Jean Grave on Colonization – Jeff Shantz

The current period of imperialism, and the debates within anarchist movements over anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, land back, and national liberation, show simultaneously the need to engage with historic anarchist positions on colonialism and imperialism, and a certain lack of familiarity with them. Many important, if imperfect, historic anarchist statements have been overlooked or forgotten.

I began this revisiting and highlighting of historic anarchist positions, with a short presentation of Victor Serge’s opposition to the colonization of Congo by the Belgian state and its social democratic leadership of the day. I followed with an examination of Camillo Berneri’s perspectives on anti-colonialism in the context of the Spanish Revolution. These are each meant to be accessible introductions rather than full-blown analytical dissections.

In the current piece I examine Jean Grave’s pamphlet “Colonization.” The editor of three major anarchist periodicals, Le Révolté, La Révolte and Les Temps Nouveaux Grave was a significant anarchist figure of his day. His legacy though is one of infamy, having co-authored with Peter Kropotkin and signed the “Manifesto of the 16” which called for anarchist support for the Allies and victory over the Central Powers in World War One. Yet “Colonization” remains a compelling, if problematic, polemic. It presents both a seething criticism of colonization and imperialist expansion while being limited by a Eurocentric developmentalist framework.

Anarchists Must Oppose the Crime of Colonization

Grave begins by asserting forcefully his view that anarchists must not waver in taking up strong positions against colonialism.

“At a time when the so-called civilized nations are disputing areas of influence in Africa — in Tripolitania, in the Congo, in Morocco — dividing up the peoples like cattle, all of this hiding the most shady financial schemes, the pastors of peoples being no more than the business managers of financial sharks, tampers of crooked businesses, we must rise up against this hybrid product of patriotism and mercantilism combined — brigandage and highway robbery for the benefit of the ruling classes.”

Grave calls out the class-based constructions of criminality that target low level street crimes while avoiding the major crimes of states and capital. He makes an argument, familiar today, that if someone broke into your home and trashed it this would be treated as a crime and society would condemn the perpetrator. Yet when the state is the perpetrator on a grand scale, as in colonialism, breaking into and trashing entire regions, it is rendered as moral. As Grave puts it:

“From the moment you operate on a grand scale it merits the approbation of honest men. It is no longer called robbery or assassination; there is an honorable word for covering up the dishonorable deeds that government commits: this is called “civilizing” undeveloped peoples.”

Colonization shows decisively the myth of law. It is merely the symbolic expression of force and violence. In Grave’s words:

“He will not be slow in teaching that the law of the sword is the only law;—the institution which protects property in Europe does not recognize it in another latitude. And in all this the soldier is encouraged by the officers who preach by example, by the administration which puts the cudgel in his hand that he may superintend the natives it employs upon its works.”

As anarchists oppose criminalization, bourgeois law, and state morality “at home,” they must fight the real crimes of states and capital in colonization.

The Civilizing Lie

Grave has no time for appeals to civilization on the part of colonizers. He rejects claims to civilization made by colonial powers. What capital and states call civilization is really armed robbery and murder. He states, in the scorching terms that characterize much of the text:

“Forbear your tirades on the benefits of civilization! That which you call thus, that which you disguise under the name of colonization, has a name perfectly denned in your code, when it is the act of a few obscure individuals: it is called “pillage and assassination by armed bands.” But civilization has nothing in common with your highway-robber practices!”

He also rejects self-serving portrayals of colonized people as violent or worse as “barbarians.” Any violence arising from the colonized is directly attributable to the actions of the colonizers.

“Let no one talk to us of the duplicity and ferocity of the barbarians…They [colonizers] have excited the animosity of these peoples against the whites by cheating them in their exchanges, by failing to keep their agreements, by massacring them, if need be, when they could do it with impunity.”

Indeed, for Grave, it is the would-be civilizers who show themselves as true barbarians in need of civilizing: “They are savages; they must be civilized.” Let any one take up the history of conquests, and then tell us which were the most savage,—those who were called so, or the “civilized.” Which are in greatest need of being civilized, the conquerors or the inoffensive peoples.”

