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.
Echoes and Intersections
The Propagandists of the Deed
By the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian revolutionists had established a worldwide presence through labor diasporas and educational circuits, often converging on the same cosmopolitan cities as their radical counterparts from East and Southeast Asia, Egypt, Turkey, and Ireland. Their tasks overseas were twofold: to organize insurrectionary activities, and to spread information and propaganda.
The Swadeshi (autonomy; literally “one’s own country”) movement was a flash point of unrest sparked in 1905 by the administrative partition of Bengal. It took heart from the Japanese victory over Russia in the same year, setting the rapturous precedent of an Asian nation defeating a European power. From the moment of the movement’s emergence, police intelligence reports and newspaper accounts anointed its militant wing as anarchists. Accurate or not, the label dogged them at home and abroad.
In a 1916 newspaper article Ram Chandra, one of the leaders of the Ghadar Party founded by Indian anticolonial militants in the United States, objected to a remark in the London Times that “just as Ireland still has her Sinn Fein extremists, so has India still her anarchists and her fanatical bombthrowers.” Chandra retorted, “The truth in this statement is that India has her Sinn Feiners. The falsehood lies in the implication that the Hindu revolutionists are a forlorn hope of intransigents. They are not ‘anarchists’; they are nationalists; and hence the whole nation is and is growing to be, with them.”[1]
Such disclaimers were meant to defend the revolutionaries’ legitimacy. To be called an anarchist in the rhetoric of the day meant being seen as a purveyor of meaningless violence; to be dubbed a nationalist meant being seen to serve a just cause—democratic self-determination in the face of imperial tyranny and the looting of one’s country. Precisely because of their claim to the justice of their cause, they objected far more to the label of anarchist than terrorist, a term then used matter-of-factly without any particular moral condemnation to describe a tactic of extralegal, conspiratorial deployment of propaganda of the deed.
The most obvious factor in the pinning of the anarchist tag on the Swadeshi militants was their willingness to express their hatred of the British colonial government through violent means. The Indian radicals’ penchant for dramatic, symbolic bombings and assassinations linked them in the public eye to an international spate of attacks on establishment figures, applying to them the caricature of the bearded desperado cradling a sphere with a guttering fuse under his coat.
Ideological anarchism, of course, is not to be equated with violence and irrationality.
