Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (106 page)

This led naturally to a criticism of parliamentary democracy. In the first place, the Sarvodayites like their Western anarchist counterparts assert that those who seek political power are inevitably corrupted. Secondly, they believe that the principle of majority rule cannot express public opinion and bring about the welfare for all. Thirdly, they maintain that political parties are by their nature divisive and corrupting. Recognizing that revolutions are never achieved by power or party politics, the
Sarvodaya
movement therefore sought at this stage to develop a new form of politics based on the direct action of the people themselves. Through Vinoba’s inspiration, the Sarva Seva Sangh (Association for the Service of All) adopted the basic rule that all decisions should be taken either unanimously (all members positively agreeing) or by consensus (no member actively disagreeing).

There are of course important differences from the mainstream of Western anarchism. Like Tolstoy’s anarchism, the
Sarvodaya
movement is fundamentally religious, and while it sees all creeds as different paths to the same end and even tolerates atheism, it assumes the existence of God and the reality of spirit. Its appeal to all classes is ultimately based on a metaphysical belief in the unity of humankind and in the harmony of interests. Its confidence in an objective moral order means that its central principle of non-violence can take on the force of a categorical imperative. The Sarvodayites have also inherited Gandhi’s ascetic, puritanical and repressive character. They rightly want to simplify life, but in pursuing non-attachment they wish to eliminate all sensual pleasure.

In addition, the Sarvodayites are gradualists and flexible in their application of theory. They believe that truth, the obverse of which is non-violence, exists in an absolute sense. But they acknowledge that human beings, however enlightened, are capable of expressing only relative truths. The world might be evolving towards non-violence, but violence is preferable to nonviolence adopted out of cowardice. In the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, for instance, many Sarvodayites accepted military resistance as justifiable
(while not resisting themselves) since the Indian people were not strong enough for
ahimsa.

Their gradualism is also reflected in Vinoba’s three-fold programme of political development which moves from national independence, via a decentralized self-governing State, to pure anarchy or freedom from all government. He saw himself working in his lifetime to develop the second stage; the last stage will only be reached when all the people, both rich and poor, powerful and weak, become self-reliant and self-governing. The State will eventually wither away, but only if people build an alternative society. And this will be possible only through the slow and thorough transformation of ideas and values.

Vinoba’s two most important contributions to anarchism however were his views of non-violent direct action and popular politics. The first involves
satyagraha.
He preferred to work positively through non-violent
assistance
in right thinking rather than through Gandhi’s non-violent
resistance
to evil. He wanted get rid of all coercion, moral as well as physical, confident that it is enough to reveal the truth for it to be immediately understood and acted upon. Secondly, Vinoba advocated the ‘politics of the people’, which involves the positive non-violence of truth and love instead of the ‘politics of the State’ which excites a craving for power. Even the Welfare State is wrong since it encourages dependence. He fully recognized that the ‘only way to bring peace is to renounce power’ since ‘If you want to cut down a tree, it is no use to climb into its branches.’
³³
To this end he called for a new politics of partyless democracy based on the consensus of all classes and groups.

At the peak of its campaign for land revolution in 1969, the
Sarvodaya
movement managed to get 140,000 villages to declare themselves in favour of modified version of
Gramdan
(in which landowners possessed ninety-five per cent of their land donated). Although the movement distributed over one million acres of
Bhoodan
land to half a million landless peasants, it failed to redeem the vast majority of pledges in favour of
Gramdan
, with the result that few villages became even partially communitarian. Many peasants were alienated by the volunteer workers, who on occasion appeared somewhat proud, if not arrogant, in their moral superiority. The movement also became identified to a degree with the National Congress since the government had actually endorsed
Gramdan
programme as a way of promoting its own more modest land reforms.

As the movement began to founder in the early 1970s, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), an ex-socialist Party leader who had joined
Sarvodaya
in 1954, began to exert a dominant influence. On joining, he had argued that the way forward was ‘to create and develop socialist living through the voluntary endeavour of the people rather than seek to establish socialism
by use of the power of the State’.
³⁴
He now began calling however for the ‘politicalization’ of the movement and the use of Gandhi’s more aggressive form of non-violent struggle which involved active resistance to the State. Ninety per cent of the activists supported JP’s revised strategy but Vinoba himself declined to endorse any departure from his ‘non-political’ and ‘gentle to gentler to gentlest’ approach.

In the ensuing crisis, JP and his supporters went on the offensive and tried to turn a students’ rebellion in the northern State of Bihar into a ‘people’s movement’ for ‘Total Revolution’. No doubt recalling the Marxism of his youth, JP declared that it had become ‘glaringly apparent’ that the ‘state system was subservient to a variety of forces and interests in keeping it a closed shop’.
³⁵
Mass demonstrations opposed ‘student power’ and ‘people’s power’ to ‘State power’ and through ‘struggle committees’ a parallel system of self-government was attempted. Indira Gandhi however responded by imposing in 1975 her State of Emergency for nearly two years, imprisoning the main opposition leaders.

