With renewed interest in North America in building dual-power and forming strategies to achieve these objectives, it is important to look around the world at existing modes of resistance and power-building. Around the world, indigenous and formerly colonized peoples have been taking up the struggle to create autonomous spaces, or as Arturo Escobar says, building “a world in which many worlds fit”[1]. This strategy is well known to anyone following efforts of the Zapatistas (EZLN), the Self-Administration of Northern Syria (Rojava), Bakur, and recently the Mapuche people in the Wallmapu region of South America. These struggles forsake the creation or control of the State as a goal, instead creating forms of dual-power within the states they occupy. This approach broadly aligns with the political program of Communalism developed by Murray Bookchin, although adapted and altered for specific contexts.
It is in this context that I bring up the iTaukei (E-tow-kay) people of Fiji, who have built many aspects of the struggle for autonomy into the foundations of Fijian government. Fiji has experienced state weakness thru various coups in its past, and it is my contention that this weakness has at its center aspects of dual-power. This text will illustrate some of these features, and briefly discuss their origins and consequences. I will argue that these experiments with dual-power in Fiji show us the importance of communally-controlled land and taking power from local and municipal government organs, and demonstrate how this can contribute to the weakness of state that Communalism calls for. In addition, I will suggest that while these structures are latent “forms of freedom,” it is up to people and organizations to give them political content. The Fijan experience also offers a cautionary tale; absent a broader critique of systems of hierarchy and domination, grassroots democracy and dual-power can easily become tools of reactionary nationalism.
Fiji was first colonized by the British in 1875, relying on imported indentured servants from India until 1916. Fiji finally gained independence in 1970. As is common in many formerly colonized countries, there have been tensions between the descendants of Indian people and the native iTaukei that sometimes boil over into violence. The fear that perceived Indo-Fijian control would destroy iTaukei cultural autonomy has been identified as a major factor in the four coups Fiji has had, either led or abetted by the iTaukei-dominated military. Although it is beyond the scope of this text to deal with the origins of this racism and other factors involved in the coups, this history is adequately summarized in other sources such as Robert Norton’s Race and Politics in Fiji (2012) and Timothy Macnaught’s The Fijian Colonial Experience (2016), both of which argue that the political elite of the colonial and later sovereign governments fostered this division and stoked fear to keep their positions secure.
Yet despite this colonial and post-colonial history, the iTaukei have developed an indigenous form of grassroots direct democracy and confederation with ecological undertones. This process has been facilitated by a variety of historical and social factors. Throughout Fiji, villages have had only limited penetration of the cash economy and state control, leaving the community largely free to direct and decide its own development. Issues are raised in a monthly village meeting called a bose va koro, wherein people take part in the indigenous practice of talanoa, or storytelling. Talanoa functions as a sort of unity of work and play—people discuss goings-on in the village, air grievances, laugh, joke, and report out from the various councils—all while drinking kava and smoking cigarettes. In this way, the tedium of the meeting is suffused with care, humor, and interest. Social life is also informed by the iTaukei concept of living vaka vanua, or with the land. Vanua has multiple connotations: it can simply mean the land itself, or the unity of land, spirit, and people. It implies a style of living in harmony with the land, with one’s community, and putting the well-being of both above profit for oneself[2].
Various councils exist in which villagers can take part in, depending on the village itself. These councils include crime and mediation, water sanitation, health and safety, finance and investment, community development, women and youth groups, church groups, and elder care. Through these councils, various aspects of village life are constructed and directed. The councils differ from village to village, as each one is created and controlled within the larger village bose. The bose va koro have been codified into the government through the Ministry of iTaukei Affairs. These grassroots meetings connect to a system of district and provincial meetings, comprised of both hereditary chiefs and elected officials to decide the affairs of villages on regional, provincial, and national level. In short, a confederation of community councils.
Broadly sketched, Fiji is divided into 14 yasana (provinces), with each yasana containing a varying number of tikina (districts). The koro, or village, is the smallest unit. Each of these units has a chief, or tui that is in charge—the Roko Tui for the province, Buli for the district, various local chiefs, and the Turaga Ni Koro (village headman) at the village level[3]. Each of these communal units has its own council, which meets to take care of issues, and then meet with the next level up to confer. This next level is guided by a set of village bylaws, which vary from place to place. In addition, village chiefs and headman meet every quarter of the year to collaborate on district issues and to nominate members to the provincial council meeting that is held twice a year[4]. The provincial councils help to coordinate development within the villages, from infrastructure to investment. They are also empowered to create and run public-private corporations and/or cooperatives in order to help economic development in rural areas and generate iTaukei-controlled capital.
