Gandhi's Villages: Some Communal History (Part Four)

from Commune Life

Currently, among the many things that I’m doing is that I’m in a book group.  We are discussing The Gandhian Iceberg, a book subtitled: “A Nonviolence Manifesto for the Age of the Great Turning.”  I’m not going to recommend the book because I wasn’t taken with parts of it, especially the author’s emphasis on Gandhi’s program of “self-purification”.  However, I was very interested in what the author had to say about Gandhi’s “constructive program”.

While Gandhi is famous for his teachings and emphasis on nonviolence, especially direct action (which he called ‘satyagraha’), he was even more interested in the total transformation of Indian life.  He was particularly concerned about programs he called ‘swadeshi’ (local production) and ‘swaraj’ (self-rule or home-rule).  Gandhi is probably best known for his work in helping India achieve independence, however after the British left, Gandhi disagreed with Nehru about where India should go next.  

When I started reading The Gandhian Iceberg, I realized that I had a book on Gandhi that I hadn’t read, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays.  The first essay in the book points out that Gandhi was very critical of Western ‘modernity’.  He was very influenced by such western writers as Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau, who were also critical of modernity.  He wanted an India rebuilt from the bottom up, not the top down.  He wanted  “to convert the Indian National Congress from a political party seeking power to a Lok Sevak Sangh, a People’s Service Association.”  The authors point out that “Gandhi started with the village and the villager, with local economy and employment, with work in small-scale industries, crafts, and agriculture.  Nehru started with the city and urban life, with centralized state planning, and with production and work in large-scale, impersonal industry and offices.”

Gandhi was far from perfect.  (Unfortunately, he did a lot of cringe worthy things.) While he is sometimes revered in the US and other countries for his nonviolent actions, he is less held in esteem in India today.  There is a video of Arundhati Roy talking about many of the issues around regarding him as a ‘saint’, when he was anything but.   Arundhati Roy mentioned B.R. Ambedkar, which led to me looking him and his issues with Gandhi up on the web.  Basically, Ambedkar was a Dalit, the lowest caste in India, which has been called the “untouchables”.  While Gandhi was horrified by the treatment of Dalits and wanted to improve their situation, Gandhi was also a devout Hindu and believed the caste system was an important part of his religion.  Ambedkar wanted to do away entirely with the caste system.  He eventually decided that Hinduism was beyond reform and became a Buddhist.  (The authors of Postmodern Gandhi note that Ambedkar also had a problem with Gandhi’s emphasis on villages, seeing them as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and communalism.”  They also point out that he wasn’t wrong.  But Gandhi was talking about “imagined villages”, villages built around equality as well as self-sufficiency, potential villages of a postmodern future.)

Where did Gandhi’s ideas come from?  Gandhi was on an overnight train ride across South Africa, in 1904, when he read John Ruskin’s book, Unto This Last. “...he resolved the next morning ‘to change my life in accordance with the ideals of this book.’”  He started an agricultural settlement not far from Durban, in South Africa, which became called the Phoenix Settlement.  Then, in 1910, he started Tolstoy Farm, named after Leo Tolstoy, near Johannesburg. These were ashrams, communities devoted to “a life of simple living, service and political activism.”   The authors of Postmodern Gandhi (where all this information and the quotes come from) go on to say, “He created seven ashrams in all, two in South Africa, five in India.”

Communitarian?  Again from Postmodern Gandhi: “With members drawn from many castes, classes, religions, occupations, regions, and languages… Ashrams prefigured how those from diverse social backgrounds could choose to live a new form of life.”  How egalitarian was Gandhi?  While he did act as the leader, he also fought for economic equality.  From The Gandhian Iceberg comes the following Gandhi quotes: “By the nonviolent method, we seek not to destroy the capitalist, we seek to destroy capitalism…” “Trusteeship provides a means of transforming the present capitalist order of society into an egalitarian one.”  And as for sharing, there’s the famous Gandhi quote: “We have Sufficient for Everybody's Needs, Not For Greed.” From The Gandhian Iceberg, “According to the principle of asteya, non-stealing, anything we acquire beyond what we need has been stolen.”  He was certainly into simple living and sharing.

