Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Introduction I 3
opponents, never the twain to meet. Yet the seeming polarity
was in reality masking a range of critical variants being
voiced within each category. To me the synthesis seemed
perfectly logical because of my idiosyncratic angle of vision,
free of entanglement in the intermovement dynamics that
seemed to overdetermine any statement so that a critique
of entity X would by implication align you with entity Y,
within a fixed arrangement of alternatives.
In India, when I hear people use terms like anarchism,
anarchist, and anarchistic, they are usually referring either
to violent, nihilistic chaos or competitive, free market individualism.
It stands to reason, then, that the terminology is
used disapprovingly by leftists and Left-liberal progressive
types, and approvingly by postmodern academics and selfindulgent,
capitalist entrepreneurs. The implied opposite
is top-down centralized state planning of the sort that was
instituted through the Nehruvian social democracy that
officially dominated Indian society until the liberalization
of the early 1990s (though already undermined by the
Emergency period of authoritarian crackdown in the mid-
1970s). Despite its stated goals of redistributive justice, this
system became in practice a byword for inefficiency and
unwieldy bureaucracy.
If engaged in an appropriately complex yet amicable
political discussion, I might point out that the contrary
of top-down organization and concentrated power is not
the absence of organization but rather a different form of
decentralized, participatory organization in which power
is dispersed. I might suggest that the alternatives to a statecontrolled
economy include not just neoliberal free market