We are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement, 1923-1953

by M.P.T. Acharya, Ole Birk Laursen (Editor)

Overview

“Ole Birk Laursen has done us a valuable service in tracking down and collecting the work of M.P.T. Acharya, scattered across countries, decades, and publications, and not least placing this work in well-researched context.… This is a treasure chest that will enrich our picture of both global anarchist and South Asian radical history.” —Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle

“With this collection of writings—many made available in English for the first time—Ole Birk Laursen recovers the extraordinary life and writings of M.P.T. Acharya, perhaps India’s most important but least remembered anarchist activist and theoretician.... Anyone interested in anticolonial struggles past or present should read this book.” —Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

“This fascinating and rich collection of essays by M.P.T. Acharya significantly deepens our understandings of transnational radical thought in the early twentieth century, placing Indian activists at the center of critiques of communism emanating from Berlin, Paris, Bombay and London.” —Kama Maclean, author of A Revolutionary History of Interwar India

M.P.T. Acharya (1887–1954) was a contemporary and critic of Mohandas Gandhi during the Indian Independence Movement. A lifetime of anticolonial struggle led him to embrace anarchism and he saw tremendous revolutionary potential the practice of nonviolent direct action. A transnational figure, Acharya engaged in anticolonial activism across India, Europe, the United States, and Russia. He was also a prolific writer for publications across the globe, penning essays that are testimony to a tireless agitator and intellectual seeking to develop a radical, internationalist idea of national liberation. Acharya’s work demonstrates the global reach of anarchism in the interwar period and gives us a more complete and nuanced understanding of Indian anticolonial struggles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849353427
Publisher:	AK Press
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

M.P.T. Acharya (1887–1954) was an anticolonial activist who co-founded the Communist Party of India. After the Russian Revolution, he became disillusioned with communism and became India's most prolific anarchist writer.

Ole Birk Laursen is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Indian Literature at New York University, London. He specializes in South Asian literature and history, anti-imperialism, and anarchism.

Read an Excerpt

Nationalism in India

M. Acharya

Nationalism as initiated by Gandhi is pacifist. It is national only in the territorial sense—territorial independence. True that Gandhi also dreams of a national state and a constitutional state. But that is due to the reaction even upon Gandhi’s mind forced on the part of an imperial, foreign and unconstitutional government at the present. This statement is true notwithstanding the force of fact that there are many groups within the Gandhian camp who wholly stand for a dictatorial militarist and imperial India—some day.

It is well known that when a constitution was drafted by India leaders some years ago and Gandhi was invited to assist it, Gandhi refused to take part in the drafting saying it was after all not so important as passive resistance to authority. And he started the famous Salt-tax violation march (direct action) with only 64 adherents saying he would do so and persist in it even if the constitutional leaders considered him quixotic and the national congress refused to support and follow him.[i] Gandhi was more courageous, audacious and foolhardy than the Indian Congress and leaders and soon his movement became the fashion, custom and religion. It has come to stay. Today violation of laws has become the hall-mark of respectability even for former legislators, e.g. V. J. Patel, the former speaker of the Indian Legislative Assembly who recently toured U.S.A.[ii]

Gandhi is a lawyer and religious man. But for him law and religion are only means for social well-being. In this respect the irreligion and anti-legalism of many a revolutionary is backward and only the means to another legalism and religious mind. Gandhi felt the pulse and heart beat of India when he started his march to Dandhi salt deposits of the government. The atmosphere was surcharged with violent thought swaging and the government wanted it to grow looking for an opportunity long sought to crush violence with super-violence of tanks and gas bombs—in the name of law and order. But Gandhi by sanctioning and initiating passive polite and unarmed violation of salt monopoly law intervened successfully between governmental and popular violence and led the violent energies of the people into channels of inconquerable solidarity against the government and its laws. He overtook and unnerved the government and its readiness to use and justify its own violence over all. As such he acted like an Anarchist tactician of the first magnitude, caring for no laws when he gave his personal ultimatum to the Viceroy—through an English follower Mr. R. Reynolds, a former Labour Party man, and when Gandhi refused to yield an inch of his ultimatum it was thought that on the day fixed for the Salt march he would be arrested at his door-step.[iii] But the government lost its nerves at the lightning rapidity with which he maneuvered—according to his ultimatum. Since that day pacifism has come to stay and grow in India, going from success to success—not halting in spite of his repeated incarcerations Gandhi made the movement go without and against leadership—it is a great autonomous education to the people. In one stroke he killed off both Marxism and its opposite authoritarianism. That day we must reckon as the birth of popular Anarchy in the world—not only in India. He planted the seed of Anarchism—even if he did not want or know it, because he wanted nothing shall intervene and cross pacific education. Gandhi had openly proclaimed that schools as they are, are slave manufacturies and the people go to prison as to places of pilgrimage, calling it Gandhi’s College. They have thus liberated the prisons by flooding them in. Is it not in Anarchism with a vengeance?