So how did it all work out?  While Gandhi’s visions of ashrams and imagined villages (his ‘Constructive Program’) were certainly inspiring and he worked hard at creating these alternatives and there were many people who tried to help him, the author of The Gandhian Iceberg notes that Gandhi’s constructive ideas were “met with a great deal of resistance, and the khadi campaign [to get Indians to wear clothes made from home-spun cotton], specifically, often attracted outright ridicule.”  He goes on to point out that Judith Brown, in her book Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, talks about modern India and “describes an India teeming with Gandhi statues, and with roads and institutions named after him, which nevertheless presents barely a whiff of evidence that such a thing as the Constructive Programme ever existed.”

This isn’t to say that the movement died with Gandhi.  There were several leaders in India that tried to carry on what he started, in particular Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan, but it seems clear that India today is far from the imagined villages and ashrams of Gandhi.

This work is hard.  The egalitarian movements like the Anabaptists were crushed in Europe, the Diggers were crushed in England, and a lot of his constructive program died in India with Gandhi.  Yet there are still many people who believe in sharing, equality, and communal living.  I recognize that this tour through communal history doesn’t bode well for the egalitarian movements of today, but I also believe that there is a very human impulse toward sharing and community.  We can either give up or keep trying.  I intend to keep trying.

Diggers and Quakers: Some Communal History (Part Three)

 from Commune Life

While egalitarian movements were crushed in continental Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see Part Two of this history), some new variants emerged in England during the middle of the seventeenth century.

That time “saw the emergence of dozens of unconventional groups, counter-cultural sects with exotic names like Muggletonians, Grindletonians, Seekers, Adamites, Ranters, Levellers, and True Levellers (better known as ‘the Diggers’).” Many of these groups, similar to the medieval movements on the continent, were religious in nature.  Probably the most important and most radical of them were the Diggers.

The Diggers called themselves the True Levellers to differentiate themselves from the movement that was being referred to as the Levellers, a group of reformers who just wanted things like universal male suffrage and other reforms.  The True Levellers, however, wanted to  “make the Earth a Common Treasury,” and started April first, 1649, by digging up and cultivating a spot of land in Surrey called St George’s Hill (thus people started calling them “the Diggers”) where they grew food and began a little commune.  They were inspired by bible passages such as Acts 4:32 where the apostles and believers “had everything in common.”  One of their main spokespersons was Gerrard Winstanley, a tailor from London who wrote the manifesto The True Levellers Standard Advanced,  where he declared: “The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows.”

This rebellion didn’t last long.  As one writer put it:  “Fear of a communist takeover spread among local ministers and small property owners. The Diggers at St. Georges Hill suffered insults and assaults, and several Diggers were arrested for trespassing on St. Georges Hill. In March 1650, the small community of Diggers was dispersed. In April, a small Digger community in Cobham was also dispersed after a local Lord of the Manor, Parson Platt, and others destroyed Digger houses, furniture, and scattered their belongings. The Diggers were threatened with death if they returned, and several guards were posted at the property.” 

The Diggers were resurrected in San Francisco in the mid-nineteen sixties as part of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene.  These folks consciously took the name from the original DIggers and inspired by them, distributed free food and opened Free Stores.

Interestly enough, not long after the original Diggers were dispersed, another English movement, The Society of Friends (also called the Quakers) began.  “Historians mark 1652 as the beginning of the Quaker movement. One day Fox climbed up desolate Pendle Hill (believed to be a haunt of demons) and saw "a people in white raiment, coming to the Lord.’”  As another writer noted, this was “during the aftermath of the English Civil War; a time when many people were interested in radically reshaping religion, politics and society. Early Quakers started preaching around the North of England, and then further afield around Britain, gathering followers who were convinced by their radical ideas.”

