Читать книгу Decolonizing Anarchism - Maia Ramnath - Страница 5

Given that colonization is one of the most concentrated forms of power in history, incorporating extreme modes of domination, dispossession, and racial hierarchy, the categorical imperative of resisting it or acting in solidarity with those doing so should require no justification to any anarchist. Yet anarchists in the global North often feel conflicted by the sense that opposing colonialism requires supporting national liberation struggles. This in turn implies compromising their own principles to allow for a ­provisional alignment with nationalism, with all its distasteful corollaries of statism, chauvinism, and patriarchy. This is precisely why an anarchist approach to anticolonialism is needed: to sketch out a more comprehensive emancipatory alternative to the limited nationalist version of liberation.

It begins, perhaps, with distinguishing between the negative (much simpler) and positive aspects of liberation.

Resistance is by definition a negative project, aimed at the removal of that which obstructs equity and emancipation. Such a goal may be held in common—even if for different reasons—among many who share nothing else. The positive counterpart is the prefigurative project of creating the conditions that generate equity and emancipation. Many anarchists emphasize this as a distinguishing feature of their praxis; here limitless variation is possible among divergent visions of an idealized future. Of course we ­insist that even in the midst of struggle, the visions can’t be postponed, since the route we choose determines where we end up. But since resistance is the common denominator, clarifying the nature of the enemy is a logical place to start. In redefining what we’re for, it always helps to understand what we’re against.

Anticolonialism ≠ Nationalism

The words colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably, although there are some nuances. Imperialism is the projection of power by a political entity beyond its territorial jurisdiction, whether through economic or military means, hard power or soft, or some combination thereof. It may take the form of direct occupation along with some degree of administrative control, though strategically located bases or concessions are cheaper, easier, and demand less responsibility for the residents. Colonization, which originally denoted settlement within metastasizing enclaves, has more recently come to imply ­hegemony through the export of culture.

In the national liberation context, using the terminology of imperialism as opposed to colonialism suggested an analysis of global capitalism, which was thus more radical than simply opposing foreign rule or presence per se. In the corresponding metropolitan context, anti-imperialism was a term used on the Left to add an anticolonial component to a domestic anticapitalism focused solely on localized (and ethnically bounded) class struggle.

The goal of modern imperial power projection is the accumulation of capital, considered necessary for the strengthening of the colonizing state relative to other states. Capitalism in the north, particularly in its industrial form, required “underdeveloped” areas in order to continue expanding and stave off periodic crises in its wealth-­generating system, constantly renewing the founding act of primitive accumulation along new frontiers of dispossession. By seizing resource-rich areas, enlisting the resident populations as cheap labor and a captive market, a “great power” could externalize its costs on to its colonies while enabling a massive extraction of surplus. In this way, colonialism embodied the symbiosis of global capital with the interstate system, underpinned by the crucial legitimizing ideologies of cultural and racial supremacy. Colonialism was in fact instrumental in generating the logics and structures of capitalism, nationalism, and racism during their formative periods.

Nationalism developed in tandem with the period of high imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to what’s often termed the first round of globalization at the turn of the twentieth. The logic was that a great nation needed a strong state, and a strong state needed a colonial empire in order to secure an advantageous balance of financial and military power against its rivals. Furthermore, in the escalating paranoia of realpolitik, maintaining autonomy became equivalent to achieving supremacy. World War I was the inevitable result of imperial competition running up against its material limits, combined with the increasingly vehement and organized ­objections of these empires’ subject peoples.

