left party (or parties), I found some aspects of affinity with some sectors, and other aspects with others. These sectors would never see eye to eye with each other, however, and indeed are often positioned as radical opponents, never the twain to meet. Yet the seeming polarity was in reality masking a range of critical variants being voiced within each category. To me the synthesis seemed perfectly logical because of my idiosyncratic angle of vision, free of entanglement in the intermovement dynamics that seemed to overdetermine any statement so that a critique of entity X would by implication align you with entity Y, within a fixed arrangement of alternatives.
In India, when I hear people use terms like anarchism, anarchist, and anarchistic, they are usually referring either to violent, nihilistic chaos or competitive, free market individualism. It stands to reason, then, that the terminology is used disapprovingly by leftists and Left-liberal progressive types, and approvingly by postmodern academics and self-indulgent, capitalist entrepreneurs. The implied opposite is top-down centralized state planning of the sort that was instituted through the Nehruvian social democracy that officially dominated Indian society until the liberalization of the early 1990s (though already undermined by the Emergency period of authoritarian crackdown in the mid-1970s). Despite its stated goals of redistributive justice, this system became in practice a byword for inefficiency and unwieldy bureaucracy.
If engaged in an appropriately complex yet amicable political discussion, I might point out that the contrary of top-down organization and concentrated power is not the absence of organization but rather a different form of decentralized, participatory organization in which power is dispersed. I might suggest that the alternatives to a state-controlled economy include not just neoliberal free market capitalism (which far from representing an escape from the state, actually depends on favorable state policies) but also some form of nonstate socialism built on an overlapping network of self-run syndicates and collectives.
Most often, though, there doesn’t seem to be much point in quibbling. Why force my vocabulary into a place where it doesn’t make sense, using words that will inevitably trigger referents and associations that are far from what I am trying to communicate? Even in explaining this project to people in Indian social movement and scholarly contexts I’ve hesitated to use the words, because whenever I did, due to an accepted sediment of meanings and associations, it led directly into miscomprehension of what I was trying to do. If the concern is with content and meaning rather than with labels, it is better to scrap any attachment I have to a terminology from another context and seek a different shared vocabulary for the principles to be discussed, the problems to be solved.
And what are these principles, these problems? My political, ethical, and intellectual worlds have long orbited a binary star of anarchism and anticolonialism. The attempt to explain their relationship has a double implication: in how an anarchist perspective affects our understanding of a history of anticolonialism, and in how an anticolonial perspective affects our understanding of a history of anarchism.
Regarding the first, standard nationalist history tells one story of decolonization. There are others, and they are still unfolding. In these stories, the achievement of a national state was not the endpoint of liberation, and its inherited institutions not the proper vehicle. The elimination of the British government left incomplete the task of ending injustice and inequity. The postcolonial state, insufficient at best, at its worst actually perpetuated the same kinds of oppression and exploitation carried out by colonial rule, but now in the name of the nation.
I should emphasize that what I am not doing here is looking for anarchism in South Asia (although I do sometimes find it), staking out territorial claims with a red-and-black flag. Rather, I am exploring a slice of South Asian history through the lens of an anarchist analysis. In doing so, what becomes visible or legible, what is foregrounded or emphasized, that may otherwise seem to defy logic or simply be overlooked? What in India’s counterhistory does this shed light on—what forgotten but not lost possibilities? Where and in what form do I recognize certain questions being asked, certain concerns being addressed, that I as an anarchist share—for example, regarding the role of the state, the nature of industrial development, or attitudes toward modern rationalism? How and in what terms do people embedded in this particular history generate theory and praxis regarding those questions and concerns? Where do I see intersections,