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Archishman Raju and Meghna Chandra  There are two ideological positions that hold considerable sway in our time. The first sees European modernity, as shaped by the European enlightenment, as the end of history. This was famously argued by Fukuyama and it continues to exercise considerable political influence. The second questions the project of European modernity and identifies all modern nation states and national movements as inextricably bound up with this project. This is identified with postmodernism and postcolonialism, schools of thought which primarily gained prominence through American Universities and whose ideas have now spread beyond academia. Both of these positions are united in their opposition to the rise of “authoritarianism” which includes states like China, Russia and Iran as well as right-wing movements and leaders within so-called democracies. The first argues that we must fight authoritarianism and the rise of the “global right” by returning to liberal enlightenment values while the second argues that we must center the marginalized for a new decentralized grassroots resistance against the global right. We argue that both positions get our moment wrong and do not have a vision for the future. Neither the European Enlightenment nor postmodern deconstruction can be the basis for a new world order. Indeed, both philosophical viewpoints draw their legitimacy from the dying Western world order. We argue that this is a moment of crisis in the West, which has opened up the space for new democratic horizons. This demands the struggle for a coloured modernity (singular). The vision for this was incipient in the ideas of the anti-colonial struggle and coloured modernity requires the completion of that struggle. Our framing of this moment as coloured modernity emerges from our discussions in The Saturday Free School of Philosophy of Black Liberation based in Philadelphia. We argue that the theorist for our times is W.E.B. Du Bois. The central problem of the 20th century, argued Du Bois, is the problem of the color line. Its resolution could only come through the unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia. In other words, Du Bois diagnosed the roots of the crisis of Western modernity in racism, colonialism and imperialism and envisioned a new world order based on the universal and united strivings of darker humanity. He saw within each darker civilization the striving for new universal human values. Du Bois predicted that it might be through the ideas of Tagore and Gandhi that a new world order might emerge. The theoretical work of W.E.B. Du Bois leads us to conclude that this moment requires a revisiting of the Indian Freedom Struggle and its leadership, which both the Eurocentric and the Postcolonial Left attacks. However, in our moment of the crisis of the West and the rise of colored modernity, it is to this leadership and this history that we must return. To understand this, it is important to first correctly characterize our current moment. Our Current Moment We believe that the two processes that characterize our historical moment are the crisis in the West and the rise of Asia. The sense of crisis has become omnipresent in Western societies and in its intellectual discourse, dating back to the financial crisis of 2008. Because of the primacy of the West in our international order, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implications of the domestic crisis in the West, and particularly in the United States, is felt around the world. The crisis in the U.S. is much more important than in Europe, which plays a much less significant role in the world at this time. The most important aspect of this domestic crisis in the U.S. is that it is a crisis of legitimacy. The American public no longer believes in American institutions. Multiple polls report that every major institution in the U.S. from the government, to the courts, the media and the universities are facing historically low levels of confidence. This further implies that the people no longer share the world view of the elite, no longer believe elite discourse and understand the same events very differently. We are therefore witnessing an unprecedented internal battle in the U.S. for control over the institutions of the state and a desperate attempt to re-establish legitimacy in conditions that are nearing the possibility of a civil war. A second simultaneous process of great significance that characterizes our historical time is the rise of Asia, led predominantly by the rise of China. Despite the extreme pessimism in sections of the intelligentsia, Asian societies as a whole, including India, have no sense of crisis. To the contrary, ordinary people generally have high confidence levels in a better future, in their institutions and their leadership. The scale of the transformation in China can not be overemphasized. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the past four decades. The top leading research institutions in the world are now almost all Chinese. China has rapidly industrialized and urbanized in the past several decades. It has most of the world’s biggest cities. China is an ancient civilization that has modernized a huge population. Further it has done so without colonialism, slavery and genocide which characterized the modernization of Europe. The implications of this simultaneous crisis of the West and the rise of Asia force us to reconsider the question of modernity both from a theoretical and practical point of view. Theory based on the experience of 18th and 19th century Europe and postmodern nihilism is simply insufficient to explain the processes that we are witnessing. This is not the industrialization of 19th century Britain, this is not the “Weimar moment”, this is not the end of the British Empire or any other such easy historical reference. We are living in a fundamentally new moment that requires new thinking. We are witnessing historical processes that have not been seen before and force us to re-examine the basis of our social theorizing. This social theorizing must not only help us understand these historical processes but also suggest a course of action for the future. W.E.B. Du Bois and D.D. Kosambi as Theorists of the Future The key to the future of humanity is not in the bourgeois revolution in Europe, but in the anti-colonial struggles of Asia and Africa, which remain incomplete. In many ways W.E.B Du Bois can be considered as a foundational thinker of these struggles. The legacy of Du Bois is unfortunately little known partly because of the attacks and suppression of his ideas in the American academy, which has recently attempted to appropriate him. He was not only foundational to the creation of the modern science of sociology, but a participant in the black struggle in America and a supporter and friend of the anti-colonial struggles around the world. At one point, he was very well known around the world, particularly among the colonized. Du Bois argued that “Nothing which has happened to man in modern times has been more significant than the buying and selling of human beings out of Africa into America from 1441 to 1870.”. In other words, he emphasized the centrality of the trans-atlantic slave trade and the creation of whiteness to understanding modern Europe. In his study of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois argued that it could not simply be understood in class terms and discovered the category of the “black worker”, who played the defining role in determining the outcome of the war. Thus Du Bois argued that the “backward” black worker pushed democracy forward more than the “forward” white worker, who was compromised by whiteness. However, Du Bois did not simply see race to be in a dialectical relationship with class but saw it as a civilizational category. The logic of whiteness predicated on the supremacy of western civilization determined social relationships in the world. The black worker was a category that could be expanded to include darker workers around the world. As he wrote in Black Reconstruction in America, “That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name... Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black”. An epistemology that centred the experience of the black worker was crucial to understand the history of modern Europe and the future of humanity writ large. Therefore, in his novel Dark Princess, Du Bois argued allegorically that the path forward would be the unity of Pan-Africa with Pan-Asia. In other words, he theorized the possibility not of alternative modernities but of a coloured modernity based in the intercivilizational relationships between Asian and African civilizations that had been suppressed by Europe. Du Bois very clearly saw that this modernity would look different from Europe. It would draw on the experience of the Russian Revolution as well as on the civilizational foundations of Asian and African societies, including their religions. He understood civilization not as the culture of the elite, but as having a broad base among the people. However, this left open the question of how to understand the history of large and complex civilizations. In a country like India, what sense does it make to speak of a civilization given the vast cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity that exists? It is here that we believe D. D. Kosambi’s methodology is essential. Though Kosambi primarily studied ancient history, his creative exploration of Indian society furnished a science of social complexity. Kosambi suggested that a study of Indian society requires combined methods. Kosambi argued that India was a country of “long survivals”. The bewildering variety of cultural diversity in the country nevertheless had a “double unity” and hence culture and civilization as the ways of life “of the whole people” could nevertheless be scientifically studied. Indian history could not be studied with economic determinism as “social manifestations of the class-struggle in India” had found “religio-philosophical channels of expression”. The centrality of religion to historical evolution, in Kosambi’s opinion, “minimized the need for internal violence”. Ultimately, it allowed the existence of a living history in the Indian people where practices often dated back to pre-historic times and had been preserved through a process of “reciprocal acculturation”. Thus, Kosambi argued that Indian society could be scientifically understood despite its complexity. His analysis suggests that the historical evolution of Indian society would benefit from comparison with Africa and China rather than with Europe, though such comparative studies have hardly begun. In our view, it also suggests that the transformation of Indian society into modernity would look very different from Europe. In his unpublished manuscript Russia and America, which was censored under Cold War pressure, Du Bois argued that it may be through the philosophy of Gandhi and Tagore that this new colored modernity, which he characterized as an Asiatic communism, may be created. He was of the view that the freedom of India would surpass even the Russian revolution in importance. The Indian Freedom Struggle at the Vanguard of Coloured Modernity The Indian Freedom Struggle, as part of the world anti-colonial struggle, led the way towards a new colored modernity. It inspired nearly every major anti-colonial struggle in the world. Properly making sense of its history is crucial to understanding the momentous changes occurring in the world today. Both the leadership of the Indian Freedom Struggle and the postcolonial Indian State have been attacked by both the Eurocentric left which saw it as nothing but a “bourgeois movement” and the subaltern theorists who similarly saw it as a movement of national elites imposing European modernity on the subaltern. Ranajit Guha, for example, declared in 1982 that the Indian state has “failed to come into its own”, and Spivak said that the aspiration to be a leader is undemocratic and itself a source of problems in postcolonial societies. As much as we take it for granted today, the question of how a civilization which had been colonized and brutalized by British imperialism could be taken forward in a revolutionary manner presented no easy answers in the early 20th century. However, the leadership of our freedom struggle understood that the struggle for liberation would find religious channels of expression. Therefore, they sought to re-interpret Hinduism and Islam in ways that would allow them to become religions of freedom and anti-colonialism. A large number of people understood that Gandhiji was a revolutionary though sections of the Indian left could not understand him partly because they had an inadequate theoretical basis to do so. Among the Indian communists, it was S. A. Dange who fought for this position within the communist movement. Nevertheless, there were many participants of the freedom struggle who saw no basic contradiction with their socialistic ideas and association with Gandhiji including Jawaharlal Nehru but also lesser studied figures like Aruna Asaf Ali, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya etc. In fact Nehru, who is often misunderstood as a liberal or social democrat, was greatly concerned with understanding the Indian revolution and how it could be continued after obtaining state power. In an interview with Russi Karanjia taken towards the end of his life, Nehru clarified that he did not see any break in his thinking from Gandhiji’s time. He saw that the Gandhian method of revolution was distinct and rooted in the Indian tradition. Most importantly, it was based not on a vanguard that was ahead of the people, but in the whole of the people. This striving of Nehru towards coloured modernity which had a civilizational basis bore fruit in such initiatives as the Nonaligned Movement, the Panchscheel declaration, and support and solidarity for anti-colonial revolutions all over the world. The struggle for colored modernity expressed itself in the struggle for a New International Economic Order. The anti-colonial state, the product of the anti-colonial struggle, expressed, in potentiality, the universal strivings of the people for peace and development. Nehru knew that religion played a central role in politics for both Gandhi and Tagore. Nehru was therefore interested, particularly at the end of his life, in a “scientific-spiritual approach” deriving from both Gandhi and Tagore. Interestingly, when Tagore visited China in 1924, some Chinese radicals from the May 4th movement attacked his “spiritual” approach arguing instead that what Chinese society needed was modern science and democracy. In reply, Tagore argued that “The revelation of spirit in man is truly modern: I am on its side, for I am modern.”. In other words, Tagore warned against associating modernity with Western technological advancement and instead argued for the democratic emancipation and spiritual development of humanity which could be forged through closer civilizational relationships between Asian societies, as he strove to do in Visva-bharati. Conclusion The role of the intelligentsia is to assess the world and provide a vision for the future. For an intelligentsia to be relevant, it must answer the challenges of its times. As James Baldwin wrote, “An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn.” Just a few years after independence, Aruna Asaf Ali argued “the Indian intelligentsia was getting confused about the great objectives for which the people had struggled”. Today, there is active hostility to these objectives. However, one thing is for certain. The leadership of the freedom struggle would not have lost faith in the Indian people and characterized them as backward. Nor would it have seen them as divided, fragmented and incapable of unity. In many ways, their times were more difficult than ours. What then is the role of Indian intellectuals in this time? By intellectuals, we don’t mean academics, but all those who seek to contribute to the ideological contestations of our time. They must separate themselves from the fashions of a dying West and instead “return to the source”, by seeing the potentialities of our own people. For, as our leadership understood, it is not intellectuals but the people who make history. The struggle for ideas, which can become a material force in the hands of the people, will be paramount. We must struggle for the completion of our freedom struggle in the construction of a state of the whole people. This requires defining a revolutionary struggle for democracy from within the Indian tradition to which Gandhi and Tagore are central. This struggle for democracy is not defined by constitutionalism but by working out the possibilities for the democratic transformation of Indian society into a modern civilization. The age of Europe is over, the age of humanity is beginning. We must look forward, not backward. Meghna Chandra is a researcher for a healthcare union based in Chicago and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation. Archishman Raju is a member of the Intercivilizational Dialogue Project, and an editor of this journal. The article is a slightly edited version of the original published in kafila.online.
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by Jeremiah Kim  Does the nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. offer a theory of state power within its total vision of revolutionary change? If so, how does it compare with the theory of the state championed by V.I. Lenin and Karl Marx? And further, what does it look like when these ideas are put into practice and unleashed on a mass scale? Between the movements embodied by Gandhi and by Lenin, which ideas are more likely to bend the future as we proceed in this stage of humanity’s long development? These are the types of questions one might expect a student of history or seeker of social change to ask within the natural trajectory of his or her knowledge. Yet such questions are not asked, especially not in radical circles in the United States. So there remains an ocean around us, an extraordinarily rich catalogue of revolutionary experiences descending from the past century of human history. It waits to be picked up, examined, known, and used. Revolutionary and Democratic Questions We are living in a time when the crisis of American society has reached such a degree that we must consider the real possibilities and conditions of state collapse in the U.S. Such a collapse would have profound consequences for the world, due to the imperial nature of the U.S. state. Indeed the internal crisis of the United States mirrors the global crisis of U.S. imperialism, which faces a collapse of its hegemony and insurgence from the world’s darker nations on multiple fronts. As such, certain questions now take on a more vivid hue of intensity. Can we say that state collapse in America is inevitable, given the increasingly vicious struggles between establishment wings and “counter-elite” factions of the U.S. ruling elite? Or must it be forced by external pressure, such as a broad mass movement of the American people? In either case, can there be a nonviolent transition of power? It is exactly the interplay between these lines of thought that, in turn, raises the larger question of what we mean by such fundamental terms as revolution and democracy in the 21st century. Here, there are existing interpretations we can consider. In his April 1917 article “The Dual Power,” Lenin declared, “The basic question of every revolution is that of state power.” Today it is appropriate to ask whether this formulation is sufficient, or if we must adopt a more complex framing — especially if we assume that every revolution must, in the end, be a social revolution. In other words, what we seek is a revolution at the highest level of the state and at the level of ordinary human beings in their ideological, social, political, and economic relationships with one another. At the center of this discussion, we must also account for a new reality: the overwhelming