Asked if he would take position as Minister in India, Gandhi replied he may not, probably will not. Nay certainly, he cannot, for he cannot accustom himself to the cribbed routine and cramped spirit of ministerial formalism (bureaucratism) which keep ministers buried in the grave as it were of formalities. He wants to be a free man, moving freely among people.

Gandhist volunteers not only resist government passively and without arm but also prevent violence against Englishmen themselves or of Indian provocateurs of England against Indians themselves. When driving a great demonstration in Bombay the son of an English general got mixed up among the crowd and these wanted to manhandle him, Gandhists at once jumped to his rescue and relieved him of dangers. They teach chivalry and sportsmanship to Englishmen without boxing or shooting them as they want to do. That tells effectually upon soldiers, civilians and policemen. It is sport and feast which Indians want to call fight against bayonets. An arrested civil resister is not an object of pity but worthy of congratulations at public meetings—a lucky and honored person. Can anything be nobler in fight without arms to defend oneself? When the most cowardly and craven feels a spirit of emulation at Gandhist action. Naturally, the brave in bayonet charging feel like cowards unless they are the froth of humanity.

The Gandhi volunteers prevent provocation by the police. At a great Store house when crowds were looking at boycott posters in a most orderly manner, the police could not find excuse to charge upon their admirers. A civil clothes policeman slyly took a stone to throw into the shop window. Alert as the crowd was they held his hand and pulled him to the Congress office. To their surprise, they found him possession of a civil clothes police badge and the Commissioner of the police had to ask for the release of the man.

Again the Congress volunteers take away from the police the duty to keep order and traffic regulation. When a great demonstration of millionaires and workmen, numbering half a million or more of Bombay’s population was moving against police prohibition, it was very rough in the eyes of the onlookers to shoot into them. The police made a cordon and the procession sat on the streets a whole day and a whole night refusing to disperse. At last there was nothing but to parley and agree with the leaders of the demonstration who were pressed from behind to march on and who could not push the crowd back. The compromise was arrived at thus: the police agreed to withdraw and the leaders agreed to care for order. The triumph was great for the crowd. The police were robbed of their office and authority at least for one day without a blow.

Nowadays such skirmishes are not done en masse at one place. Such battles are given at twos and threes—at hundreds of places at the same time to separate and weaken the force of the authorities. The people have become wiser and surer since the arrest of thousands of leaders. The leaders are the first to set the example and go to prison—instead of directing and sending others to prisons as in the West. Bourgeois they are in India. More honor to them than to the proletarian leaders of the West.

The Indian national movement has all the essence of war without hurting the minions of authority. It split the brains of the opponent without breaking the skull. (Read: R. B. Gregg’s “Strategy of Gandhian Non-Violence,” 2 vols.) Have you ever heard of this type of nationalism, without leadership except among the leaders themselves?

Nationalism in India is self-determination of one and all at all times and places. The only program of nationalism in India is to choose a point among the prohibitions of ordinances as target. Each one may choose and act against it as one wills. Surely it is not Bolshevism to break laws and decrees. Is it nationalism as we know it? It is anarchistic direct action by individuals and groups which goes territorially as nationalism in India because it has not become general throughout the world. Will such a discipline and self-determination, and self-education leave traces of any government? Impossible. If it is not nationalism, it is nationalism without fixed purpose and program, a kind of Makhnovism. Like Makhnovism—Gandhist nationalism fights without arms between two fires and fronts: inner and outer violence. The men participating in this fight cannot be expected to submit to or tolerate a native violence, be these Bolshevik or constitutional dictatorial. Gandhi has given an education and foretold—nay prepared them to meet successfully every violence with non-violent unarmed resistance, simply by mass refusal to obey and submit.

It may be nationalism against imperialism but still it is international in spirit and purpose, because it is pacifist and simple. All nationalities are welcome in this struggle. In India or outside. It believes each nation and individual knows its or his affairs better than anyone can tell. Leave us in peace and live in peace. That is Indian nationalism.