A restive or insurgent colony was even better than a pacified one as a laboratory for states to develop their military, bureaucratic, disciplinary, policing, and surveillance capabilities. Here administrators tested new techniques for future application to domestic security in the metropole. In the later stages, coercion came to the fore as sporadic revolt swelled into irrepressible resistance, but earlier—­initial conquests aside—colonizers attempted to consolidate their control (and claim moral legitimacy) by training the racialized “primitive” through the ideological apparatus of both liberal and religious civilizing missions. The “white man’s burden” was the onus of enlightening the ungrateful savage, the heathen, the eugenically challenged—while doomed never to be appreciated for this selfless effort. Hence, some of the most pernicious and persistent aspects of colonization involved not just military occupation, ­political domination, and economic superexploitation but also the systematic assault on cultural integrity, languages, lifeways, and ethnic identities. But are these always defined as ­national identities?

So far I’ve been referring to the nationalism of the colonizers, not the colonized. Is the widespread instinct that one is good and the other bad as simple as the difference between overlords and underdogs? While nationalism lies at the root of many evils, its emotional force and historical significance for freedom fighters cannot be ignored, and so the notion of national liberation struggle requires some attention.

Indian Marxist literary theorist Aijaz Ahmad took Perry Anderson to task in an essay for stating that “all third world literature is nationalist literature.”[1] The same objection could be made regarding the historiography, not just the literature, of the global South. Periodized in terms of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, a nationalist narrative moves from primordial purity to unjust enslavement to destined redemption. A cycle of restoration and rebirth, combined with a linear progression toward teleological fulfillment, results in a triumphal spiral toward statehood: the destination for the nation’s journey, sign of its legitimacy, and guarantor of its autonomy and well-being.

The fundamental assumption of nationalism is that in order for a people to be recognized as holders of collective rights and freedoms, it must be constituted as a nation duly manifested in a state: an exclusive institution defined by its monopoly on sanctioned force and revenue extraction. A state is, in the starkest terms, a mechanism designed to accumulate wealth in order to make war, to make war in order to protect its wealth, and to make laws to facilitate its functioning, meaning to protect its own stability. This includes the maintenance of a reasonable degree of contentment among its members; the liberal or social democratic state adds the requirement of legitimation either by formal mechanisms of consent for its members or its claim to serve the members’ common welfare. Therefore, the only anticolonial militance retroactively recognized as a legitimate freedom struggle (violence by an anticipated future state) rather than a crime (nonsanctioned violence within a state) or terrorism (as extrastate violence) must be nationalist. The nationalist fairy tale culminates in the marriage of (spiritual) nation and (physical) state, where the people live happily ever after.

By this circular logic, without a state a group is merely a marginalized minority, hoping at best to exist on sufferance as outsiders within someone else’s jurisdiction where safety and success cannot be guaranteed. This logic became particularly important in South Asia, where the movement for a separate Pakistani state emerging from the Indian national liberation movement depended on the argument that the Muslims of the subcontinent constituted an ethnically distinct nation defined against the numerically dominant Hindus, correspondingly framed as the quintessence of a more monocultural Indian state—never mind the immense variety of regional and linguistic identities that crosscut either religious identity, or their centuries-old coexistence and cultural cross-fertilization.

The same fractal pattern has been repeated many times since independence from British rule, by separatist movements objecting to the domestic practices of postcolonial national states, exercising forms of “internal colonialism” on border areas and hinterlands (for whom internality was exactly the question) and deploying the same forms of governmentality. In seeking to replicate the techniques of colonial rule by institutionalizing states rather than abolishing them, the nationalist goal diverged from that of substantive decolonization. If the colonial regime’s structures of oppression were not simply to be reopened for business under new local management, yielding a new generation of authoritarian dictatorships and cultural chauvinists, a ­different logic of anticolonial struggle was imperative.

But should we object to a group’s self-identifying as a nation per se?