The Quakers, unlike the Diggers and some of the other egalitarian movements, are still around.  I think of them as one of the few nonhierarchical religions and organized spiritual movements.  (Offhand, the only other ones I can think of are the Havurah Movement–or at least some parts of it–and the Reclaiming Witches.  There are probably others without clergy–let me know in the comments if you know of any.)  A Quaker joke I really appreciate is the argument that the Quakers didn’t get rid of the clergy–they got rid of the laity.

The Quakers are also decentralized–they have no central authority.  As the authors of the book The Starfish and the Spider put it:  “Here was a robust network of people who lived together, conducted business with one another, and shared a common belief system.  Put together a close-knit community with shared values and add a belief that everyone’s equal and what do you get?  Decentralization.”  They go on to add, “The Quakers weren’t just decentralized themselves; they served as the decentralized platform upon which the antislavery movement was built.”

Given the time and location of the Diggers and the Quakers, I wondered if there was any relationship between them.  Apparently there were folks in the seventeenth century  who thought so.  An article on Quakers and Diggers notes that “the Dean of Durham, Thomas Comber, published a book … claiming that the Quakers ‘derived their ideas from the communist writer Gerrard Winstanley’, which in his view made ‘repression of Quakerism… not only a service to God, but a preservation of every man and his property’.”   The author of the article goes on to say that many Quaker writers over the years have claimed that there was no evidence of contact between Winstanley and the Quakers until “the late 1970s when historian Barry Reay unearthed in the Friends House archive a letter sent in August 1654 by Edward Burrough in London to Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor. Burrough and Francis Howgill had been dispatched to the capital by Fox as Quaker missionaries, and Burrough reported that ‘Wilstandley says he believes we are sent to perfect that work which fell in their hands. He hath been with us’.”  In spite of the misspelling of his name, it seems clear that this was Winstanley.  Unfortunately (but probably the reason that the Society of Friends survived while the True Levellers did not) the article goes on to say that “Quakerism had established its headquarters in a gentry house, under the patronage and matronage of a family which had greatly benefited in wealth and influence from their Cromwellian politics and entrepreneurial adventures. The Fells can hardly have been unaware that ‘the work’ associated with Winstanley was a levelling work, a communist work, dedicated to the overthrow of private property and its replacement by common ownership, under the power of an indwelling God who was more sweet reason than lord of lord protectors. It seems not unlikely to me that Margaret Fell and George Fox discouraged further contacts with so notorious an agitator.”

Finally, the author of the article points out ways in which Digger and Quaker positions were “congruent”.  He notes that “Winstanley’s and Fox’s radical religio-political ideologies were formed and framed by the revolutionary convulsions of the 1640s” and goes on to say, “these suggested congruities are not simply between Winstanley’s thought and Fox’s, but between True Levelling and first-generation Quakerism en masse.” He elaborates with ten points, but I will suggest if you’re interested that you read the article.

One of the many points that the Diggers and Quakers have in common is an orientation to nonviolence.  In my next piece, I intend to write about one of the greatest advocates of nonviolence, Gandhi, as also an advocate for sharing, simple living, and building things on a local level.

Medieval Egalitarian Movements: Some Communal History (Part Two)

from Commune Life

In the last community that I lived in, one of the members turned me on to a book about history called The End of the Megamachine by Fabian Scheider. It’s a complex book that tries to document how we got into the mess that we’re in today.  One of the things that I found fascinating in the book was the author’s description of what he terms “egalitarian movements” in the Middle Ages.  Apparently there were a number of them in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, fueled by new biblical interpretations and the desire to be free of feudal yokes.  These were called heresies by the church and rebellions by outraged (and scared) governments.  I will quote extensively from Fabian Scheider’s book.

One of the earliest of the medieval egalitarian efforts may have been the “Bohemian Hussites” who (as the book says) “set out to create an egalitarian community.  They founded the town of Tabor in 1420 and assumed control over large parts of Bohemia and Silesia for more than 10 years.  The state and the church needed five crusades to suppress this uprising.”

