Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath
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function, including both disciplinary and ideological apparatuses. In British India, military installations, infrastructure, legal and educational systems: all were targeted for raids, sabotage, boycotts, or noncooperation. For some, this externality implied that the problem could be solved through decapitation, sidestepping the need for deep systemic change, and stoking a taste for propaganda of the deed.
Furthermore, classical anarchism was often associated with primary resistance to the onset of industrialization, as opposed to the Marxian and syndicalist assumption that the transition had already occurred, and that revolution would be organized from within industrial society. For many anarchists and anticolonialists (and later for India’s Maoists), agrarian peasants rather than industrial proletarians represented the leading edge of struggle. Therefore it was more than just a matter of co-opting an already-existing mode of production, changing its relations while retaining its means and instruments; it meant challenging the establishment of capitalism and modern governmentality, sometimes even opposing the structures of thought on which they were based. Either way, the result was that the ground of struggle, conditioning the modality of resistance, was primarily non- or preindustrial. Given the enforced role of nonindustrial dependency within the classical colonial relationship, the structural comparison to the situation faced by Britain’s South Asian subjects at that time was clear.
Finally, cultural practices, language, education, and everyday life in the colonial context constituted a major dimension of oppression, and therefore a major field on which resistance played out. Here there was no question of base and superstructure. Colonization functioned on multiple levels, through several interlocking modalities of hard and soft power, from the structural to the psychological. Economically it was accumulation by dispossession; politically it was authoritarian state control; militarily it was occupation and counterinsurgency; ideologically it was cultural hegemony leaving its stamp through linguistic retraining and epistemic violence. Striving for total decolonization would mean working on all these levels in addition to (but not instead of) tackling capitalism and the state, without reducing the struggle to either the material or ideological/discursive plane.
Thus some of the differences between the Left antisystemic movements of a colonized agrarian region and those of a heavily industrialized one were analogous to those between classical anarchism and early Marxism—for example, critiques of the latter’s (real or perceived) overemphases on developmentalist teleology, instrumental reason, class reductivism, and analysis of political economy without a comparable analysis of power. This resonance arose because anarchist and anticolonialist traditions were responding to analogous conditions: a collision with the leading edge of capitalism and the state at a crucial transition point into their modern forms.
Modernity = Coloniality?
Historians identify several processes definitive of the modern condition:
The expansion of the rationalized state, functioning through mechanisms of surveillance, policing, discipline; governmentality exercised through bureaucratic enumeration and management of populations, resources, and so on; and the recognition of such a state as one unit among a mutually reinforcing system of units
The incorporation of more and more goods, commons, natural resources, land, water, labor, time, space, minerals, crops, genetic information, cultural materials, raw materials, manufactured/processed products into the logic of a global capitalist economy, subject to quantification as alienable and exchangeable commodities on the world market rather than local use values
An exponential increase in technology, industrialization, scientificity—especially with regard to communication and transport—and the fossil-fuel-based energy regime
The processes entailed in colonization are recognizable as a particularly traumatic, violent acceleration of the frontier of modernization, here experienced as an assaultive external force that shredded the existing sociocultural fabric rather than incrementally modifying it. This is not to paint the inhabitants of such a region as identical, passive victims; many participated in these projects, and some significantly benefited. This is one reason why resistance always entails internal conflict as well as a defensive front; many an anticolonial effort has segued into civil war.
Moreover, without colonial incursion, modernization may well have emerged on its own; some argue that colonization itself is what prevented this from happening. But Asian, African, and Latin American modernities unaffected by European intervention are a counterfactual speculation in our historical reality. The fact is that every dimension of modernity as we know it was built on colonial history. Modern European and North American material prosperity along with cultural consumption and production at every level owed an immense debt to its colonial relationships with Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, from the plantation slave labor driving the Industrial Revolution, to the silver and gold mines financing military might, whereas modernization in India and elsewhere was experienced through the medium of colonization. The Latin American subalternists, inspired by but diverging from the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, actually theorize coloniality as the other face of modernity.[5]
Despite their close interrelation, however, colonization and modernization are not interchangeable terms. What distinguished the process of colonization from any other instance of coercive modernization, legitimating and masking it, was the dimension of racism in all of its iterations (including Orientalism), whether as a religious and cultural myth, or a scientific and biological one. This is also what makes antiracism such an important component of mobilizations in solidarity with anticolonial movements.
The key to manifesting an anarchist anticolonialism (a point shared with third world feminism as well as what Chela Sandoval calls the methodology of the oppressed, among other analogous terms) lies in the intersectionality of those dimensions.[6] This is exactly where twentieth-century antisystemic movements in decolonizing regions—the “tricontinental” of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—had critiques to offer their counterparts in the Western, northern, and/or colonizing world: isolating class struggle in practice and rhetoric did not sufficiently address the fundamental global structures of imperialism, nor the realities of racism and colonization.
Meanwhile, systemic analysis allowed for the relating of Left internationalism to national liberation struggles and other transnational anticolonialisms. The power grid of race both reinforces and complicates that of capitalism, especially when we add the dimension of spatiality at the global scale—and there we have imperial geopolitics. But as is still true today, the counterpart of a globalization of power systems is a globalization of antisystemic resistance.
The question of orientation to modernity underlies both the anarchist and anticolonial discourses. This question fuels the perennial debate on the nature of anarchism, the genealogy of its intellectual tradition, and its relationship to other radicalisms on both the Left and Right. It also refracts the spectrum of intellectual and political differences within Indian anticolonialism.
If the processes of colonization correlate to those of modernization, then does anticolonialism have to be antimodern? No, and this largely has to do with sloppy language use. Modernity, modernization, and modernism are all words too often used in confusing, contradictory ways. There are the material processes associated with modernization, a project never fully realized and never proceeding evenly without frictions and obstructions; there are also shifts in perception and consciousness that make up our experience of these new conditions—of which multiple effects and affects, interpretations and evaluations, are possible—all of which are modern, but not all modernist. Modernism reveals a third level, which is a conscious aesthetic, philosophical, political, epistemological stance manifested in art, literature, architecture, and so on. But the description of modernity as an existential condition consists of the full package of contradictions and contradictory vectors on all these levels, a complex agglomeration of causes, effects, and responses to them.
Under the harsh stamp of racialization it became difficult (on both the material and epistemological levels) for Indians to develop without conflict an alternate, indigenous modernity out of the materials already available, or freely exchanged through their transnational contacts with other activists and intellectuals. Yet even within the given circumstances, responses to the projects and conditions of modernity ranged from complete