Where ethnicity is brutalized and culture decimated, it is callous to discount the value of ethnic pride, asserting the right to exist as such—not forgetting that cultural expression must include the right to redefine the practices of one’s own culture over time, in dialogue with multiple internal and external influences, rather than sanctifying a fixed tradition. In the colonial context, the defense of ethnic ­identity and cultural divergence from the dominant is a key component of resistance, with the caveat that it’s equally crucial to pay attention to who’s dictating the “correct” expression of culture and ethnicity. No culture is as homogeneous or static as the invented traditions of nationalism. Precolonial reality was dynamic, multifarious, and also horrible for some people. The decolonization of culture shouldn’t mean rewinding to a “pure” original condition but instead restoring the artificially stunted capacity freely to grow and evolve without forcible outside interference to constrict the space of potential.

In any case it’s possible to concede a strategic identity politics, evoked by the context of resistance, where the ­assertion of collective existence and demand for recognition functions as a stand against genocide, apartheid, systemic ­discrimination, or forced assimilation to a ­dominant norm.

Of course, defining any group as a nation is not without its own risks as the political stakes of identification rise, even if a community is culturally, linguistically, and genealogically distinct, with shared historical experience and aspirations. But here too it’s the specter of stateness—the pressure to establish your own, or to resist the aggression of someone else’s—that calls forth the enforcement of internal conformity, elimination of elements who fail or refuse to conform, and relentless policing of boundaries, including those of hereditary membership, for which task the control of female bodies, sexuality, and reproduction is essential.

What about the geographic boundaries? Aside from the unambiguous wrong of dispossession, indigenous land claims constitute an argument for a way of relating to place and biosphere that counteracts the ecologically destructive logic of late capitalist consumer society. Statehood aside, calls for sovereignty in this sense can amount to a way of securing spaces in which other logics can prevail and other modes of existence can be protected. Even if we hypothetically establish a connection between territory and ethnic identity, establishing a qualitative relationship of people to places, and places to identities, does not by definition require enforcing the separation of homogeneous categories of people assigned to fixed, exclusive plots of land.

Could collective demands for self-determination then be distinguished from the demand for a state? Nation-statehood was only one possible form that shared memories, visions, and social/place relations could take. In practice, “nation” has also been used as a blazon of symbolic solidarity, a committed choice of ethical affiliation. That it’s such a freighted word attests to the overriding force of nationalism, conceptually locking nation to state. The devil’s in the hyphen.

Is it possible then to conceptualize the liberation of nation from state, along with the liberation of people from occupation and exploitation? This is what classical anarchist thinkers such as Mikhail Bakunin and Gustav Landauer attempted to do during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively. It’s also something contemporary solidarity activists may need to think about.

Bakunin saw Pan-Slavism as a vehicle of liberation against dynastic autocracy, imbuing a transnational identity with certain values that could resist tyranny and subjugation. Poland was then the democratic-republican battleground, and Russia’s village terrain the spiritual heartland. In the same way, radical democrats and antiauthoritarians were Francophiles in the 1790s and 1871, and Hispanophiles in the 1930s. In all these cases devotees of a principle embraced the people who were fighting for that principle, acknowledging their location on the shifting front line of an ongoing global struggle, while also imputing to them inherent ethnocultural traits that made them fit bearers of the struggle. But this would be to miss the moon for the finger pointing at the moon: a people could betray an ideal as well as defend it, and others, when their turn came, would then become the defenders.

For Bakunin, while rejecting the state, nationality remained an essential trait, both a “natural and social fact,” given that “every people and the smallest folk-unit has its own character, its own specific mode of existence, its own way of speaking, feeling, thinking, and acting; and it is this idiosyncrasy that constitutes the essence of nationality.”[2] In contrast, Rudolf Rocker argued that it was positional and contingent: “nation is not the cause, but the result of the state. It is the state that creates the nation, not the nation the state.” Moreover, he warned, in any talk of nationalism,

we must not forget that we are always dealing with the organised selfishness of privileged minorities which hide behind the skirts of the nation, hide behind the credulity of the masses. We speak of national interests, national capital, national spheres of interest, national honour, and national spirit; but we forget that behind all this there are hidden merely the selfish interests of power-loving politicians and money-loving business men for whom the nation is a convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for political power from the eyes of the world.

