Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 151
This insurrectionary tactical logic was that "one deed brings
forth another, opponents join the mutiny, the government
splits into factions, oppression intensifies the conflict,
[and] revolution breaks OUt."57
Of his own thinking at this time, with the hindsight
of his later Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, Josh admitted that
back then even he "did not know much of Marxist theory.
I knew only what I had read and learnt from [Charles T.
Sprading's book] Liberty and the Great Libertarians, which
also contained some excerpts from the writings of Marx,
Engels and Lenin. Hence, whatever I knew was eclectic,
anarchistic and communistic all mixed together and unsystematic."
(Sprading's anthology also contained writings
from Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, William Godwin,
Mill, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Max Stirner,
Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner,
George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Ferrer.) Since
the only person he felt could have guided him-Santokh
Singh, the California-returned Ghadar leader who had
shepherded the organization to its postwar Marxist reincarnation-was
extremely ill and not to be disturbed on
strict doctor's orders, Josh said he had to fend for his own
ideological education. Given the official prohibition on
importing Marxist literature into India, he assessed his own
youthful writings as "progressive and leftist no doubt, but,
strictly speaking, not Marxist:'S8
Josh ruefully criticized his own early articles in retrospect
as "betray[ ing] individualism:' revealing that he had
still been "very far from ... knowledgeable in the theory
and practice of Marxism, of the Marxist principles of