majority of people on this planet are more conscious, more aware than they were 100 years ago. Great leaps in consciousness have been ushered into the lifeblood of humankind. The capacity for democratic rule is far vaster; just as the contradictions in people’s consciousness are far more intricate. All this places far greater demands upon our thinking and vision today. From here, we turn our eyes to two great streams of light from world history: the Russian Revolution and the Indian Freedom Struggle. Each reveals a distinct path of revolutionary change, yielding different lessons about how a people can achieve democracy and state power in modern times. The Russian Revolution: The Vanguard Party With the Russian Revolution, there is no shortage of ideological and historical material to sift through. The Bolsheviks’ theory of the state was unambiguously stated by V.I. Lenin in works such as The State and Revolution — published on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917. Lenin, invoking Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, defined the state as an instrument for the suppression of one class by another. Across time and place, it was the product of the “irreconcilability of class antagonisms,” characterized in bourgeois society by such institutions as a bureaucracy and standing army. Lenin insisted the historic task of the proletariat was not to “lay hold” of the existing state machinery, but to smash the old regime. Only then could revolutionary forces institute a new, democratic state, organized by the entire working class, that would expropriate and if needed, suppress the capitalists. This socialist state would eventually “wither away” with time, leading to communism. The seeds for 1917 were laid twelve years earlier, in Russia’s Revolution of 1905. That year saw the emergence of the first worker’s council, or soviet, in St. Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, amid an intense wave of strikes met by reactionary violence from the Tsarist regime. The year ended with the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, an unstable compromise in which the Tsar shared power with the new parliamentary Duma. In the years that followed, these soviet councils of workers and soldiers spread to other parts of Russia, concentrated in urban cities. They burst into prominence amid the chaos wrought by World War I, which devastated Russia with mass death, hunger, and upheaval. The authority of the Russian monarchy buckled before it suddenly collapsed, and in February 1917 the Tsar abdicated power, ending centuries of Romanov rule and imploding one of the largest land-mass empires in the world. A provisional government was created. It was weak and shambolic, and among its greatest immediate challenges was the surging popularity of the soviets as a rival source of authority in Russian society. In essence, there were two governments — what Lenin called a dual power. The strategic offensive of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in these fateful months hinged on several key factors. First, they focused primarily on two decisive metropolitan cities: St. Petersburg (newly renamed Petrograd), and Moscow. The Bolsheviks also sought to exploit the weakness of the provisional government, which remained committed to Russia’s war effort and failed to control the food crisis. One can interpret Lenin’s severe formulations in The State and Revolution as an attempt to rhetorically strip the provisional government of its legitimacy and justify its dissolution. Simultaneously, Lenin seized upon the soviets in his political vision. For him, the soviets embodied a new form of government, a sign of the working class’s capacity for rule. The most powerful soviet was the Petrograd Soviet (which shared some governing authority with the provisional government in an uneasy arrangement) followed by the Moscow Soviet. Otherwise, the soviets were largely decentralized and scattered. It is important to note that the Bolsheviks did not dominate the soviets in their early phases of development. Of the 1,090 delegates present at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, the Bolsheviks comprised only 105, trailing rivals like the Socialist-Revolutionaries at 285 and the Mensheviks at 248. This did not discourage Lenin and his followers from pressing forward with their call to transfer “all power to the soviets,” defying the other major socialist parties. In concrete terms, this took the form of vigorous mass agitation and various covert efforts to overthrow the government, combined with a tenacious struggle to win over contingents of disaffected workers and soldiers. By September, the Bolsheviks had earned a majority in both the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. The actual October Revolution was a relatively bloodless affair. On the night of October 24-25, Bolshevik Red Guards swiftly captured key government facilities and centers of communication in Petrograd, encountering little to no opposition. Lenin declared the provisional government deposed. There ensued a brief skirmish at the Winter Palace, the seat of government, in which only five people died before government forces gave up and withdrew. The historian Richard Pipes notes that contrary to popular imagination, the Bolsheviks and their followers did not so much “storm” the grand chambers of the Russian monarchy as simply walk in. Less than a week later, they won control of Moscow after a few days of street-fighting. A consequence of the Bolsheviks’ approach is that when they seized power in Petrograd and Moscow, vast stretches of Russia had no idea what was happening. It would take a bloody civil war to consolidate the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics across the total sweep of its geography. Ultimately, the inheritors of Lenin did succeed in establishing sufficient grounds of legitimacy upon which a socialist society, a civilization of a new type, could be built. Three decades later in the 1950 work Russia and America, W.E.B. Du Bois would observe how the local soviet functioned as a “cell of democracy,” almost akin to the New England town meeting, as he reflected upon his travels in the Soviet Union. In the arc of world history the Russian Revolution sits among the defining events of modernity. Much has passed into the realm of myth. Yet a sober assessment shows a revolution whose course was highly contingent and frequently a matter of chance, rather than propelled to an inevitable conclusion by unerring scientific laws. For our purposes, the Russian Revolution is best understood as the revolution of a vanguard party — one enacted by a small group of revolutionaries who proclaimed a new state in the name of the people, the workers, the peasants, and humanity. The Indian Freedom Struggle: The Mass People’s Movement Any attempt to describe the Indian Freedom Struggle in a mere few paragraphs will necessarily be limited, considering its staggering breadth and still-more remarkable moral dimensions. By all measures, India’s anti-colonial struggle was the largest mass movement in the history of humankind. It involved millions upon millions of people across multiple generations: peasants and workers, students and the elderly, women and men, different religious traditions and ethnic groups, an emerging middle class and the poorest of the poor. This profound mass quality immediately distinguishes India’s revolutionary path from that of the Soviet Union. In 1945, Mahatma Gandhi visited the town of Mahishadal in Bengal. He spoke with freedom fighters from nearby Midnapore, who had recently struggled in an uprising as part of the Quit India movement in 1942. The people of the region had conducted acts of sabotage against organs of colonial authority; more strikingly, they had created a parallel government, called Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, to independently govern themselves for a period of two years. In his exchange with the Midnapore comrades, Gandhi made a direct reference to the Russian Revolution: “Unless we can have a new way of fighting imperialism … in the place of the outworn one of a violent rising, there is no hope for the oppressed races of the earth. Let nobody be misled by the Russian parallel. Our tradition is wholly different from Russia's. The historical setting too is different. In Russia the whole population was under arms; Indian masses won't take to arms even if they could be given the necessary training.” They asked him: “But, is not nonviolent rebellion, a programme of seizure of power?" He replied: “Therein lies the fallacy. A nonviolent revolution is not a programme of ‘seizure of power.’ It is a programme of transformation of relationships ending in a peaceful transfer of power. … If the ruling power abdicates and a vacuum is created, the people's organization will naturally take over its functions; but such Jatiya Sarkar would have no other sanction except that of nonviolence and service of the people to enforce its fiats. It will never use coercion.” From Gandhi’s remarks we gain a glimpse of the process wherein Indian freedom fighters sought to work out the practical and ideological contours of a new type of revolution — a nonviolent revolution — and with it, questions of state power. Whereas Lenin spoke of arming a whole people to directly dispense justice, Gandhi envisioned a state that would require no form of armed suppression at all. Instead human action would be compelled and all problems resolved through the organized social force of the people en masse exercising nonviolence. The concept of revolutionary nonviolence was forged in Gandhi’s experiences struggling against white supremacy in South Africa; its roots lay much deeper in the spiritual values of Indian civilization. Gandhi’s subsequent return to India in 1915, armed with the doctrine of satyagraha, initiated a wholly new phase of the Indian independence struggle. This time marked a new era for the Indian National Congress, which had served as the principal organ of nationalist leadership since the 1880s. When Gandhi called for the first Non-cooperation Movement in 1920, he was also calling upon the INC to transform itself: to evolve from a Western-influenced political organization, focused on achieving swaraj (self-rule) through legal means, into a true mass organization, one enmeshed with the people of India and adopting nonviolent mass action as its program. So too must it join together diverse ideological strands of the freedom struggle and disparate populations of a vast subcontinent toward this unified political vision. In essence, the INC became the movement itself. Of these electric early years, Jawaharlal Nehru writes in his Autobiography: “The whole look of the Congress changed; European clothes vanished and soon only khadi (hand-spun cloth) was to be seen; a new class of delegate, chiefly drawn from the lower middle classes became the type of Congressman. … Non-cooperation was a mass movement, and it was led by a man of commanding personality who inspired devotion in India's millions. … There was a tremendous feeling of release there, a throwing-off of a great burden, a new sense of freedom. … Even in remote bazaars the common folk talked of the Congress and Swaraj.” Such a higher stage of politics acted as a threshing floor to separate those forces who sided with the masses, from those who did not: “While the country was seething with excitement and becoming more and more revolutionary, [the Liberals and Moderates] became frankly counter-revolutionary, a part of the [colonial] government itself. They were completely cut off from the people … and became a small number of individuals dotted about in a few big cities.” The next two-and-a-half decades brought dramatic high-points of struggle as well as years of frustration. There was the great Salt March and Civil Disobedience movement of 1930-31; there was the experiment of 1937-39, in which the British yielded partial state power and the INC governed eight provinces for 28 months. There was the “Do or Die” Quit India movement of 1942. Each successive campaign further eroded the legitimacy of the colonial government — systematically breaking down the morale and self-confidence of British authorities who believed they could control India’s restless population and the flow of events. The movement was a living, breathing thing; and Gandhi’s leadership proved crucial in his ability to sense the ebb and flow of human energies. He knew when to withdraw, giving the people time to breathe and gather strength; and he knew when to press forward, escalating with ever-more audacious campaigns targeting strategic weak points of British rule. He knew the capacity of his people at a level of intimacy perhaps only paralleled by Martin Luther King Jr. New heroes were born — not just national figures like Nehru but millions of ordinary people who gladly accepted imprisonment, suffering, and brutal repression, and thereby assumed their place on the stage of world history. The movement traveled to far-flung provinces, as armies of volunteers won more to their ranks through political education, the organic development of people’s institutions, door-to-door persuasion, and countless other methods of activity. Throughout this process, the Indian Freedom Movement was not only forcing the British Raj to its knees; the movement was forming the very basis for the new Indian nation in-becoming. City by city, town by town, the people of India reconstituted their existing civilizational unity, the blessing of long millennia, into a modern body politic. This meant more than the establishment of parallel governing institutions or dual powers. The nature of nonviolence created the possibility for an entire civilization of people to participate in mass revolutionary politics at an almost inconceivable scale. It birthed a new, democratic consciousness among hundreds of millions of darker human beings whom Western civilization saw as incapable of self-rule and only fit for lives of dumb, emaciated servitude. The achievement of independence in 1947 was not without contradictions, chief among them the violent wrenching of partition between India and Pakistan. In spite of this, the formation of the Indian state must be considered one of the most remarkable experiments in modern history. The centrality of the INC to the freedom struggle meant that new India at its conception was something close to a one-party state in essence, even as it adopted a parliamentary form. The nation’s first general election of 1951-52 saw the INC win close to three-fourths of all seats in the legislature; it would dominate Indian politics for the next half-century. So it happened that a cadre of freedom fighters, schooled by decades of struggle, took up the task of writing India’s constitution. Led by the philosophical vision of Nehru, they framed the constitution around two core pillars: fundamental rights and directive principles. With the latter, India’s revolutionaries laid down an enduring set of directives to the state to improve the welfare of the people — to remove poverty, educate every child, ensure social control over wealth, and more — for generations to come. This was an attempt to take the essence of a mass movement and elevate it into a mandate of governance. It must be said that the directive principles, upheld and prioritized by subsequent leaders like Indira Gandhi, clearly distinguish the Indian state from Western liberal paradigms that solely focus on the rights of the individual. The Russian Revolution was, in plain terms, a struggle to seize state power. Within this framework, Lenin cast aside questions of morality to later stages of socialist development. Yet with the Indian Freedom Struggle, we see a movement that sought not only to transfer state power to the people, but to achieve new values, to crystallize moral tenets of civilization, as part and parcel of the revolutionary struggle itself. Visions for Tomorrow We return to America and the present world situation with our eyes already marked by visions of that great inheritor to Gandhi: a second Mahatma, Martin Luther King Jr. It was the Civil Rights Movement that proved Gandhian nonviolence could be wielded as a revolutionary “sword that heals” in the wilderness of U.S. society, infused with the consciousness of her Black proletariat. A full account of the Third American Revolution and its implications for today requires deeper discussion in every forum and social sphere. Yet we can say this: the message cast out into the world by the Indian people has born fruit in the darker soils of America. The story of the Indian Freedom Struggle, more so than the Russian Revolution, shows that it is possible to struggle with human beings to the widest degree; to transform the relationships among them; and to create a social power so overwhelming that it forces a despotic state into submission. The vanguard party method of revolution marked one era of history; the achievement of the mass people’s movement ushered in another. Only a dogmatic or sterile worldview would refuse to even consider this history, now emblazoned in the record of the human race, as worthy of the most intense and fruitful inquiry. As such, we cannot hesitate in saying that India’s example is an incalculable gift to all peoples and future generations in every continent. At the international level, nonviolence bears its promise not only in the quest for world peace but in the development of new coalitions to isolate the forces of Western imperialism and build the foundations for a more just world order. With the experience of these and other revolutions at our side, we hold before us one unifying thought for the future: that always the new emerges alongside the old — sometimes sharply, sometimes unevenly, oftentimes overlaid and intertwined with one another. This field of possibility is the furnace and hope of human striving. Jeremiah Kim is a peace activist based in Philadelphia and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation.  Rabindranath Tagore by Nandita Chaturvedi Our time is the era of the civilization-state, when India and China, along with other nations such as South Africa, Vietnam, are establishing the independent civilizational paths of their societies towards modernity. Yet, our concept of civilization remains amorphous and ill-defined. There are those who see civilization in older colonial and white-supremacist terms and champion liberal democracy as the only true democracy. On the other hand, many think of civilization in vague cultural, anthropological terms, placing emphasis on clan structures and ‘values’. There are also some who speak of the achievement of Asian and African aristocracy as the basis of dark civilization. When Asian nations won their political freedom, revolutionary movements that led the people’s struggle for freedom took over the state. In the case of China, the new state saw a strong and accentuated rupture from the old as a ‘people’s republic’ was established. In India, Nehru’s government took over the colonial state, wielding it for the benefit of the Indian people in a way that was in tune with Gandhi’s ideas and the Indian freedom struggle. As Nehru himself said, his government sought not to “destroy their past or uproot them (the people) from their social fabric. We have to balance the forces of continuity with those of change.” Nehru called the period after Indian independence the ‘authentic Gandhian era’. He said in an interview with Russi Karanjia, “Gandhiji always sought to function within the social fabric in which the masses had been living for centuries and tried to bring about gradual but revolutionary changes, instead of destroying the fabric or uprooting the people from their soil. He insisted on continuity with the past and he accepted the existing social system as a base for his political and social strategy.” Thus, the Indian state post-independence was a civilization state, seeking to champion development yet placing non-violence at its center. Here we will examine the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and W.E.B Du Bois on civilization