What he described was the state hijacking the credulous masses through the method of nationalism.[3]

Later Landauer tried to differentiate the folk or people, viewed in an almost spiritual sense, from the institutional mechanisms of the state.[4] The dangers here (as Rocker surely guessed) are obvious: it’s a slippery slope from the praise of a völkisch spirit to a mysticism of blood and soil, to chauvinism and fascism—especially when the state to be distinguished from the organic soul of the people was identified with modern bureaucracy and a liberal intelligentsia—likewise anathema for today’s populist right wing. But to transmute into fascism, a folk idea such as Landauer portrayed would have to augment its integral sense of connection to place and community with racial exceptionalism, supremacism, and xenophobia, and moreover to lure its nation back around to the cult of the state, to be embodied in its virile leader, its military strength, and the order and discipline through which its people were taught to find honor in serving it—all of which Landauer detested.

In the 1930s, anticolonial activists drew explicit parallels between the fascism on the rise within Europe and the imperialism that had long been exercised outside Europe’s borders. Both used the same authoritarian methods of supremacy, racializing a population in order to classify it as outside and below the paragon of the human. Elaborate hierarchies of being were necessary to justify systematically excluding groups from full status as rational agents, thereby protecting the principles of liberalism or Christianity from being forced into revealing their apparent contradiction with the imperial enterprise. Racialist logic provided the final, crucial ingredient in the toxic assemblage of capitalism plus state; without racism, the imperial project would have been insupportable according to the logic of the empires’ own domestic populations. But the dehumanization could remain far away, unobjectionable until ­carried out on internal populations.

If colonization—to be dehumanized and forcibly incorporated into a global cycle of accumulation, by subjection to a parasitic regime of surplus extraction under the control of a hypertrophied state mechanism unmistakably external to society—is a neat paradigm of everything anarchists abhor, does that mean that the most fully developed form of anticolonialism should be something that ­resembles anarchism?

Anarchism ≈ Decolonization

Indian anticolonial radicals overseas after the turn of the twentieth century sought out active collaborations in cosmopolitan cities with anarchist networks whose tactics and principles they saw as applicable to the needs of their cause.

In fact until the mid-1930s, the traits that ­differentiated anarchism from other sectors of the Left were also those that gave it affinities with contemporary anticolonial struggles—for example, the perception of the government itself as an evil and the state as clearly extraneous to society, so that the primary sites of resistance were the defining mechanisms of state function, including both disciplinary and ideological apparatuses. In British India, military installations, infrastructure, legal and educational systems: all were targeted for raids, sabotage, boycotts, or noncooperation. For some, this externality implied that the problem could be solved through decapitation, sidestepping the need for deep systemic change, and stoking a taste for propaganda of the deed.

Furthermore, classical anarchism was often associated with primary resistance to the onset of industrialization, as opposed to the Marxian and syndicalist assumption that the transition had already occurred, and that revolution would be organized from within industrial society. For many anarchists and anticolonialists (and later for India’s Maoists), agrarian peasants rather than industrial proletarians represented the leading edge of struggle. Therefore it was more than just a matter of co-opting an already-existing mode of production, changing its relations while retaining its means and instruments; it meant challenging the establishment of capitalism and modern governmentality, sometimes even opposing the structures of thought on which they were based. Either way, the result was that the ground of struggle, conditioning the modality of resistance, was primarily non- or preindustrial. Given the enforced role of nonindustrial dependency within the classical colonial relationship, the structural comparison to the situation faced by Britain’s South Asian subjects at that time was clear.

Finally, cultural practices, language, education, and everyday life in the colonial context constituted a major dimension of oppression, and therefore a major field on which resistance played out. Here there was no question of base and superstructure. Colonization functioned on multiple levels, through several interlocking modalities of hard and soft power, from the structural to the psychological. Economically it was accumulation by dispossession; ­politically it was authoritarian state control; militarily it was occupation and counterinsurgency; ideologically it was cultural hegemony leaving its stamp through linguistic ­retraining and epistemic violence. Striving for total decolonization would mean working on all these levels in addition to (but not instead of) tackling capitalism and the state, without reducing the struggle to either the material or ideological/discursive plane.

