Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

120 I Ramnath
Mukerji one day challenged this revolutionist, "Look here,
why should we supersede British massacres by our own,
except that our own may be a little mon; radical? Theirs
arc only practical and utilitarian." The answer was that the
English massacres were continuous; their own would be
economical and a temporary necessity-a little hurt to
create a giant benefit.
Mukerji declared himself weary of such "hygienic"
and "mathematical" conceptions of violence, fo r which
the nationalist accused him of slave mentality "tainted" by
We stern influence. He decried the British charge "that rebellion
is unholy, and a destructive profanity," when it was
the colonists' "soulless railroads piercing through the sacred
places throughout India" that had called it fo rth. Mukerji
agreed this far: "It is true that this industrialization of Asia
is terrible . ... It is sucking out the life blood." But he made a
crucial distinction between culturalist and economic paths
of resistance, correcting his interlocutor: "Your quarrel is
not with the British nation, but with Western capitalism."
The nationalist disagreed: Ifit was their own people
running the army and exploiting the natural resomces, he
insisted, at least the wealth and benefits would be going
back into the country. Mukerji, though, vehemently rejected
this sort of nationalism as being virtually indistinguishable
from imperialism in its greed and crudity. Instead, he
suggested, why not "think in terms of two classes, the possessing
class and the dispossessed classes, throughout the
world ? These two marching against each other are to my
mind the fo rces of the conflict. I cannot make out much
difference between imperialism and nationalism."