Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 213
social problems, "ecologically unsustainable development,
regional inequalities, and the growing control of the economy
by global capital . .. are not trends that have emerged
despite the nation-building project ofIndian elites, but
precisely are what 'anarcho-communitarians' point to as the
result of that project."6
Of course, these alleged anarcho-communitarians are
intellectuals, and the context is a highly charged academic
discourse that spills into other social science disciplines as
a feud between Marxist and poststructuralist theoretical
approaches. So maybe this debate has nothing to do with
actual political struggles, social movements, and grassroots
resistance. Yet the distance between the academic debates
of activist scholars and their real-world political implications
is far less in India than it is in the United States.
Such debates affect the very recognition and validation of
movements-how struggles are framed and carried out,
who leads and takes part in them, and whose interests and
beliefs are represented or left out of political space.
Once the ideal type of the Nehruvian developmental
welfare state was discarded in 1991, other models replaced
it: state as vehicle for neoliberal capital accumulation or
violent ethnoreligious chauvinism. Either of these orientations
made it less and less feasible for the organized Left
to strategize a role within it. Not only had it failed in its
original stated goals but it had then actively abandoned
these goals altogether. The function previously ascribed to
the state was as a defender against imperialism and militarybacked
capital accumulation with a British face. Now it was
the ptomoter of the same, with an Indian face. It could be