Thus some of the differences between the Left antisystemic movements of a colonized agrarian region and those of a heavily industrialized one were analogous to those between classical anarchism and early Marxism—for example, critiques of the latter’s (real or perceived) overemphases on developmentalist teleology, instrumental reason, class reductivism, and analysis of political economy without a comparable analysis of power. This resonance arose because anarchist and anticolonialist traditions were responding to analogous conditions: a collision with the leading edge of capitalism and the state at a crucial transition point into their modern forms.

Modernity = Coloniality?

Historians identify several processes definitive of the modern condition:

 The expansion of the rationalized state, functioning through mechanisms of surveillance, policing, discipline; governmentality exercised through bureaucratic enumeration and management of populations, resources, and so on; and the recognition of such a state as one unit among a mutually reinforcing system of units

 The incorporation of more and more goods, commons, natural resources, land, water, labor, time, space, minerals, crops, genetic information, cultural materials, raw materials, manufactured/processed products into the logic of a global capitalist economy, subject to quantification as alienable and exchangeable commodities on the world market ­rather than local use values

 An exponential increase in technology, industrialization, scientificity—especially with regard to communication and transport—and the fossil-fuel-based energy regime

The processes entailed in colonization are recognizable as a particularly traumatic, violent acceleration of the frontier of modernization, here experienced as an assaultive external force that shredded the existing sociocultural fabric rather than incrementally modifying it. This is not to paint the inhabitants of such a region as identical, passive victims; many participated in these projects, and some significantly benefited. This is one reason why resistance always entails internal conflict as well as a defensive front; many an anticolonial effort has segued into civil war.

Moreover, without colonial incursion, modernization may well have emerged on its own; some argue that colonization itself is what prevented this from happening. But Asian, African, and Latin American modernities unaffected by European intervention are a counterfactual speculation in our historical reality. The fact is that every dimension of modernity as we know it was built on colonial history. Modern European and North American material prosperity along with cultural consumption and production at every level owed an immense debt to its colonial relationships with Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, from the plantation slave labor driving the Industrial Revolution, to the silver and gold mines financing military might, whereas modernization in India and elsewhere was experienced through the medium of colonization. The Latin American subalternists, inspired by but diverging from the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, actually theorize ­coloniality as the other face of modernity.[5]

Despite their close interrelation, however, colonization and modernization are not interchangeable terms. What distinguished the process of colonization from any other instance of coercive modernization, legitimating and masking it, was the dimension of racism in all of its iterations (including Orientalism), whether as a religious and cultural myth, or a scientific and biological one. This is also what makes antiracism such an important component of mobilizations in solidarity with anticolonial movements.

The key to manifesting an anarchist anticolonialism (a point shared with third world feminism as well as what Chela Sandoval calls the methodology of the oppressed, among other analogous terms) lies in the intersectionality of those dimensions.[6] This is exactly where twentieth-­century antisystemic movements in decolonizing regions—the “tricontinental” of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—had critiques to offer their counterparts in the Western, northern, and/or colonizing world: isolating class struggle in practice and rhetoric did not sufficiently address the fundamental global structures of imperialism, nor the realities of racism and colonization.

Meanwhile, systemic analysis allowed for the relating of Left internationalism to national liberation struggles and other transnational anticolonialisms. The power grid of race both reinforces and complicates that of capitalism, especially when we add the dimension of spatiality at the global scale—and there we have imperial geopolitics. But as is still true today, the counterpart of a globalization of power systems is a globalization of antisystemic resistance.