It is more international than Bolshevik state bureaucracy in Russian territory. It depends least upon business and money and arms—because it depends upon and is born of the people instead of being superimposed. It is educating people not to depend upon leaders and armed forces and state paraphernalia. It is a self-moving tye, organically naturally, spontaneous. Uniting all its parts and including engulfing all into one mutually interested whole. It is a rock in formation against which all armies of the world will fail—for armies are automatons having only wheels within wheels—unthinking and tyeless. The party and state movement depend upon the principle of exclusion, while the Indian movement is all-embracing. Hindus, Mussulmans, Jews, Christians of all classes and races. Men, women and boys and girls taking an equal part as independent beings in the movement. If it is nationalism, it is greater than Socialism, which try to include only a class, no, only actual workmen organized in unions or party politicians in the name of the workers “as a class.” It is abolition of classes and class war which is going on in India peacefully in the name of nationalism.

The movement gives anarchist training, which is exactly what the Bolshevik and anti-Marxian world is afraid of, and even anarchists are mistakenly skeptical about. But India is teaching in practice the anarchist principles—to the whole world. Be it national because territorial at present. None the less it is anarchic, anti-bourgeois and anti-Marxian. It is stealing a march over coming anarchy in the West and in the world. Hail Gandhism because it is anarchic—it is new to a fossil world of ideas.

I rather think that the anarchic claims for Gandhism by comrade M. Acharya are more of an inspired wish than a triumphant reality as yet. – Editor.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The “Communist” Programme: A Critical Review
2. Communism in Its True Form
3. “Anarchist Manifesto”
4. The Mystery Behind the Chinese Trouble
5. In India
6. Disruption of Marxism
7. From a Bolshevik
8. Mother India
9. Principles of Non-Violent Economics
10. Unity – What For?
11. Why This Judicial Murder?
12. On Jealousy
13. Trusts and Democracy
14. Project: Intended to Wrest Small Industries from the Clutches of Capitalism
15. Gandhi and Non-Violence
16. The Problem of Exploitation and Its Elimination
17. Some Confusions Among Workers
18. Who Are Workers?
19. Is the Exchange Between the City and the Countryside Economical?
20. A Response to all “Economists”
21. The End of the Money System
22. Nationalism in India
23. On the Question of Race
24. Is the Present System Doomed?
25. A Belated Forecast for the Year 1934
26. Anarchy or Chaos?
27. The Case for Buddhism
28. Max Nettlau as Biographer and Historian
29. Ethics and “Isms”
30. A Letter from India
31. Is War Inevitable?
32. Letter from India
33. Anarchy: From Philosophy to Economics
34. Labour Splits in India
35. What is Anarchism?
36. A Libertarian Voice from India
37. Libertarian Thought in India
38. Money & Moral Values
39. Life of the Workers in India
40. Voice of India
41. The End of an Era: Echoes of Independent India
42. Trade Unions in India – Pillars of Capitalism
43. An Indian Looks at “Independence”
44. Savarkar: A Criticism
45. How Long Can Capitalism Survive?
46. Our Indian Correspondent on the Stuffed Dove of Peace at the Indian Peace Convention
47. Confusion Between Communism and State Capitalism
48. Letters to the editor of Thought
49. Letter from India: Nehru and Korea
50. Indians in British Colonies

Timeline

Index

Editorial Reviews

Ole Birk Laursen has done us a valuable service in tracking down and collecting the work of M.P.T. Acharya, scattered across countries, decades, and publications, and not least placing this work in well-researched context.… This is a treasure chest that will enrich our picture of both global anarchist and South Asian radical history.” —Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle

“With this collection of writings—many made available in English for the first time—Ole Birk Laursen recovers the extraordinary life and writings of M.P.T. Acharya, perhaps India’s most important but least remembered anarchist activist and theoretician.... Anyone interested in anticolonial struggles past or present should read this book.” —Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

“This fascinating and rich collection of essays by M.P.T. Acharya significantly deepens our understandings of transnational radical thought in the early twentieth century, placing Indian activists at the center of critiques of communism emanating from Berlin, Paris, Bombay and London.” —Kama Maclean, author of A Revolutionary History of Interwar India

“M. P. T. Acharya was one of that mass of significant and undeservedly neglected figures active in international anarchist movement, in India and across Europe, who fought for the implementation of anarchist principles during a period of dramatic geopolitical change in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Ole Birk Laursen’s breathtakingly meticulous and riveting account of his life and his interactions with other leading figures in the anarchist movement is a perfect introduction to an important collection of writings that cover issues from non-violence to race, nationalism, and Bolshevism. Anyone interested in Indian and transnational anarchism, nationalism, anti-colonialism, and the cross-fertilisation of anarchist ideas and practices will cherish this book.” —Ruth Kinna, author of Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition

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