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Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

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Echoes and Intersections I 225<br />

mobilization was essential-one that would address those<br />

sectors subject to "particular forms of exploitation not<br />

recognized in traditional class analysis" and yet more salient<br />

than ever at the present stage-namely, the women's,<br />

peasant, environmental, and Dalit movements. The other<br />

stream of resistance to the structures of neocolonialism and<br />

internal colonialism since the 1990s came from the new<br />

social movements and "non-party people's struggles; as intellectuals<br />

and activists grew more aware of the necessity of<br />

incorporating the registers of caste and patriarchy as well as<br />

ecological concerns into their analysis of power. 22<br />

Interestingly, one theme among the variously situated<br />

economic struggles that Omvedt identifies is that they are<br />

"directed against the state, rather than against the holders<br />

of private property; that is, the 'decentralizing' or 'antistatist'<br />

thrust, is economic as much as it is political." She draws<br />

on Immanuel Wallerstein's linkage between the political<br />

and economic decentralizing moves of "emphasizing democratic<br />

participation . .. 'eroding the state' rather than attempting<br />

to take state power;' and "retaining 'local' control<br />

over surpluses." This movement orientation, though, is not<br />

apolitical but instead "an effort to redefine political action,<br />

to find ways of reconstructing politics."23 Foregrounding<br />

these dimensions called for a more comprehensive "unified"<br />

analysis of capitalism that could recognize manifold<br />

sites of surplus extraction-not limited to wage labor but<br />

rather falling everywhere along a complex and distended<br />

chain of accumulation-from appropriation ofland and<br />

minerals, to reproductive labor, through a string of valueadded<br />

transactions.

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