The question of orientation to modernity underlies both the anarchist and anticolonial discourses. This question fuels the perennial debate on the nature of anarchism, the genealogy of its intellectual tradition, and its relationship to other radicalisms on both the Left and Right. It also refracts the spectrum of intellectual and political ­differences within Indian anticolonialism.

If the processes of colonization correlate to those of modernization, then does anticolonialism have to be anti­modern? No, and this largely has to do with sloppy language use. Modernity, modernization, and modernism are all words too often used in confusing, contradictory ways. There are the material processes associated with modernization, a project never fully realized and never proceeding evenly without frictions and obstructions; there are also shifts in perception and consciousness that make up our experience of these new conditions—of which multiple effects and affects, interpretations and evaluations, are possible—all of which are modern, but not all modernist. Modernism reveals a third level, which is a conscious aesthetic, philosophical, political, epistemological stance manifested in art, literature, architecture, and so on. But the description of modernity as an existential condition consists of the full package of contradictions and contradictory vectors on all these levels, a complex agglomeration of causes, effects, and responses to them.

Under the harsh stamp of racialization it became difficult (on both the material and epistemological levels) for Indians to develop without conflict an alternate, indigenous modernity out of the materials already available, or freely exchanged through their transnational contacts with other activists and intellectuals. Yet even within the given circumstances, responses to the projects and conditions of modernity ranged from complete rejection to complete embrace, with all variants of critical and ­selective adaptation in between. For example, liberal reformers such as Rammohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, or Sir Syed Ahmad Khan objected to their exclusion from the liberal Enlightenment paradigm of republican democracy and humanist rationalism, but not to that paradigm itself.[7] They saw it as a universal that was theirs by right, no less than anyone else’s (not Westernness masquerading as universalism but rather universalism only masquerading as Westernness).[8] Others rejected the whole paradigm as antithetical to their particular ethnocultural natures, embracing with pride an Orientalist binary logic that had been jointly formalized by Western scholars and Asian clerical elites.

Both the universal and binary were false, of course. The existential condition of colonialism facilitated a flattening out or repression of the range of internal variation on both sides. A state of war tends toward extreme polarization; colonialism is a permanent state of war, whether in the low-intensity register of prolonged occupation, or the hotter moments of conquest, reconquest, pacification, and ­counterinsurgency. Accordingly, coloniality tends to generate Manichaean ­binaries, as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi observed.

Non-Western, Oriental, or so-called primitive cultures, including the Celtic, were portrayed as the polar opposite of the modern, occupying the space of the spiritual, the not-yet-disenchanted, the unilluminated—whether that was seen as a sign of danger and backwardness (as for the Utilitarian reformers, who tried to make India over with railroads and Shakespeare in the 1820s–30s) or salvation for the world (as for the theosophists, who took dictation from Buddhist “hidden masters” and added their force to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1900s–1910s). Whether the Enlightenment logic was evaluated as good or bad, or a little of each, depended on how you felt about mechanization, rationalization, and so forth, or whether you lived in England, Ireland, India, or the Ottoman Empire.

It bears mentioning that the words progressive and reactionary—in their most literal sense—entail relative direction, not necessarily political content or ideological value. One means to go forward in the direction of change, and the other means to generate friction, stoppage, or reversal. But what is the particular change we’re talking about, and what was the status quo? It seems more pertinent to ask what a specific vision of utopia looks like—what its content is—than which direction we need to move in to reach it from where we are now—whether we envision it as having existed in a prelapsarian past or as the destination of future redemption. The legacy of utopian thought contains both kinds of narrative.

