Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 191
true systemic socioeconomic change. A fear was that
bhoodan actually helped to stabilize rather than subvert the
system, due to its ameliorative effects. In fact, after India attained
independence it seemed that people had gotten all the
more dependent on the central state, expecting it to do everything
for them. Laws offered band-aids without enabling the
self-strengthening necessary for a true "politics of the people"
(lokniti) to replace a "politics of the power-state" (rajniti).44
The Bhoodan movement, Bhave claimed, as an attempt to
weave comprehensive change in the fabric of society without
recourse to the state, could produce such strengthening:
In our modern conditions a powerful state can
bring nothing but slavery. Therefore sarvodaya
stands for an immediate reduction in the power of
the state . ... In our social structure we must accept
the principle that the welfare of one group is not
opposed to the welfare of another.
In such a social order the need to use fo rce
would be eliminated . ... Such a society would be
truly self-governing.45
In the mid-1960s, Bhave retreated into a life of spiritual
contemplation, dying at his ashram in 1982. After
Bhave, JP was the movement's most prominent figure. The
concerns and goals that motivated JP in the attempt first
to bridge socialism and Gandhism, and then in his shift
from Marxism to Sarvodaya, resonated with the concerns
and goals expressed in anarchist critiques of the dominant
Marxist tradition.46