Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

6 I Ramnath
can we identify just what affinities and analogies are being
sensed whenever the linkage is made?
This leads to the second implication, which has to do
not just with anarchism's role in decolonization but also
with decolonizing our concept of anarchism itself. That
means that instead of always trying to construct a strongly
anarcha-centric cosmology-conceptually appropriating
movements and voices from elsewhere in the world as part
of "our" tradition, and then measuring them against how
much or little we think they resemble our notion of our
own values-we could locate the Western anarchist tradition
as one contextually specific manifestation among a
larger-indeed global-tradition of antiauthoritarian, egalitarian
thought/praxis, of a universal human urge (if! dare
say such a thing) toward emancipation, which also occurs
in many other fo rms in many other contexts. Something
else is then the reference point fo r us, instead of us being
the rderence point for everything else. This is a deeply
decolonizing move.
This is perhaps where I need to make a distinction between
the concept of anarchism and the Circle-A brand.
The bigA covers a specific part of the Western Left tradition
dating from key ideological debates in the mid-nineteenth
century and factional rivalries in the International Working
Men's Association. It peaked worldwide in the early twentieth
century among radical networks that consciously
embraced the label while nevertheless encompassing multiple
interpretations and emphases within it. Genealogically
related to both democratic republicanism and utopian
socialism, the bigA opposed not only capitalism but