Vinoba, Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘spiritual heir’, had reacted to JP’s campaign by a year’s vow of silence as a mark of disapproval. Asked for his opinion of the Emergency, he vouchsafed the written comment without breaking his silence: ‘an era of discipline’. It was immediately interpreted as support for Indira Gandhi’s government and the State of Emergency. The old libertarian who had done so much to guide the
Sarvodaya
movement into a genuinely anarchist direction, was even hailed as the ‘Saint of the Government’.
³⁶
He later clarified his position by saying that he was referring to the discipline laid down by the
acharyas
(traditional teachers) to guide their pupils, but the harm had been done.

For his part, JP abandoned all anarchist pretensions. Throwing himself into the political struggle in Bihar, he reminded the students that he would not be a leader in name only and that while he would take the advice of all they would have to accept his decision. During the State of Emergency he then helped organize the coalition of non-Communist parties which formed the Janata (People) Party which defeated unexpectedly Indira Gandhi in 1977. He still held true to his vision of a community in which every individual is dedicated to serving the weak, in which individuals are valued for their humanity and in which every citizen participates in its affairs, but he now saw that a vote for the Janata Party was the way to realize it.
³⁷
Composed of the same social forces and interests as its Congress predecessors, it singularly failed to change anything in India. Since Indira Gandhi’s return in 1980 and the subsequent rule of her son and his successors, India has drifted further into authoritarian rule.

JP died in 1979 and Vinoba three years later. Although JP made his strategy of revolution more confrontational, Vinoba remained the purer
anarchist of the two. JP like Gandhi had the dubious honour of a State funeral, but not Vinoba. As for the
Sarvodaya
movement itself, its disastrous engagement in conventional politics has left it weakened and uncertain. The failure of its political compromises has encouraged the landless and poor peasants who have not benefited from India’s ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture to look more to the Communist parties and to those who adopt the violent methods of the Naxalite movement.

From its political baptism of fire, the
Sarvodaya
movement emerged no longer as gentle and anarchistic as it had once appeared. Since 1978, the
Sangh
has modified the unanimity principle to accept majority decisions of eighty per cent. With the loss of its two principal leaders, it has developed more collective ways of forging policy. The main thrust of this policy is now directed towards building from below ‘a non-party alternative’ to the existing system, combining elements of both Vinoba’s and JP’s ideas. But the
Sangh
also promotes the idea of fielding non-party ‘people’s candidates’ in elections.

Whatever the future, the
Sarvodaya
movement which developed from revolutionary Gandhism remains distinctly libertarian, and represents the fruitful union of Western economic and social thought with traditional Indian philosophy. It is still active in India and Sri Lanka in the new century.

Neither Victims nor Executioners.
A
LBERT
C
AMUS

Power is war, continued by other means.
M
ICHEL
F
OUCAULT

I am an anarchist/I am Antichrist.
’A
NARCHY
IN
THE
UK’, S
EX
P
ISTOLS

Never Work.
Under the Paving Stones, the Beach.
I Take My Desires for Reality, Because I Believe in the
Reality of My Desires.
P
ARIS
, 1968

T
HE
LAST
GREAT
ANARCHIST
experiment on a large scale took place in the Spain of the 1930s, and the anarchists’ defeat by Franco’s forces destroyed libertarian activity in that country for a generation. The rise of fascism in Germany and Italy destroyed the movements there, while in Britain and France the small remaining bands of anarchists played only a minor role in the struggle against fascism during the Second World War. During the post-war period of reconstruction in Europe, capitalism not only failed to collapse as a result of its own inherent contradictions, as predicted by Marxists, but seemed to many workers to be delivering the goods. It appeared for a while mat the ‘end of ideology’ had come. The European anarchist movement had become so fragmented by the late fifties and early sixties that historians of anarchism were sounding its death knell, burying it in valedictory tomes. Only the idea of anarchism seemed to remain as an unrealizable ideal, perpetually receding on the horizon.

The resurgence of anarchism in the sixties therefore came as a great surprise. With hindsight, however, it is possible to trace a gradual disillusionment on the Left with authoritarian socialism, especially in its Soviet form, after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. As the Cold War began to bite, the promises of Western social democracy — that it would liberate the peoples of Europe from fear and want — came to ring increasingly hollow. Towards the end of the decade, the campaign against the stationing of nuclear weapons in Europe, a campaign which proved especially vigorous in Britain, radicalized a large number of young people.

In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement and the Students for a Democratic Society made a new generation wary of the coercive power of the State. Although the demand was initially for ‘one man, one vote’, the protesters took to the street and practised non-violent direct action. The police replied with force. For many young people vaguely discontent with their lot, the direct confrontation with authority proved traumatic: ‘The policeman’s riot club functions like a magic wand’, wrote Carl Oglesby in
extravagant, existentialist tones, ‘under whose hard caress the banal soul grows vivid and the nameless recover their authenticity — a bestower, this wand, of the lost charisma of the modern self: I bleed, therefore I am.’
¹

Tired of the grey monotony of bourgeois life, groups of the young began to ‘drop out’ and form their own subculture. They wanted to establish a free social space for their imaginative experiments. The cult of the anti-hero and the outsider suggested that all was not well in suburbia. Albert Camus’ existentialist stress on rebellion in thought and action against the absurdity of life was widely appreciated. Although the young rebels had not yet found a cause, they wanted to leave their comfortable homes and take to the open road.