Neither an across-the-board improvement nor unmitigated ruin, modernization was rather a radically destabilizing rearrangement in the status quo, which benefited some and harmed others. A critique of modernism (or colonialism) or any of the phenomena of modernity (or coloniality) is not necessarily a bid to “go back” but instead an attempt to seek a different way forward that doesn’t destroy beneficial aspects of an existing fabric, while improving on those aspects that were detrimental to the expansion of freedom and equality. Far from being reactionary, as an orthodox Marxist teleology would deem it, anticolonial critique of modernity was not necessarily an attempt to halt progress—as if the only options were to go forward or backward along a narrow track—but rather to choose a different direction—oblique, perpendicular, or spreading in a skewed delta of potential alternatives. In other universes, with other histories, maybe they are what modernity looks like. Resistance thus contains a range of adaptive, subversive, redirectional, or dialectically synthetic responses not just to halt or reverse modernity but also to generate ­alternate modernities or countermodernities.

Anarchism = Modernity?

And what about anarchism? In its attempt to solve the problems of oppression and exploitation, is it inherently modernist or antimodernist? Rationalist or Romanticist? This debate has implicitly structured much of the past and current terrain of Western anarchism. It also underlies a pervasive confusion among those who, in the effort to define anarchism historically, give up and dismiss it as ­incoherent and contradictory.

The crux is this: if by asking “Is anarchism modern or antimodern?” we mean “Is anarchism really part of the rationalist or Romanticist tradition? Is it a child of the Enlightenment or its counterrevolution? Does it do the work of Dionysus or Apollo?” then we fail to grasp that the cultural profile of modernity itself is not wholly identifiable with either side. Rather, its very fabric is woven from the dialogic counterpoint of both, as a play of energies that exists within the field of material conditions symptomatic of modernization. Generated in response to these conditions, anarchism is part of modernity, and like the rest of ­modernity, partakes in the same interplay of energies.

What’s unique about the anarchist tradition among Western political discourses is its continuous struggle for a synthesis between the two polarities, rejecting neither. Taken as a whole, it’s a cumulative attempt to find a balance by making contextually appropriate adjustments along the spectrum. Nowhere is it a reduction to one or the other, and indeed a quest for balance implies a critique of such a reduction at either end. True, even within the broadly drawn boundaries of anarchism, there are those who have staked out positions near to one or the other. But to argue over which pole truly represents the tradition is to hear only half the conversation. We might ask, for example, whether in a specific context the source of oppression is an excess of either instrumental reason or superstition, whereas the existence of rationality itself is neither disease nor cure. I like to use a lemonade metaphor: depending on the circumstances and what’s already been mixed, you might need to increase or decrease your ratio of lemon juice to sugar to reach the perfect balance. Without both, your lemonade is going to suck.

Is it meaningless—or unanarchistic—to try to identify boundaries? I don’t think so; on the contrary, refusing to do so makes the conversation meaningless. Maybe a more relevant way of putting this is that the anarchist tradition is a discursive field in which the boundaries are defined by a thematic, not a problematic, as Partha Chatterjee puts it in a famous essay on the conceptual difficulties of an Indian nationalist historiography. According to this formulation, it is necessary to distinguish two parts of a social ideology: “the thematic . . . refers to an epistemological as well as ethical system which provides a framework of elements and rules for establishing relationships between elements; the problematic, on the other hand, consists of concrete statements about possibilities justified by reference to the thematic.” The problematic includes an ideology’s “identification of historical possibilities and the practical or programmatic forms of its realization,” and the thematic “its ­justificatory structures, i.e., the nature of the evidence it presents in support of those claims, the rules of inference it relies on to logically relate a statement of the evidence to a structure of arguments, the set of epistemological principles it uses to demonstrate the existence of its claims as historical possibilities, and finally, the set of ethical principles it appeals to in order to assert that those claims are morally justified.”[9]

Anarchism is a thematic larger than any of its myriad manifestations, all of which can be considered anarchism if they refer to that thematic—if they are part of the anarchist conversation. This is also analogous to contrasting langue as “a language system shared by a given community of speakers”—that is, anarchists—with parole, “a concrete speech act of individual speakers”—that is, what’s said or done by any type of anarchist.[10] The totality of the conversation generated by a particular set of ethical questions and concerns can’t be identified solely with any one utterance, or any one answer to its defining questions.

