Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

The Highest Form of Anarchism
Given that colonization is one of the most concentrated
forms of power in history, incorporating extreme
modes of domination, dispossession, and racial hierarchy,
the categorical imperative of resisting it or acting in
solidarity with those doing so should require no justification
to any anarchist. Yet anarchists in the global North often
teel conflicted by the sense that opposing colonialism requires
supporting national liberation struggles. This in turn
implies compromising their own principles to allow fo r a
provisional alignment with nationalism, with all its distasteful
corollaries of statism, chauvinism, and patriarchy. This
is precisely why an anarchist approach to anticolonialism is
needed: to sketch out a more comprehensive emancipatory
alternative to the limited nationalist version ofliberation.
It begins, perhaps, with distinguishing between the
negative (much simpler) and positive aspects of liberation.
Resistance is by definition a negative project, aimed
at the removal of that which obstructs equity and emancipation.
Such a goal may be held in common-even iHor