Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 159
International, Left-wing Communism, Kropotkin's Mutual
Aid and Fields, Factories, and Workshops, Marx's Civil HI/i,r
in France, Land Revolution in Russia, Nikolay Ivanovich
Bukharin's HistoricalMaterialism, and-for fun-the 1920
novel The Spy by Upton Sinclair.75
The interconnected themes in the notebook include
theories oflaw along with its nature and purpose, the idea
of natural rights, and the role of force; theories of government
and the state; and notes toward a history of the
political philosophy of the state and its institutional fo rms
from Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, to Thomas Aquinas,
Benedict de Spinoza, Hugh Grotius, John Milton, John
Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Rousseau-specifically his
Emile and the Social Contract. It's clear that Singh was extremely
critical of all state forms that had existed so far; it's
possible he would have put the Communist workers' state
into an exceptional category, yet these notes may also be
taken to contain a warning to the workers' society not to
fall into the traps of previous powerholders.
He indicated justifications of revolutionary tactics,
insurrection, and extralegality, combined with a developing
analysis of organization, and an increasing appreciation
for the pragmatic benefits of a disciplined mass party
("as opposed to sudden and unorganised or spontaneous
change or breakdown") and seizing political power in order
to bring about economic liberation?6 In addition to Marx,
Lenin, and Engels, he was reading Trotsky, Morris Hillquit,
Eduard Bernstein, and Kautsky.
He also pursued these thoughts in the posthumously
published statement "To Young Political Wo rkers;' plainly