and modernity. Both these thinkers, born 7 years apart in 1861 and 1868 respectively, witnessed the collapse of Europe in the two world wars. They both analysed the root causes of war and tied them to colonial exploitation, materialism and human greed. They studied the West deeply, tracing the revolutionary edge of the renaissance and enlightenment, yet finding it absent in their treatment of colonies and slaves. They were both also witnesses to the human experiment of the Russian revolution, as well as the great democratic upsurge of the anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa. They both studied the emergence of Japan, and the Euro-Asian experiment she undertook in her own society. Both were deeply connected also to China, visiting her several times and studying the trends and changes in her society. All of these great events of the 20th century shaped their thinking on civilization. They lived through a time when humanity undertook leaps towards expanding democracy, when nothing was certain, and possibilities for human kind were open. We could argue that we are entering such a time ourselves. The last 70 years, and especially the last 30 have been a period of a US led hegemonic world order. As is apparent to anyone paying attention, this is fast changing. Coming time will bring with it dynamic possibilities, but also grave dangers that humanity will have to grapple with. We look towards two of our greatest thinkers for inspiration. Democracy For both Tagore and Du Bois, civilization was tied intrinsically to an emerging democracy. Both saw ordinary people, workers and peasants, as the makers of civilization. They did not trace art and music to imperial courts or ruling class museums and conservatories, but to the uncovering and realization of talent among the mass of men and women. As Du Bois says through his protagonist Mathew Towns in the novel Dark Princess, “And suppose we found that ability and talent and art is not entirely or even mainly among the reigning aristocrats of Asia and Europe, but buried among millions of men down in the great sodden masses of all men and even in Black Africa?" Later in the same section of the novel Mathew goes on to proclaim, “some of the noblest blood God ever made is dumb with chains and poverty,” before he breaks into song, singing “Let My People Go”, a Negro spiritual. Dark Princess paints a picture of Du Bois’ conceptualization of civilization and democracy. Early in the book, he argues that the experiment in America was showing the world that “ability and capacity for culture is not the hereditary monopoly of a few, but the widespread possibility for the majority of mankind if they only have a decent chance in life.” The Dark Princess was written in 1928 and would be followed by Du Bois’ exploration of this idea in Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois begins with the idea of the ‘Black Worker’, not slave-workers, but an enslaved proletariat. This was a revolutionary breakthrough in theory, and Du Bois faced backlash for daring to argue that the enslaved were workers with agency. Du Bois laid out in Black Reconstruction how the Black proletariat executed a general strike during the civil war. After emancipation these Black men and women went on to establish a dictatorship of the Black proletariat in some southern states. To many, dictatorship and democracy may seem at odds. Yet for Du Bois they did not pose a contradiction. As he says, “The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. (..) But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation. It is then one’s moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. (...) The opportunity to study a great human experiment was present in Reconstruction, and its careful scientific investigation would have thrown a world of light on human development and democratic government.” Reconstruction was accompanied with the responsibility of universal education being taken up by the state, innovations in the education system, setting up of hospitals, etc. This period where the black masses in the South, recently emancipated from slavery, expanded democracy for all Americans marks an important period of modern history that should be studied more by people all over the world. For Du Bois, this history, when studied scientifically and free from color prejudice, showed the potential of men and women everywhere. For here was a people brutally severed from old world civilization, with no record of the inheritance of blood, caste or even nation, who “enfranchised labor led by educated men and groups of their own blood sought so to guide the state as to raise the worker to comfort and safety.” This was the human experiment that Du Bois was speaking of in Dark Princess, and he saw the implications of this history for all of the colored world. African Americans were and are a unique people, who have shown the world that ordinary men and women can create civilization, science and culture even without an unbroken social inheritance. Their experience showed that the mass of men “could rule as well as be ruled” and “can work as well as be worked, can live as well as be kept alive”. In fact, the lack of caste and tribal bonds and divisions of the old world may have allowed Black people to leap forward into a new modernity. Strikingly, it is a dictatorship of the lowest and most exploited, according to Du Bois, which is in the interests of democracy. Du Bois’ journal The Crisis, of which he acted as editor between 1910 and 1934 acted as a medium for the dialogue of the civilizations of the world, unmediated by the assumptions of white supremacy. The journal would regularly feature articles on the situation of the colonial world, and the anticolonial struggles. It was read all over the world, and Du Bois would become one of the most well known figures among the Darker World. The journal would also carry messages from leaders and thinkers of the anticolonial movements across the world, including Tagore. Similarly, for Tagore, creation was undertaken in all its aspects by ordinary people. As he says in Geetanjali, “Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil! Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever. Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.” Universal man was at the center of the process of knowledge and civilization. Tagore said in his letters from Russia, “In knowledge, love and activity, my development will reveal the infinite: in this is my fulfillment. The veil of imperfection will fall away from our minds, will and action so that we shall ever prove our kinship with the infinite: this is the religion of man. (...) Man’s evolution consists in the self attained truth, not in the Nature regulated mode of life. Hence it is his difficult prayer that he may reveal the infinite in every respect. Hence he says --bhumaiba sukham --happiness is in greatness: nalpe sukham asti -- in nothing small is there happiness. (...) The manifestation of greatness is another synonym for what we call civilization. The implicit meaning in man, his deepest truth, is being unravelled in civilization.” Tagore saw universal man in the peasantry of India. He devoted his life to two parallel endeavors: a world civilization school for art, literature and music in Shantiniketan, and an experiment in rural reconstruction in Sriniketan. Shantiniketan saw the emergence of great artists such as Ramkinkar Baij, who was the son of a barber with little to no formal education. With Tagore’s ideas and the creative impulse of Shantiniketan he went on to create some of the most profound sculptures and paintings of modern India. It is said that he would sing Tagore’s songs while he painted. Shantiniketan is also home to Cheena Bhavan, one of the great efforts to bridge civilizations in Asia. On the other hand, Sriniketan was an effort to prove that the Indian peasantry could work as well as be worked and rule, as well as be ruled. It was an experiment to realize, in Du Bois’ words, “thinking workers and working thinkers.” In Sriniketan and Shantiniketan the work done was to bridge the gap between folk traditions and modern art forms on the one hand, and to bridge the civilizational traditions of the world unmediated by Europe on the other. In his trip to the Soviet Union, he would compare the experiment of Sriniketan with land collectivization and the education of the peasantry that he saw there. Tagore would be deeply moved by conversations with the peasants of the Soviet Union, and would say, “The dumb have found their voice, the ignorant have cast the veil from their minds, the helpless have become conscious of their own power and those who were in the depths of degradation have come out of society’s ‘black hole’. This is Soviet Russia’s achievement in eight years. They are busy here with three things: education, agriculture and machinery.” He saw the development of the human being as the center of it all, since “ the machine alone is of little use until the machinist himself becomes a man.” Tagore and Du Bois both greatly admired the Soviet experiment and sought to study it for application among their own people. Du Bois would declare, “If this is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.” Tagore would say in his letters from Russia, “I came to Russia at a time when my mind was dark with despair. (...) There I saw mighty efforts being made to provide universally everything of which India is deprived. Needless to say, I have seen it all with my own long hungering eyes.” Like Du Bois’ vision in Dark Princess, Tagore envisioned a great world democracy where each civilization would make a contribution towards the building of a human civilization. In 1929, he would send a message to Du Bois’ journal the Crisis, “What is the great fact of this age? Is it that the messenger has knocked at our gate and all bars have given way. Our doors have burst open. The human races have come out of their enclosures. They have gathered together. We have been engaged in cultivating each his own individual life, and within the forced seclusion of