The anarchist tradition is a continuously unfolding discourse—meaning not just the writings and rhetoric of anarchism but also its body of practices and history of performative acts. And the content of this discourse—the thematic that defines its boundaries—is the quest for collective liberation in its most meaningful sense, by maximizing the conditions for autonomy and egalitarian social relationships, sustainable production and reproduction. The tradition consists at the same time in the argument over what anarchism is, and the argument over the proper balance between a whole constellation of key pairs: freedom and equality, liberty and justice, the individual and the collective, the head and the heart, the verbal and the sensual, power relations and economic relations. India’s anticolonial history represented a similar conversation. Here too the totality of the discourse is characterized by a shared thematic of defining and attaining liberation, through a dialogic counterpoint of the modernist/rationalist lineage (exemplified in the twentieth century by Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Ambedkar, and the People’s Science Movement) and its variously positioned critics.

It is a crucial and delicate issue, however, to recognize that some of these critical positions have included fascism and fundamentalism. Furthermore, wherever the terminology of anarchism appears in the Indian context, right-wing elements frequently crop up as a menacing shadow not far away. This does not mean that there is any inherent affinity between anarchism and the reactionary Right, contrary to the conflation sometimes made by sectors of the mainline Indian Left. What it does indicate is that certain situations create common openings for both.

The same could be said in general of the worldwide radical ferment in the fin de siècle moment before World War I—a moment of equal significance for the rise of anarchism and the emergence of radical anticolonialism—when multiple potentialities were held in combustible suspension. Georges Sorel offers some clues here, in his writings about revolutionary syndicalism during the same period, when anticolonialists were meeting anarchists in Paris and London. Sorel was a French civil servant born in 1842, an engineer by training and a disciple of philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson. He produced the bulk of his difficult-to-categorize work on social theory in the last decade of the nineteenth and first of the twentieth centuries, after his professional retirement. As an advocate of labor syndicalism, he abhorred bureaucracy and parliamentary armchair socialism, favored total revolution over piecemeal reform, and touted worker militance and direct action to seize control of production. He also despised the state, particularly in its bourgeois capitalist incarnation. Yet the premises of his analysis were quite different from those of the socialist branch of the Enlightenment project. Antirationalist and antiliberal, his top imperative was seeking a workable, living revolutionary myth capable of revitalizing and reinspiring an alienated, moribund modern society.

As the bearer of libidinal energy or Bergsonian élan vital, the myth, in Sorel’s view, must recharge the potency of the heroic revolutionary class through militant struggle. Sorel had no doubt that the needed revitalization must come about through violence, which he differentiated from force, meaning the physical dominance of the state that was inherent in its foundation and the institutions of its preservation. Either class struggle or external threat would do the trick, though the latter would more sharply stimulate the national myth and the former the social, in which case the mythic icon of the general strike would serve to motivate the working class, while icons of the counterrevolution for which the workers’ opening move was the stimulus would rouse the bourgeoisie from its decadent stupor. Regardless of who won, the struggle would have done its work. This is why the Sorelian logic of prewar revolutionary syndicalism bore within it the seeds of both the Right and Left radical movements of the 1920s. It didn’t really matter what that myth might be; it only mattered that it did the job.

But of course, it does matter quite a lot to the outcome. From this perspective the significance of these moments of dual potentiality is not that anarchism converges with the Right but precisely that it does not. At a crossroads, choices matter most; here is where ethical orientation and content make the difference. What determined whether the myth of right-wing populist rhetoric or libertarian socialism would prevail? The key distinction is in the prefigurative content of the emancipatory vision, not in the simple fact of opposition to the state. It’s not enough to call for small government or the elimination of a foreign regime without also articulating a critique of capitalism, race, and power. This is equally true of the difference between national supremacism and radical (and ­potentially nonstatist) anticolonialism.