Grave heaps scorn on the idea of colonialism as “civilizing” and mocks colonizers who see themselves as “civilizers.” Instead, he rightly positions them as architects of extinction, what we would today call genocidiers. He condemns:

“You, rulers, are civilizers? Come on! What have you done with those tribes that inhabited America and which disappear every day decimated by betrayals, those tribes of which, in defiance of the sworn faith, you tear off, little by little, the hunting grounds that you had recognized as theirs? What have you done with the tribes of Polynesia, which all travelers agreed in depicting to us as strong and vigorous peoples, and who are now disappearing under your rule?”

And Grave is most clear on the fact that the path of colonialism (or “civilizing”) is always to what today we call genocide:

“‘[C]ommerce must be protected.’”—We know what that means: two or three fast iron-clads, in double-quick order, half-a-dozen gun-boats, a body of troops to be landed—salute! Civilization is going to perform its work! We have taken a people, strong, robust, and healthy; in forty or fifty years from now we shall have them turned into a horde of anæmics, brutalized, miserable, decimated, corrupted, who will shortly disappear from the surface of the globe. Then the civilizing job will be finished!”

And he notes that this occurs in all contexts of European colonization. It operates as an inevitability of the very acts of colonization. In his words:

“If any one doubt what we here assert…let him read the descriptions of those countries in which Europeans have installed themselves by the right of conquest: everywhere the native populations decrease and disappear; everywhere drunkenness, syphilis, and other European importations mow them down in great swaths, atrophy and anæmiate those who survive. And can it be otherwise? No, not when such means are employed!”

Grave also condemns the flattening of history that presents colonialism only as “progress” or “development.” Instead, he calls for focus on the actualities of colonization in its day to day terrors.

“Remember, too, that in these histories you will find recorded only the “great events,” whose importance has left traces; but if you were to picture to yourself all the “little events” of which these are composed and which pass by unperceived; if you were to bring to light all the turpitudes which are absorbed in the imposing mass of the principal facts, then what would it be? You would recoil affrighted before these horrors!”

And Grave puts a finger on the real motive driving colonial expansion—capitalist desire for land upon which to carry out production, trade, and exploitation. Commercial exploitation becomes everyday oppression. He asserts:

“What the ruling classes must have is new markets for their products and new peoples to exploit; for this they send out their Solcillets, their de Brazzas, their Crampels, Triviers, etc., in search of unknown territories, there to open up factories which shall deliver these countries over to their unlimited exploitation. They commence by exploiting commercially and finish by exploiting in every way, when once these tribes have been brought under their protectorate.”

He also relates this to processes and regimes of settler colonialism.

“What they stand in need of is immense tracts of earth which they may gradually annex after having depopulated them;—do they not need plenty of room where into they may divert the surplus population which embarrasses them, and buy the parliamentarians who become their accomplices in the House [of representatives]?”

Grave shows no sympathy towards those who are killed in uprisings of the colonized. Indeed, those who put down the colonizers have done well: ““They have revolted; they have killed our men!” Well, what else? What were we doing in their country? Why did we not let them alone? Did they ever come and ask anything of us? We have tried to impose laws upon them which they do not want to accept. They have revolted; they have done well. So much the worse for those of us who perish in the struggle; they should have refrained from participating in these infamies.”

Grave connects struggles against colonialism with class struggles domestically. He recognizes that colonialism is bound up with—is intricately connected to—the intensification of exploitation of the colonizing nation’s domestic working class. The exploitation of land and labor abroad provides means simultaneously for the decimation of the working class “at home.” In this he touches upon the process that continues through neo-colonial “globalization” today. Grave states unambiguously:

“As you have undertaken to destroy these races, not inferior, but merely latecomer, you tend in like manner to destroy the working class, which you also qualify as inferior. Day by day you seek to eliminate the worker from the workshop, replacing him by machines. Your triumph would be the end of humanity.”

Colonization and Class Collaboration

Grave is at pains to highlight the destructive effects that colonialism has on the working class. It turns them into monsters as well.