our racial tradition. We had neither the wisdom nor the opportunity to harmonize our growth with world tendencies. But there are no longer walls to hide us. We have at length to prove our worth to the whole world, not merely to admiring groups of our own people. We must justify our own existence. We must show, each in our own civilizations, that which is universal in the heart of the unique.” Thus for Tagore each civilization was not to be self-serving but in service to the expansive project of human knowledge and culture. He saw and appreciated the different strengths of different peoples. In his Talks in China, he would say, “Civilisation cannot merely be a growing totality of happenings that by chance have assumed a particular shape and tendency which we consider to be excellent. It must be the expression of some guiding moral force which we have evolved in our society for the object of attaining perfection. The word ‘perfection’ has a simple and definite meaning when applied to an inanimate thing, or even to a creature whose life has principally a biological significance. But man being complex and always on the path of transcending himself, the meaning of the word ‘perfection’ as applied to him, cannot be crystallised into an inflexible idea. This has made it possible for different races to have different shades of definition for this term.” Indeed, Tagore was an emissary of India to the world, seeking to build bonds of friendship and brotherhood wherever he went. His trip to China opened up a great historic relationship disrupted by colonialism, as he would say, “The world has for long been in its grip,--the exclusive winter that keeps the human races within closed doors. But the doors are going to open. Spring has come.” He would visit America, Europe, Java, Japan, Iran and Russia with the same sentiment. He would create an atmosphere in Shantiniketan where the whole world could feel at home. It was a futuristic endeavour, seeking to rekindle intercivilizational dialogue and friendship in a time when white supremacy mediated all interactions. Modernity and Western Civilization Tagore would declare himself a revolutionary in his talks in China, declaring his opposition to the greed and materialism of Western modernity. He would say, “The impertinence of material things is extremely old. The revelation of spirit in man is truly modern: I am on its side, for I am modern. I have explained how I was born into a family which rebelled, which had faith in its loyalty to an inner ideal. If you want to reject me, you are free to do so. But I have my right as a revolutionary to carry the flag of freedom of spirit into the shrine of your idols,---material power and accumulation.” Modernity, as Tagore saw it then, was related to ideas and man’s spirit, not technology and scientific prowess for material wealth. Even as a young man, Tagore despaired at the condition of the Indian people brought about by colonialism. Throughout his life he studied the roots of this, as well as the British response to it. Criticising the comments of John Simon blaming the condition of India on her people, he would criticise the hypocrisy of white supremacy, “These words are meant to be contemptuous. The ideals by which he has judged India’s needs is not his own. The advantages of unlimited education, opportunities and freedom, which his own people enjoy for producing abundance of wealth, have enriched from many sides their ideal of life in education, action and enjoyment. India in rags, emaciated of body, exhausted by disease and starved of education must not even dream of this ideal. We must carry on as best we can by preventing the increase of our population and limiting our expenses. Beyond this there is nothing more to think; and therefore the entire responsibility of the remedy lies on us: those who make the remedy difficult have little to do.” In his trip to China, he warned the young Chinese revolutionaries of the May 4th movement who protested his visit and upheld Western progress and development, “My warning is, that those who would have you rely on material force to make a strong nation, do not know history, or understand civilization either. Reliance on power is the characteristic of barbarism; nations that trusted to it have already been destroyed or have remained barbarous.” Tagore would criticise the machine civilization and materialism of the West, echoing Du Bois’ sentiment that “Science is a great and worthy mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves; one thing there is greater than knowledge, and that [is] the Man who knows.” In the same address in China, Tagore would say, “It is co-operation and love, mutual trust and mutual aid which make for strength and real progress in civilization. New spiritual and moral power must continually be developed to enable men to assimilate their scientific gains, to control their new weapons and machines or these will dominate, enslave, and slay them. Men have been losing their freedom, their humanity and their lives, to fit themselves for vast mechanical organizations, scientific, political, economic, and military. We see today civilizations of vast power and great intellect veiling in a decent way mere cannibalism. It is the nemesis of Science dominant over, rather than subservient to, the spirit of man ; for the world of mere science is not a world of reality, but an abstract impersonal world of force.” On his 80th birthday Tagore would deliver his address “Crisis in Civilization” in which he expressed his loss of faith in the ability Western civilization to take humanity forward, “I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has gone bankrupt altogether. As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage.” Tagore was not an idealist or a sentimental figure, he knew well the challenges of poverty before the colonized nations and had studied them among his own people. He spoke of a righteous path to a new civilization well aware of the suffering of these nations, “I speak to you as a member of a nation that has gone under in the race for progress, and I tell you that I am ready to accept weakness and insult and oppression of the body, but I will never acknowledge the defeat, the last insult, the utter ruin, of my spirit being conquered, so that I am made to lose my faith and purpose. My enemies may dominate and slay my body, but they cannot make me adopt their methods, or hate them. The devil helps in the sphere in which he is master, but we must reject such aid if we want to save our life from utter destruction. Seek righteousness even though success be lost.” Tagore based his critique of the West on the ideas of the Vedas and the Upanishads, which he reinterpreted for his times. He would repeat the same couplet from the Upanishad in several of his talks, “By the help of unrighteousness men do prosper, men do gain victories over their enemies, men do attain what they desire; but they perish at the root.” It is based on this philosophy that he defined civilization as dharma, “The Sanskrit word dharma is the nearest synonym in our own language, that occurs to me, for the word civilisation. In fact, we have no other word except perhaps some newly-coined one, lifeless and devoid of atmosphere. The specific meaning of 'dharma’ is that principle which holds us firm together and leads us to our best welfare. The general meaning of this word is the essential quality of a thing. Dharma for man is the best expression of what he is in truth. He may reject Dharma and may choose to be an animal or a machine and there-by may not injure himself, may even gain strength and wealth from an external and material point of view; yet this will be worse than death for him as a man.” Du Bois early in his career, in the Souls of Black folk, would declare himself “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil.” Thus, he spoke from within the West, yet with an epistemology based in the Black poor. He would write of White Folk in Darkwater, “ Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them, I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge which servants have of their masters, or mass of class or capitalist of artisan. Rather, I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know what I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet, as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of fact and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped -- ugly, human.” Thus, for Du Bois, the white and Western world were not externalities that could just be rejected, but their true human assessment was essential to the project of freedom. It is difficult for those outside of the west to truly appreciate what Du Bois’ vantage point was, and a deeper study of the African American situation is needed to see the white world. In his work the World and Africa, he titled the first chapter ‘The Collapse of Europe’, referring to the second World War. He says in the first paragraph, “The collapse of Europe is to us the more astounding because of the boundless faith we have had in European civilization.” Du Bois would go on to describe in the book how the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and, eventually the bending and contorting of Western knowledge for their justification led to the crisis. In his words, “The result of the African slave trade and slavery in the European mind and culture was to degrade the position of labor and the respect of humanity as such.” European civilization would develop a system “first conscious and then unconscious of lying about history and distorting it to the disadvantage of the Negroids” such that the history of Africa ceased to be taught and then in the European mind, to exist. Every field, including “archaeology, history, and biography, psychology and sociology” was used to prove the scientific basis of the color line. For Du Bois, it was not just the European ruling elites, but the whole of European society and civilization, including the European worker that began to want “not comfort for all men, but power over those men for himself.” European