This system, which in its present form suffers from corruption and graft, could also point toward a municipalized economic structure. Although these larger councils are controlled by political and hereditary elites, this was not always the case. Historical and anthropological evidence suggests that making these positions hereditary and giving them so much control over the councils was a result of British colonialism[5]. Before that, the leaders of these councils were selected by their own people according to valor in war, service to the community, or as a compromise between various factions; their power over the rest of the village was in many places negligible. Confederations emerged in a fluid way, coming into being and fading away as need dictated. The provincial system was attached to the grassroots, directly democratic village meetings as a method of indirect rule by the British[6].
Another major aspect of this ministry is the communalization of land rights. Over 80% of the land of Fiji is owned communally by various clans—it is inalienable and the financial proceeds of leases and other development projects are distributed to clan members annually through the iTaukei Land Trust Board. This has in large part stunted capitalist penetration into the villages of Fiji and prevented their proletarianization. The iTaukei people can participate in commerce at will, and have land to farm and live on available to them without rent or taxation.
At this point it is important to explain some of the Indo-Fijian context. The Indo-Fijian are excluded from this land communalization and must either buy the small amount of freehold land available or lease from one of the iTaukei clans. Because of this, Indo-Fijians are kept from access to land on an ethnic basis and forced to participate in the wage economy. This creates a large number of business owners and workers who are Indo-Fijian. Thus, there has developed a perception, kindled and support first by the British colonial government and later by the iTaukei clan elites that took their place, that Indo-Fijian people were looking to expand, steal land, and suppress the iTaukei way of life[7]. The perception that Indo-Fijians had won too much political power and threatened iTaukei “paramountcy” was the animating factor for all four coups in Fiji’s history.
Due to the limited scope of government throughout Fiji, however, this is largely a drama played out amongst the political and cultural elite in the capital of Suva. While there were riots and killings in Suva during the coups, these were uniquely limited in scope in comparison to similar eruptions around the world[8]. In addition, there is evidence of solidarity between Indo-Fijian and iTaukei communities on the lived, everyday basis. One major historical example comes from 1920 when Indo-Fijians declared a general strike for wages equal to Europeans that was brutally repressed by the colonial government. The iTaukei people initially supported Indo-Fijian miners, farmers and laborers with food, shelter and moral support. Later, however, they were directed by their chiefly elites – at the direction of the Colonial government – to act as scabs[9].
This event helped catalyze the ‘development’ of the iTaukei people and not coincidentally, their land. First, British colonizers and then iTaukei elites pushed to move the iTaukei towards ‘individualization,’ especially by not renewing the leases of Indo-Fijian cane farmers in order to work the land themselves[10]. This was carried out, but to the dismay of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR); the iTaukei cultivated far less sugarcane than Indo-Fijians, but the company had no other group to buy from. The development plan was soon abandoned, and the colonial government centralized land leasing in 1940. This example illustrates how tensions between the iTaukei and Indo-Fijian peoples have been stoked by colonial and cultural elites in an attempt to reconcile the communal culture of the iTaukei with the drive for land and profit innate to capitalism. In her book Earth Democracy, Vandana Shiva astutely describes how ethnic conflict masks and interpenetrates class conflict: “As diverse cultures experience a threat to their values, norms, and practices by globalization, there is a cultural backlash. When the cultural response does not simultaneously defend economic democracy and create living economies, it takes the form of negative identities and negative cultures”[11]. The conflict between these two ethnic groups in Fiji drives Shiva’s point home.
While the account above provides only a sketch of the complicated historical context, we can nonetheless pull out some interesting threads and conclusions. The first is the fixation on Fiji as an unstable nation-state while remaining a relatively peaceful archipelago. Many theorists have used Fiji as a case study on state weakness, including the current Attorney General, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, in his Master’s thesis on iTaukei Cultural Autonomy[12]. Sayed-Khaiyum points to the Ministry of iTaukei Affairs, its iTaukei Land Trust Board, and village autonomy as prominent reasons for state weakness, which he argues split loyalties while encouraging parochialism and racism. While we can certainly acknowledge that there is some truth in this, we can also employ a social ecological lens to point out that we do not have to accept state weakness as a bad outcome, and that it is not a forgone conclusion for forms of political decentralization to be racist or parochial.
