Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections , 229
rebellions on the one hand and delegitimisation
through new managerial doctrines like privatisation
on the other. Perhaps the fault lay in adopting this
very conception of the state as the sole repository of
power and authority.30
After all, this concept had emerged in the Europe of the late
Middle Ages. Why should anyone assume it was identically
applicable in the modern third world?
All the changes on the international and domestic
terrain, brought on by the turbulence of a new phase of
globalization, called for new nonparty forms of popular
resistance more appropriate to the conditions. These grassroots
movements could be understood as signs of a sense of
the bankruptcy "of States. Of parties. Of other party-like
organisations. Of the organised economy. Ofleadership.
Of democratic institutions. OfNGOs and voluntary agencies;'
observed Kothari. "They are based on deep stirrings of
consciousness ... as a response to the incapacity of the State
to hold its various constituents in a framework of positive
action, its growing refusal (not just inability) to deliver the
goods and its increasingly repressive character."31
Ye t their implications were on the macro scale. They
also had "to be seen as part of the democratic struggle at
various levels, in a radically different social context than
was posited both by the incrementalists and the revolutionaries,
at a point of history when existing institutions
and the theoretical models on which they are based have
run their course ... when large vacuums in political space
are emerging thanks to the decline in the role of the State