Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

238 I Ramnath
twentieth-century people's movement activists came into
contact with the network of resistance from below known
as the global justice or alter-globalization movement. This
in turn provided opportunities at both moments for points
of encounter with Western anarchists, or activists who at
least partake of a movement culture pervaded by the influence
of Western anarchism.
Many groups participating in the National Alliance of
People's Movements were also associated with the People's
Global Action, an international coordinating framework initiated
in 1998 in response to a call put out by the Zapatistas.
Representatives from grassroots movements of seventy-one
countries met in Geneva, including a large (200,000) delegation
from India's Mazdur Kisan Sangram Samiti farmers'
movement. The People's Global Action hallmarks manage
to comprehensively catalog the essential features of multiple
facets of oppression and exploitation, while aiming for universal
relevance without cultural particularism. In this sense,
it is both antiauthoritarian and anticolonial.
Some of these linked campaigns have also maintained
their dialo g ue \vith the aIt- g lobalization movement
through participation in the World Social Forum process,
though not without controversy. When the forum
was held in Bombay in 2004, it provided an opportunity
to crystallize some of the major contemporary debates
around means and ends of antisystemic struggle in South
Asia. Multiple counterconvergences organized by the traditional
Left parties denounced it as a tool of imperialism
for derailing struggles, "putting a human face on neoliberal
globalisation:' and being a hotbed of counterrevolutionary