In light of mentioning Gandhi in recent correspondence with Jeremy, I thought I'd share this essay about this extraordinary figure, written for a libertarian publication, The Voluntaryist.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
BOOKS OF INTEREST
by Carl Watner
Gene Sharp, Gandhi As A Political Strategist with Essays
on Ethics and Politics, Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers,
1979, 357 pp.
In the annals of 20th Century political history,
Mohandas Gandhi undoubtedly holds a unique place.
For one thing, he was probably the only leader of a
national independence movement in this century not
to have held political office or led troops into military
combat. Yet it was his creative theory of Satyagraha
("Truth Force") which was the driving force behind
India's independence. As Gene Sharp demonstrates in
this collection of essays about Gandhi and the theory
of nonviolent resistance, Gandhi was an extraordinary
political strategist. Gandhi's primary contribution
during this century was to argue for, develop and
implement practical nonviolent means of struggle.
He was the first to consciously act on the voluntaryist
insight and he formulated a major system of resistance
based on this assumption. Thus, Gandhi deserves our
careful attention.
Gandhi has often been maligned and misunderstood in
the United States. It is important that libertarians
understand and come to grips with Gandhi's stance on
nonviolence as a means of social change because it
offers them an entirely new alternative to electoral
politics. The Indians are often perceived as being
inherently nonviolent people, but this is definitely not
so. Nonviolent action was accepted as a technique of
struggle in the grand strategy for Indian liberation
because Gandhi offered it as a course of action which
was above all practical and effective.
Although Sharp does not offer us a full scale biography
of Gandhi, we are able to fit together a picture of his
life. Born in 1869 into the family of well to do Hindus,
Gandhi led an uneventful childhood. He was sent to
England in the late 1880's to pursue legal studies. It
was in South Africa, where he was sent to represent
an Indian firm in 1893, that he read some of the works
of Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau.
His concern from that time until 1914 was the
liberation of the Indian community there. These two
decades served as the proving ground for forging the
weapons later used in India. In South Africa, Gandhi
proved that a well conducted civil-resistance movement
could embarrass an opponent of superior numbers and
physical power and could eventually mobilize public
opinion to such an extent that discriminatory legislation
would be rescinded.
South Africa was truly the birthplace of Gandhi's
Satyagraha. To counter the discriminatory laws placed
on the Indian minority in South Africa, Gandhi chose to
develop a theory of resistance which was at once nonviolent
and nonhostile. "The resistance he wished to offer would
be that of people who did not fear to be violent but chose
deliberately to be nonviolent and fight by the power of
truth rather than by the power of the body." Satyagraha
was born from the knowledge that the soul cannot be
jailed and that freedom and slavery are mental states.
The theory of social and political power basic to Satyagraha
is the theory of voluntary servitude or what The
Voluntaryists label the voluntaryist insight. Even before
Gandhi had read Tolstoy or Thoreau, he realized that the
genuine source of political power "lies at the grass roots"
level. it is the cooperation and obedience of the subjects
which permit elites to wield power. Such power can be
curtailed by the withdrawal of cooperation and obedience.
As Sharp writes, "Accordingly, on the question of how to
achieve social and political changes, Satyagraha differs
fundamentally from those political philosophies which
accept the need for a seizure of power (whether by
violence, majority decision, or other means)... "
(pp. 72-73).
When Gandhi returned to India during World War I, he
found a situation similar to that he had encountered in
South Africa. The Indians were involved in a struggle to
determine how and at what pace they might seek
independence from Great Britain. Gandhi realized the
applicability of Satyagraha to this movement and, as
early as 1917, began implementing nonviolent struggle
against the British. From that time until he was
assassinated in 1948, (after having seen Indian
independence granted), Gandhi was one of the spiritual
and political leaders of India.
Gandhi has a superb sense of timing, a quick intuitive
grasp of the balance of power, an instinct for symbolic
action, and an unsurpassed view of strategy and tactics.
These are some of the reasons he was one of the most
able political figures of his time. This is all the more
remarkable because, remembering the lessons of the
Bhagavad Gita, he never sought the rewards of politics.
Much of Gandhi's success was based on his realization
that the ends he sought were irretrievably linked to the
means he used to attain them. Nonviolent resistance, for
him, was the only way to promote peace and oppose
injustice simultaneously. It was the only way to unite
the means with the ends. Satyagraha was at the same
time the most practical and most moral approach for
achieving social change. Neither Sharp nor Gandhi accept
the dichotomy that the moral and practical approaches
to societal change are really different. It was this view
of the relationship of means and ends which led Gandhi
to reject both violent revolution and electoral politics.
Gandhi maintained that "if one takes care of the means,
the end will take care of itself."
Gandhi emphasized the importance of using only
nonviolent means and showed why the use of unjust or
violent means in an effort to hurry up progress would
only hinder goals. He drew on the Hindu concept of
"nonattached action" going back as far as the Bhagavad
Gita and applied it to politics. "He maintained that
action which is determined on the basis of ethical or
moral standards turns out in the final analysis to be the
more practical course than that determined by short-term
expediency for achieving the desired goal." (p. 291). It
is an interesting coincidence to see how closely this
reasoning follows Ayn Rand's strictures that the moral
and the practical are always synonymous. Nonviolent
resistance is the only theory of social change consonant
with these requirements and that is why Gandhi was not
a politician, but rather a partisan of civil disobedience
and nonviolent struggle.
Gandhi's way of dealing with violence, as Sharp points
out, was very different from the traditional Western
pacifist. He was not a conscientious objector nor a war
resister, although he obviously did not support military
means. Gandhi respected the willingness of a man or
woman to fight and die for their beliefs. This willingness
to die represents one of the strengths of nonviolent
resistance and indicates why it is, in fact, a weapon of
the strong. Gandhi wanted "men to give up violence
because they were strong enough not to feel the need for
it and because they had a better way of facing serious
conflicts." In one of his most famous statements. Gandhi
announced that "Strength does not come from physical
capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." (p. 138).
"Satyagraha is always superior to armed resistance ...
It is the weapon that adorns the strong. Nonviolence is
without exception superior to violence, i.e. the power at
the disposal of a nonviolent person is always greater than
he would have if he was violent."
Sharp's final evaluation of Gandhi echoes George Orwell's
assessment: "regarded simply as a politician, and
compared with other leading political figures of our
time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!"
Despite his extraordinary political canniness, Gandhi
remained uncorrupted in a country where politics and
corruption were almost identical. More importantly,
whenever the chance of political power lay near at hand
either before or after the liberation of India, he rejected
it, and in this he was certainly unique among the
revolutionaries of any time. Although Gandhi confessed
to being "a kind of anarchist" his impulse was religiously
and socially rather than politically motivated.
Nevertheless, Sharp's book shows why Gandhi is of
significance to The Voluntaryists. When the Indian
National Congress became a political party, Gandhi
withdrew from it. "With an extraordinary persistence
he made and kept himself one of the few free men of
our time."