Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

240 I Ramnath
and the possibility of another world." Open space, accordingly,
"challenges and subverts the idea that structure and
organisation are necessarily vertical or programmed;' or
hierarchical by definition. Ye t Sen also stresses the importance
of contextualization and accountability. Such a space
is never "inherently neutral, open or equal;' since it "lives
in dialectical tension with its surrounds;' and may have
been created through "displacement and appropriation."
It represents potentiality, not utopia. Therefore it must be
"conceived, perceived, and practiced as struggle; as critical
action. Open space-and opening spaces-must be seen as
an insurrectionary act; as an insurrection."4,
The task at hand is to keep an eye out fo r where antiauthoritarian
and decentralizing tendencies are visible while
also noting where resistance to neocolonialism, most obviously
in the form of neoliberal capitalism and accumulation
by dispossession, is visible, and asking whether there is any
logic by which these two elements should have anything do
with each other.
In the context of post-cold war neoliberal globalization,
the Indian state reneged on its social contr n and
renounced its previous institutional persona, betrayed often
in practice yet still cherished in the abstract, as emancipator
and benefactor. Now that the state was aligned with colonizing
forces rather than against them, as its redistributing
mechanisms channeled wealth upward, not downward, an
anticolonial (or neocolonial) orientation would by default
have to involve opposition to the state. But did this materialize
as a principle, and not just a situational tactic ? For
some, perhaps, yes.