civilization gave up its agency to the fetish and lie of whiteness, and “even the evidence of the eyes and senses was denied by mere weight of reiteration.” Their art became cynical and decadent, a far cry from the European renaissance and enlightenment. Like Tagore, Du Bois condemned the machine civilization of Europe where “moral judgement of the industrial process” was made difficult by “the stretch in time between the deed and the result, the work and the product.” He would declare ignorance of the European people to be a colossal crime in itself. He would say, “When a culture consents to any economic result, no matter how monstrous its cause, rather than demand the facts concerning work, wages, and the conditions of life whose results make the life of the consumer comfortable, pleasant and even luxurious, it is an indication of a collapsing civilization.” In a time when European civilization and modernity were just about the only standard for civilization in the world, Du Bois was not afraid to state that he believed “that the trade in human beings between Africa and America, which flourished between the Renaissance and the American Civil War, is the prime and effective cause of the contradictions in European civilization and the illogic in modern thought and the collapse in human culture.” Hence, European modernity was contradictory and hypocritical because of its embracing of slavery and colonialism. In Darkwater, Du Bois would declare of King Leopold's regime cruel and murderous regime in the Congo, “As we saw the dead dimly through the rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: this is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the soul of white culture--back of all culture-- stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived, -- these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted.” Further, Du Bois analysed the triumph of the industrial revolution, mechanization and modern European production not as proof of the superiority of Western civilization, but as results of the inordinate and unprecedented profit amassed by the cheap labor of slavery and colonialism. Like Tagore, Du Bois saw the future of human civilization in the East. In his unpublished manuscript Russia and America, he would say of a new system of human organization, “It must, of course, be Marxian in its abolition of industrial profit, toward which family and state communism in Asia already tends, but which has been frustrated by European influence. It must be Marxian in its division of income according to need; but it may be distinctly Asiatic in its use of the vertical clan division and family tie, instead of reaction toward a new bourgeoisie along horizontal class layers which must be the temptation of Europe. It would take a new way of thinking on Asiatic lines to work this out; but there would be a chance that out of India, out of Buddhism and Shintoism, out of the age-old virtues of Japan and China itself, to provide for this different kind of Communism, a thing which so far all attempts at a socialistic state in Europe have failed to produce; that is a communism with its Asiatic stress on character, on goodness, on spirit, through family loyalty and affection might ward off Thermidor; might stop the tendency of the Western socialistic state to freeze into bureaucracy. It might through the philosophy of Gandhi and Tagore, of Japan and China, really create a vast democracy into which the ruling dictatorship of the proletariat would fuse and deliquesce; and thus instead of socialism becoming a stark negation of the freedom of thought and a tyranny of action and propaganda of science and art, it would expand to a great democracy of the spirit.” Today we are in a new period where Europe and America face an unprecedented social and political crisis. We in the darker world must ask ourselves what the future of human civilization will look like. Will we continue to chase after the contorted vision of civilization of the West, or will we take Tagore and Du Bois seriously, to work out the basis of a new civilization? Conclusion This article attempts to put together the ideas of two great thinkers. Yet its scope is too small to fully investigate the worldview of Tagore and Du Bois, which deserves further work in the future. It is illustrative and beautiful to examine the two together, one born of the Indian people’s striving for freedom, and the other of the African American struggle for human emancipation. Both were world-citizens, belonging to all humanity. There are other questions that deserve attention for future thought. This includes the common emphasis of Tagore and Du Bois upon children. While Tagore surrounded himself in Shantiniketan with children and concerned himself deeply with education, Du Bois conceptualized the problem of the modern world as the treatment of the Immortal Child. Further, the most examined subject in Tagore’s Letters from Russia is the reform and innovation in education. Du Bois also was a lifelong teacher, and his essay ‘The Meaning of Progress’ paints a moving picture of the Black poor in Josie, and her striving for knowledge. We hope that this article can form the basis for further exploration of these ideas. Through the discovery of our common inheritance of the movement for human emancipation and the struggle to achieve it we can build a new human civilization. Nandita Chaturvedi is an editor of Vishwabandhu Journal.
Here we republish an essay 'India and Africa' written by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1931 for the 'Golden Book of Tagore' to celebrate Tagore's 70th birthday.  The great branches of the human family which have their chief dwelling place in Africa and India have much of common history in the past and common interest in the present.
The thing that India and Africa must learn today is that their interests have more in common than the interests of either have with the ideals of modern Europe. Granted that Europe is powerful and still dominant, yet she is today doomed. She has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. On the other hand, the dark millions of India and Africa and their descendants and kinsmen throughout the world, have upon their shoulders the vast responsibilities of remaking this world nearer to the ideals of true civilization and high culture. Two things they forgot in the past and this forgetting gave Europe its chance. These things were: The mastery of the technique of earning a living by subjugating the physical forces of the world. And the other thing was the faith in democracy; that is, the fact that out of the masses of people can be developed just as much power and genius, ability and culture as has in the past been shown by the aristocracy, by the favoured few. Africa and Asia did not know or did not realise these facts in the past and their contributions to civilization were marred by poverty and slavery, on the one hand; and tyranny on the other. Europe has given us the technique of industry. At terrible cost, to be sure, but nevertheless, the machine stands and is a marvellous tool but a horrible master. Europe and America have given us the beginnings of democracy, although with strange inconsistency they have tried to hem democracy in with a colour bar. Here, then, is our chance for the future---our mighty opportunity. We borrow, as we have a right to borrow, and as Europe in other ages has borrowed from us,---the things that in modern days she has taught us. Be we use these things for greater ends. Both Africans and Indians must seek to be rid of the spiritual and physical death of poverty. They must educate and develop the masses of their people. They must welcome genius and ability wherever it occurs---among the lowest and most unlikely, as well as among those who have regarded themselves as the highest. It will be a revelation to see how wide-spread human ability is when it has a chance. And then, with the help and strength which decent income gives, and with the rise of the intelligent mass, the dark millions of Africa and India can go forward to set new standards of freedom, equality and brotherhood for a world which is in desperate need of these spiritual things. It seems to me that no one has had a finer vision of such a future than Rabindranath Tagore. I greet him in his quest for common justice for all ment. We republish here a tribute by W.E.B. Du Bois to Mahatma Gandhi upon his death in 1948.  At his death, Mohandas Gandhi was the greatest man in the world. He was the Prince of Peace and stood among living leaders alone, because of that fact. For his color and his poverty he was despised and rejected by most of the world. He had no form nor comeliness that men should desire him and yet he stood for the one thing which the powerful Christian Church has been supposed to advocate for nearly two thousand years.
