Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (105 page)

While the anarchist propagandist Osawa welcomed the ‘revolutionary violence’ of the students, he warned that it would become oppressive if it remained separated from the ‘revolutionary masses’. In the event, the students singularly failed to turn their struggle for greater autonomy into a popular movement. The workers in Japan had become too wedded to the material gains of a thriving economy and too blinded by the ties of loyalty to their companies.

Anarchism in Japan has remained primarily the preserve of small groups of students and isolated intellectuals. In the late 1970s, however, a new anarcho-syndicalist organization called the Rodosha Rentai Undo (Workers’ Solidarity Movement) was formed in the Tokyo area and is making headway in other regions. Parliamentary democracy in Japan still remains a delicate plant in stony soil, and the corruption and misrule of a series of conservative governments have sharpened the relevance of the anarchist critique. Direct action also remains part of Japanese political culture. While a social revolution in Japan seems remote, anarchism with its Buddhist and Taoist roots retains its moral force and its legacy will not be erased.

As in China and Japan, Korea has an old libertarian tradition, especially through Taoist influence. The roots of Korean anarchism have been traced back to Jeong Dasan (1760–1833) and Su-un (1824–64).
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Dasan advocated a ‘village-land system’, an early form of anarcho-communism in which people possess jointly the land and cultivate it in common. Everyone is expected to work but can choose and receive according to need. Differences between rich and poor villages would be overcome through free transfers between them. Su-un was more of a philosopher than Dasan. As a humanist, he argued that ‘Man is Heaven’ and inferred that all human beings are of equal worth. He was executed for trying to upset the feudal order.

These ideas found expression in the Farmers’ Revolution in Honan Province in 1894 during which the district which supplied half the rice production of Korea was taken over until it was crushed by the invading Japanese.

During the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 the anarchist movement developed in Korea as part of the national resistance. In the Shimmin region, anarchists formed an independent administration from 1929 to 1931. One ‘anarchist’ Yu-Rim even took part in the ‘Provisional Government’. Korean anarchists are therefore considered patriots today and have a section devoted to them in the Independence Hall in Seoul.

The devastating civil war of the 1950s split the country, with the north developing a Stalinist form of communism under Kim Il Sung which has remained as authoritarian and monolithic as ever. The rulers in the south chose to develop a form of State-directed capitalism. Free trade unions are still not allowed so anarcho-syndicalism has hardly got off the ground. A Federation of Anarchists of Korea however exists and its secretary Ha Ki-Rak, veteran of the Kwangju uprising against the Japanese in 1929, has translated many classic anarchist texts into Korean. The Korean anarchist movement still remains somewhat nationalist and reformist, with the centre of libertarian opposition to the regime remaining with the students and the young who are obliged to do three years’ military service.

As in China and Japan, the Buddhist tradition of non-interference and indifference to political power made anarchism attractive to a few Indian intellectuals and spiritual teachers. The Buddha told of the first men who lived in perfect harmony but they are said to have had no corporeal bodies. Jaina too tells of a heaven on earth in which no person is discontent and all wants are satisfied by trees. Nevertheless, the mainstream Hindu tradition, with its rigid caste system, is static and hierarchical. Although there was no ideal of a stateless society in ancient Indian political thought, it is doubtful that there was ever a clear idea of the State as a living entity in pre-Muslim times.
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The idea of the State is discouraged by the concept of
dharma
which is seen as a cosmic law which regulates the universe and sustains society. Indian mysticism moreover has always recognized the need for the individual to work out his or her liberation.

Modern anarchism has popularly been associated in India with violence and naturally has not appealed to those committed to non-violence. Whereas most Western anarchists have been ‘anti-statist’, Indian anarchism tends to be more ‘non-statist’, preferring to build an alternative society and to make the State redundant rather than trying to destroy it at one stroke. It is mainly
for this reason that Tolstoy has been the most influential Western anarchist in India.

Before the Second World War no real anarchist movement on Western lines developed in India although isolated militants like the Bombay worker M. P. T. Acharya who moved in London anarchist circles in the thirties did their best to introduce anarcho-communism.
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A Bombay publishing house also reprinted many Western anarchist classics, but they did not find fertile ground beyond a few student and intellectual circles. It was left to the heirs of revolutionary Gandhism to develop an authentically Indian anarchist movement.

While Gandhi has been the outstanding libertarian in India earlier this century, he was not the only one to draw on the country’s spiritual traditions in order to reach anarchist conclusions. The central belief of Hindu philosophy is a belief in the divine nature of the unique individual. God is usually interpreted as a moral principle, not a person, synonymous with truth.

Vivekananda early this century reinterpreted the
Bhagavadgita
in a libertarian direction by arguing that every individual has a right to self-realization. ‘Liberty is the first condition of growth’, he argued, since it leads to individual self-awareness and to the realization of human solidarity and social harmony. The process of self-realization does not cut the individual off from others; on the contrary: ‘You are part of the Infinite. This is your nature. Hence you are your brother’s keeper.’ Nevertheless, while insisting that all control should be voluntary, Vivekananda defined the freedom to which each soul aims in terms of ‘freedom from the slavery of matter and thought, mastery of external and internal nature’.
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Aurobindo Ghose, who was educated in England, took up Vivekananda’s teaching, and became an outstanding spokesman of the national liberation struggle. While advocating non-violent direct action, he sympathized with those prepared to fight against the British. In his philosophy, he tried to reconcile individual freedom with social unity and called for ‘preservation by reconstruction’. The individual may exist outside society but once he has attained the personal realization he seeks he should return to the community in order to help others find their own truth and fullness of being. Although Aurobindo saw the Nation-State as a progressive stage in human history after the collapse of empires, in his study
The Ideal of Human Unity
(1918) he described that entity as a mechanical, constricting and uniform structure which should give way to the ideal of anarchy: ‘the unity of the human to be entirely sound and in consonance with the deepest laws of life must be founded on free groupings and the groupings again must be the natural association of free individuals.’
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Like modern social ecologists, he felt that unity is best achieved in diversity, that anarchy is in
keeping with the ultimate aims of nature, and that freedom means self-fulfilment in harmony with the environment.

