Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decolonization , 27
many anarchists and anticolonialists (and later for India's
Maoists), agrarian peasants rather than industrial proletarians
represented the leading edge of struggle. Therefore it
was more than just a matter of co-opting an already-existing
mode of production, changing its relations while retaining
its means and instruments; it meant challenging the establishment
of capitalism and modern governmentality, sometimes
even opposing the structures of thought on which
they were based. Either way, the result was that the ground
of struggle, conditioning the modality of resistance, was
primarily non- or preindustrial. Given the enforced role of
nonindustrial dependency within the classical colonial relationship,
the structural comparison to the situation faced
by Britain's South Asian subjects at that time was clear.
Finally, cultural practices, language, education, and
everyday life in the colonial context constituted a major
dimension of oppression, and therefore a major field on
which resistance played out. Here there was no question
of base and superstructure. Colonization functioned on
multiple levels, through several interlocking modalities of
hard and soft power, from the structural to the psychological.
Economically it was accumulation by dispossession;
politically it was authoritarian state control; militarily it
was occupation and counterinsurgency; ideologically it
was cultural hegemony leaving its stamp through linguistic
retraining and epistemic violence. Striving for total
decolonization would mean working on all these levels in
addition to (but not instead of) tackling capitalism and the
state, without reducing the struggle to either the material
or ideological! discursive plane.