“Behold what an effect military discipline and brutalization have upon the minds of the workers. They endure the same injustices, the same turpitudes, with which they are helping to burden others; and they no longer feel the ignominy of their conduct; they have come to serve, unconsciously, as the instruments of despotism and to boast of this role, not realizing its baseness and infamy.”

And Grave condemns those workers who side with the bourgeoisie in supporting colonial plunder: “But what astonishes and disheartens us is that there are workers who approve of these infamies; who feel no remorse in lending a hand to these rascalities, and do not understand the flagrant injustice of massacring people in their own homes, in order to mould them to a way of living not natural to them.”

While identifying the harms done to the domestic working classes, Grave also notes the ways in which that same working class is bought off by their ruling class’s false promises of imperialist gain. And how this also fuels inter-imperialist war—again victimizing the working class: “[T]oo bad if the English workers pay the difference. In order to make them patient, they will be promised the empire of the world, and they will be launched against the Boers or the Germans.”

Grave even emphasizes the point that colonization gives the bourgeoisie an effective means for maintaining standing armies. Such is certainly the case today in which global powers (and their lapdogs) grow their armed forces not for purposes of national defense but almost exclusively for imperialist conquest.
This is all, of course, rather ironic given that Grave himself betrayed working class solidarity during World War I. To his eternal shame and infamy, Grave joined Peter Kropotkin in siding with the Allies against the Central Powers and called on other anarchists to sign on for war chauvinism.

Assimilationist Colonialism, Not Anti-Colonialism

It must be stressed too that Grave’s criticism of colonization is not anti-colonial. While condemning expressly violent aspects of colonization, he poses as an alternative assimilationist processes that are, if less openly bloodthirsty, nevertheless still violence. Indeed, as examples like residential schools in Canada which sought to “kill the Indian in the child” show us, assimilation is carried out through practices that are also brutal, involving theft of children, sexual assault, and murder.

So, Grave makes appeals that should make a present day reader cringe. He says at one point:
“Here are peoples who have another mode of life than ours, other aptitudes, other needs; instead of studying these needs and aptitudes, seeking to adapt them to our civilization gradually, insensibly, not demanding that they take any more of it than they can assimilate, we try to bend them to it at a single blow, we break everything asunder; and not only do they become refractory but the experience is fatal to them.”

Grave’s analysis is captive to his own Eurocentrism. While advocating what he sees, wrongly, as non-violent interaction, he still prioritizes European culture, values, and systems. In comparing colonized peoples with Europeans he calls them “latecomers” in an evolutionist development framework.

Note that his assimilation is largely unidirectional. He does not envision Europeans assimilating to local cultures and relationships. At best he sees assimilation as bettering European culture. Thus, he writes:

“How glorious might the role of the so-called civilized man have been, had he but understood it…The education of undeveloped tribes might go on peacefully and bring into civilization new elements, capable in the course of their adaptation, of putting new life into it.”

Neither is he opposed to opportunistic colonialism through trade.

“To be sure it would be easy enough to come to an understanding with them; one might traffic with them by means of barter, not being overscrupulous, even, about the value of the objects exchanged; these latter being valueless to them save when attractive to the eye, it would be easy enough to get the best of them and realize fine profits therefrom. Was it not thus before the dark continent was penetrated? Were we not, through the intermediary of the coast tribes in communication with the tribes of the interior? Did we not get the same products then as we get now?”

Still, in all of this, Grave does see in colonization the very fall of the capitalist empires. Even if at the very instant of crisis for what he called “this rapidly decaying civilization,” the outbreak of WWI, he was unable to grasp the moment.

References
Grave, Jean. “Colonization” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jean-grave-colonization

Grave, Jean. 1912. “La colonisation.” https://www.panarchy.org/grave/colonisation.html

Shantz, Jeff. 2024. “Victor Serge’s Anarchist Opposition to Belgian Colonialism in Congo.” https://libcom.org/article/victor-serges-anarchist-opposition-belgian-colonialism-congo-jeff-shantz

Shantz, Jeff. 2024. “Camillo Berneri, Decolonization, and the Spanish Revolution.” https://libcom.org/article/camillo-berneri-decolonization-and-spanish-revolution-jeff-shantz