The Indian guru Osho, better known in the West as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, often celebrated anarchism as the ultimate goal of human evolution, but he had none of the philosophical rigour or clarity of style of Aurobindo. For him, revolutionary practice meant meditation, freeing the mind from restraint so that it might achieve the true realization of self. He was well aware of the work of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy, and argued that ‘there is no need for any laws, any constitutions’, but felt that the anarchist ideal could not be achieved without a spiritual transformation. Freedom for him meant being responsible for oneself: ‘That you have to be left alone, that the government need not interfere with you, that the police need not interfere with you, that the law need not interfere with you, that the law has nothing to say to you — you are simply alone.’
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He once told a French journalist from
Le Figaro
: ‘Whichever regime is closer to anarchism is better — the closest to anarchism is best — whatever is furthest from anarchism is worst.’
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Osho proposes the simple life of economic communism coupled with spiritual growth which should flower into anarchism. Such aims are revolutionary enough, but his demands for a reborn spirituality offer little substantial guidance. The guru found hundreds of Western followers amongst disenchanted middle-class youth; many aped his ideas, and practised his teachings, but no organization was spawned comparable to that sponsored by Gandhi’s spiritual tutelage. His fondness for acquiring many a Rolls-Royce car, a triumphantly capitalist icon, did little to bolster his credibility; as did reports of far-from-anarchistic financial corruption amongst his aides.

Gandhi of course was the most influential social thinker this century in India. He was deeply affected by the writings of Tolstoy, but developed his notion of non-resistant love into non-violent direct action and helped organize mass campaigns of civil disobedience to oust the British rulers. He not only saw the State as representing violence in a concentrated and organized form, but contemplated an increase in the power of the State ‘with the greatest fear’ since it destroys the kind of individuality which lies at the root of all progress. He came closest to anarchism when he declared that the ideal society would be one of ‘enlightened anarchy’ where ‘everyone is his own ruler, and … there is not political power because there is no State.’
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In practice, however, Gandhi was prepared to work with the National Congress and felt that some form of State was necessary in a transitional period before the ideal of anarchy could be realized. The
Sarvodaya
(welfare of all) movement however which Gandhi inspired went beyond his cautious position to a more overtly anarchist one.

After Gandhi’s death, a few thousand constructive workers in the
Sarvodaya
movement followed their teacher’s suggestion that they should not participate in politics and formed in 1948 a loosely affiliated fellowship. In the following year, it united several Gandhian associations, notably the Spinners Association and the Village Industries Association, under an umbrella organization called Akhil Bharat Sarva Seva Sangh, the All India Association for the Service of All. They followed Gandhi in promoting a non-violent revolution in order to transform India into a society of self-governing village republics.

Vinoba Bhave soon emerged as the leader of the
Sarvodaya
movement which tried to bring about a land revolution. He launched the campaign for
Bhoodan
, in which landowners were persuaded to donate voluntarily a part of their land to the landless. From this policy developed in the mid 1950s the more ambitious
Gramdan
campaign which tried to bring about communal villages. It was seen as the immediate programme of a total revolution which would lead to the complete moral and social transformatiort not only of Indian society but of the entire world.
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Under the guidance of Vinoba Bhave who stressed the need to ‘forget Gandhi’ and made his own experiments with truth, the
Sarvodaya
movement took an increasingly anarchist direction.
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It not only stressed the social implications of
ahimsa
but radically interpreted Gandhi’s notion of ‘trusteeship’ to support the policy of the common ownership of land. Like Godwin, Gandhi maintained that any property one has, including one’s talents, should be used to the benefit of the whole. As in the family, so in society: property should be held in common, each giving according to his ability and each taking according to his needs. In the long run, this would lead to to social equality, as would the call for integrated labour and the recognition that all work is of equal value. The
Sarvodaya
movement was as committed as Gandhi to a decentralized economy of combined fields and workshops although it placed more stress on the value of appropriate technology. Despite the claims of their critics, they have no desire to turn back the clock but merely wish to avoid the disastrous consequences of unchecked industrial growth and to promote local autonomy.

Like Gandhi, the movement was also deeply suspicious of centralized political authority. By stressing the right of private judgement and the importance of the individual conscience, Vinoba rejected the legitimacy of the State’s claim to obedience. ‘If I am under some other person’s command, where is my self-government?’, he asked.

Vinoba also believed that the State and government can provide no useful service, however benevolent they may appear: ‘My voice is raised in opposition to good government … What seems to me to be wrong is that we should allow ourselves to be governed at all, even by good government.’ And to dispense with the impression that these are just isolated statements, Vinoba insisted that his main idea is that all humanity should be set free from the burden of government: ‘If there is a disease from which the entire world suffers, it is this disease called government.’
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