It is singular that a man who was not a follower of the Christian religion should be in his day the best exemplification of the principles which that religion was supposed to lay down. While the Christian Church during its two thousand years of existence has been foremost in war and organized murder, Mohandas Gandhi was foremost in exemplifying peace as a method of political progress. I remember once sitting at a large dinner in a New York hotel where there were a number of Christian ministers, including a few from colored Harlem. Madame Pandit, the sister of Nehru, was one of the speakers and as this singularly beautiful woman rose and looked upon that audience, she said with a smile, “You know I am a heathen”; and as a heathen she represented something bigger and finer than those professed representatives of the Christian Church; the church which had defended slavery and is defending, with few exceptions, present color caste; and which was not only foremost in the promotion of the First and Second World Wars but is ready for a Third World War. Since the beginning of this era, the rise of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, the world has increasingly counted upon war as the chief method of social uplift. This is in direct contradiction to the ethics of the Christian religion. It is as far as one can conceive from the Christ doctrine of turning the other cheek, of self-sacrifice, of peace and good will. Yet we have not only insisted upon war as the chief weapon of civilization but our insistence has progressively increased, until today after a World War so total and costly that it well-nigh stopped civilization, we are doggedly preparing frantically for a Third World War and what must be looked upon as a final effort at suicide. Our greatest leaders, with few exceptions, seem to agree with this program. Winston Churchill, ever since he was disappointed at not maintaining control of the British Empire, has not only advocated war but persistently pushed and advised the United States to lead it. I know of very few great leaders who have taken their stand upon the Christian doctrine of peace. Mohandas Gandhi was the one magnificent exception. For years now he has been a leader in the peace movement and also a leader in the rise of the colored peoples. He has changed their attitude. Formerly there seemed absolutely no chance for the majority of people in the world to gain freedom and autonomy except by fighting and overcoming the dominant white race. This trend of thought Gandhi ended. How is it now that among civilized people this kind of contradiction can happen? That you can have an organization and a creed and personal profession standing for one thing and yet actions which entirely contradict them? It is of course because we accept hypocrisy and lying as part of our creed. We became used not only to saying one thing and meaning another, but of professing one belief and acting in contradiction to it, and then neither permitting criticism willingly, nor heeding it if the criticism is made. When this kind of action characterizes an era, its fall and destruction is forecast. It is impossible to maintain integrity and logical balance in the midst of hypocrisy and lying. On the other hand, and no one knew this more than Mohandas Gandhi, the price of standing up against overwhelming world opinion is terrible. Gandhi began fighting for Indians and Negroes in South Africa and there, in the most reactionary and utterly debased of modern countries called civilized, he fought his battle for equality. Then when he went back to India he was faced by the inevitable difficulty when one finds power and wealth in high places, when one finds war and organized murder almost universally accepted as a method of progress. He must, as a result of this, find himself. And he did so gradually but determinedly. He tried at first to follow the faith which influenced so many of us in the First World War. He wanted India to take part in a “War to end all Wars”; in a war to stop the war psychosis. But he found out, as so many of us did, that the First World War was simply a prelude to the second; that it was not a war for freedom but for industrial profit. When Gandhi saw that its results in Asia included massacres like that of Amritsar, and the imprisoning and torture of liberal leadership, he turned to “Passive Resitance.” By inaction and refusal to cooperate in wrong, he tried to compel the governing powers of the British Empire to give India her freedom. He even tried to face and fight the great organization of industry based on the modern machine and accumulated capital. It was a hard and, for long years, a failing fight; but today we see that in the long run the Gandhi doctrine must triumph or modern civilization falls, as the cultures of Greece and Rome fell two thousand years ago. Much depends upon our attitude toward Gandhi and his doctrines. Is it not possible for the world to turn and say, “No more war!”; to reinstate the Prince of Peace as founder and guide of the Christian religion; to acknowledge that it took a heathen to show Christians the way of life, and to refuse to be carried further in this insane determination to commit suicide through a Third World War? He knew, as all men with wisdom know, that peace cannot be obtained through war; that this psychosis of murder, which has gradually gripped the modern civilized world, means its utter suicide; and, therefore, in his great work of emancipating more than three hundred and fifty millions of human beings, Gandhi sought to find the path of peace, rather than the path of war. He carried it out to an extent which no other great group of people, not even the Quakers, had ever attempted before. He led hundreds of millions toward this program of peace and sacrifice. It was not as successful as he had hoped. Nevertheless, at his death he could see that his program was a greater and finer program than anything that the world had tried, certainly during the twenty centuries of Christian leadership. The impact of his magnificent courage and his stubborn standing by principle will not soon be forgotten. This is not to say that Gandhi was all-wise; that, for instance, his fight against capitalism and his laying down of great principles were always unassailable by criticism and logic; but with all of his mistakes, and there were many, his fundamental principles were unquestionable, his unselfishness and spirit of sacrifice were something that the modern world cannot properly evaluate or worship. by Jahanzaib Choudhry.  The ongoing genocide by the Israeli state in Gaza, Palestine is a watershed moment for humanity. We are witnessing brutality, most significantly towards children, and yet we must not be paralyzed by despair. The Israeli state represents the most violent white supremacist state, and we understand its actions in Gaza as the desperate lashing out of a dying white supremacist world order. All eyes are on the American people, to see if a movement for peace in America can disrupt the crucial symbiotic relationship between the Israeli and American states. West Asia must reorganize itself on terms more humane, and we must do our part in educating Asians on the conditions of the Palestinian people. We present here a list of readings, both recent and historical to help understand the crisis in Palestine. Current Genocide and Resistance https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5364286,00.html Interview of Yahya Sinwar with Italian journalist in 2018 covering siege of Gaza, goals of Hamas, and future. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-podcast-gaza-israel American journalist Jeremy Scahilll’s interview with Osama Hamdan, senior Hamas official in early May 2025. An interview with Osama Hamdan, senior Hamas official who says the Palestinians want to work towards a 5 year hudna, or long term ceasefire and is willing to hand over power to an interim authority to conduct elections and let the Palestinian people choose their leader. https://jacobin.com/2025/02/hague-group-apartheid-israel-genocide ANC veteran and ex-minister of South African government Ronnie Kasrils writes on the launch of the Hague Group of countries to coordinate actions against Israel, the South African case in ICJ and the possibilities of the renewal of anti-colonial solidarity against imperialism. The article is dated February, 2025. https://www.mohammedmhawish.com/p/snapshots-i-spoke-with-20-people “Snapshots: I spoke with 20 people in Gaza after the ceasefire. My heart broke 20 times”, dated February, 2025. https://thecradle.co/articles/trumps-second-term-becomes-a-warzone-between-maga-and-the-deep-state “In Trump’s second term, the MAGA vs neocons battle heats up”, dated May, 2025. Historical https://www.countercurrents.org/pa-gandhi170903.htm “The Jews in Palestine” by Mahatma Gandhi in Harijan, 1938. “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.” https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/nehrus-word-zionist-aggression-against-palestinians-is-wrong Jawaharlal Nehru on Palestine, 1936 “Palestine was not an empty land fit for colonisation by outsiders. It was a well-populated and full land with little room for large numbers of colonists from abroad. Is it any wonder that the Arabs objected to this intrusion? And their objection grew as they realised that the aim of British imperialism was to make the Arab-Jew problem a permanent obstacle to their independence. We in India have sufficient experience of similar obstacles being placed in the way of our freedom by British imperialism.” https://www.peacedialogue.in/nai-taleem-reading-circle/readings/reading-9 Romesh Chandra on Palestine, 1970s “We think today of the heroic people of Palestine fighting for their just rights. Some very powerful countries threaten us with dire consequences if we dare say, as the United Nations has said, that Zionism is a form of racism. I know that there are many who do not see Zionism in this light. But the fact is that Zionism, the way it is being practiced in the Arab occupied areas and in Israel itself, is, as the United Nations resolutions states, racist in every sense of the word. The struggle against the racist practices of the Israeli authorities is not a struggle separate from the struggle in southern Africa or from the struggle in the United States of America. The struggle against racism is one struggle.” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/open-letter-born-again/ “Open Letter to the Born Again” by James Baldwin, 1979 “But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.” https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/38375 Yasser Arafat’s 1974 UNGA Speech. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, became the first nongovernmental leader to address the UNGA through the support of the NAM. “The world is in need of tremendous efforts if its aspirations to peace, freedom, justice, equality and development are to be realized, if its struggle is to be victorious over colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and racism in all its forms, including Zionism” Jahanzaib Choudhry is a historian of the world peace movement and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation. He lives in Chicago.
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