The latest coup in 2006, led by Frank Bainimarama, was allegedly a “coup to end the coup culture.” Yet as the reigning leader of the Fiji First party he has continued to hold power after two election cycles and has worked to implement neoliberal reforms designed to integrate Fiji more fully into the global marketplace. As such, he has taken steps to curb iTaukei cultural autonomy, disbanding the Great Council of Chiefs and the village bylaws, both the grassroots and elite institutions of iTaukei cultural autonomy. There has also been a push to lease land to corporate entities for 99-year leases, effectively subverting communal land rights. In response, there has been a rise in nationalistic sentiment. The most recent election in 2018 was a contest between Fiji First and the Social Democratic Party (SODELPA), the latter of which ran on a platform of iTaukei restoration and supremacy. This closely mirrors the broader phenomenon of rising nationalist/fascist movements around the world in response to neoliberal globalization.
This returns us to the center of my argument, that state weakness does indeed come from iTaukei cultural autonomy, a result of the nascent dual-power structure baked into the Colonial Administration. It carries with it the double helix of a legacy of both domination and a possible form of freedom. There is the potential to expand this cultural autonomy in a confederalist paradigm that would include Indo-Fijians and other ethnic, religious and cultural minorities in the Fijian Archipelago in a manner that neither destroys iTaukei culture nor installs its supremacy. Indeed, as Fiji is a nexus of both Melanesian and Polynesian migration patterns, the people of Fiji have a long history of inclusive integration, with vast cultural diversity that was homogenized into “Fijian” only with colonization. However, what is currently underway is an attempt to integrate Fiji into the capitalist modernity promised to ‘developing’ nations, at the cost of sacrificing cultural autonomy to a sterilized individualism encapsulated within the framework of the liberal nation-state.
This situation underscores the
importance of the Communalist or Democratic Confederalist politics advocated by
Bookchin and Öcalan. In Fiji we can see the need to build dual power by taking
over and democratizing the institutions of local government, but also the need
for confederation and a culture of inclusivity to stem parochialism. Even in a
latent form, the dual-power structure of grassroots direct democracy combined
with communal control of land in Fiji creates both a weakened state and an
alternative system into which people can invest their time and effort. Its
importance is highlighted by the contest between Fiji’s two main political
parties to control it; to either to defang this system to bring Fiji into
capitalist modernity, or to use it as an instrument to assert iTaukei
domination and exclusion of other groups. The false choice being offered in
Fiji is the same one found around the world today: of either neoliberalism or
reactionary nationalism. But through the political framework of social ecology
it becomes possible to see how we might grow a new world within the cracks of
the old, in Fiji and elsewhere, by cultivating local “forms of
freedom” while at the same time weeding out hierarchy and
domination.
[1] Escobar, Arturo. (2012) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[2] Parke, Aubrey. (2014). Degei’s Descendants: Spirits, Place and People in Pre-Cession Fiji. Australia: ANU Press.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Rotuivaqali, M. (2012) Accountability in Fiji’s Provisional Councils and Caompanies: The Case for Lau and Namosi. (Unpublished Master’s thesis). University of the South Pacific, Fiji.
[5] Macnaught, Timothy. (2016). The Fijian Colonial Experience: A Study of the Neotraditional Order Under British Colonial Rule Prior to World War II. Acton, A.C.T.: ANU Press; Parke, Degei’s Descendants: Spirits, Place and People in Pre-Cession Fiji.
[6] Macnaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience.
[7] Norton, Robert. (2012). Race and Politics in Fiji (Second edition. ed., Pacific studies series). St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Macnaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience.;Sayed-Khaiyum, Aiyaz. (2002). Cultural Autonomy: Its Implications for the Nation-State (Master’s Thesis). University of Hong Kong, China.
[11] Shiva, Vandana. (2016). Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. London: Zed Books, p. 105.
[12] Sayed-Khaiyum, Cultural Autonomy.