Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decolonization I 29
exchangeable commodities on the world market
rather than local use values
• An exponential increase in technology, industrialization,
scientificity-especially with regard to communication
and transport-and the fossil-fuel-based energy
regime
The processes entailed in colonization are recognizable
as a particularly traumatic, violent acceleration of the
frontier of modernization, here experienced as an assaultive
external force that shredded the existing sociocultural
fabric rather than incrementally modifying it. This is not
to paint the inhabitants of such a region as identical, passive
victims; many participated in these projects, and some
significantly benefited. This is one reason why resistance
always entails internal conflict as well as a defensive front;
many an anticolonial effort has segued into civil war.
Moreover, without colonial incursion, modernization
may well have emerged on its own; some argue that colonization
itself is what prevented this from happening. But
Asian, African, and Latin American modernities unaffected
by European intervention are a counterfactual speculation
in our historical reality. The fact is that every dimension
of modernity as we know it was built on colonial history.
Modern European and North American material prosperity
along with cultural consumption and production at
every level owed an immense debt to its colonial relationships
with Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, from the plantation
slave labor driving the Industrial Revolution, to the
silver and gold mines financing military might, whereas