There were many of these movements in the Middle Ages and they were almost always dealt with ruthlessly by the authorities when they managed to regain control and were crushed with extreme violence.  I won’t repeat the gruesome details that are shared in the book but obviously they were trying to make sure these “experiments” weren’t repeated–but they were, for over a century.

One of the last of these “heresies”, was the Anabaptist movement which “spread out over large parts of Central Europe. … it called for the principles of non-violence, community of goods and self-determination… the Anabaptists… sought to build their own communities beyond the state and the church.  In Münster the conflicts came to a dramatic climax… the Anabaptists declared property to be communal as it had been in the first Christian community in Jerusalem, then they burned the debt register in the city archives… the city was overpowered by troops in 1535.  The leaders of the movement were publicly tortured and executed.”

Anabaptists in Münster

“Egalitarian community”, communal property, self-determination.  No wonder leaders were terrified.  The book talks a lot about the effects of this.

“Shocked by the force of egalitarian movements, they [the feudal elites] frantically sought ways to hold on to privileged positions.  Their desperation must be taken into account in order to understand the emergence of the modern world-system… It was an endeavor by elites to stifle emerging egalitarian aspirations.”

Fabian Scheidler quotes Italian-American teacher, activist, and author Silvia Federici, from her book, Caliban and the Witch: “Capitalism is the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict… Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.”

Fabian Scheidler goes on to say, “With the stimulation of the money-war complex, European elites could gradually shift the balance of power in their favor and crush egalitarian movements.”  He concludes by saying, “Alongside colonial expansion, the second triumph of the monsters of modernity was to smash the internal resistance and egalitarian dreams across Europe.”

Or, as Silvia Federici puts it in Taliban and the Witch, “The social struggles of the Middle Ages must also be remembered because they wrote a new chapter in the history of liberation.  At their best, they called for an egalitarian social order based on the sharing of wealth and the refusal of hierarchies and authoritarian rule.”

Although egalitarian dreams may have been smashed in continental Europe, they re-emerged in England in the seventeenth century.  It seems that there is a human aspiration toward sharing and equality.  I will write more about this in the future.

Sharing, Freedom, and Egalitarian Living: Some Communal History (Part One)

from Commune Life

Living collectively and sharing most things has a long, long history.  Scholars are still debating how prehistoric and other tribes lived.

Friedrich Engles (Marx’s collaborator) wrote about what he called “primitive communism”, much of it based on the observations of Lewis Henry Morgan, who studied the Haudensaunee (also known as the Five–and then Six–Nations or the Iroquois).  Some of what Morgan reported has been disputed.

Two anarchist academics (an anthropologist and an archeologist–David Graeber and David Wengrow) in their book, The Dawn of Everything, claim that “primitive communism” and “egalitarian societies” are myths and that the societies that have occurred throughout ancient history and non-Western society are both more complex and more creative than those labels would suggest.

The Davids claimed that “... the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments…” and “Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step toward inequality.  In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies.”

On the other hand, they don’t like the term “egalitarian societies” stating that “no one seems to agree on what the term [equality] actually refers to.”  They go on to look at liberty and the various form of freedom (to move or relocate where you want, to ignore or disobey orders, and to actually change society), but they do point out that “Mutual aid–what many contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’--was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.”

What interests me is the notion of sharing and the question of private property.  Some writers have pointed out that there was a difference for some tribal folks between personal property and private property and some things (such as land) could not be owned.  Further, how did hierarchies emerge?  The Davids point out that “Carole Crumley [an anthropologist now at the Swedish Biodiversity Center] has been pointing this out for years: complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world.”

Whether egalitarianism existed in early societies or not, it is something that humans have fought to have for thousands of years.  I will write more on this in Part Two of this survey of history, looking at egalitarian living in the Middle Ages.