Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

34 I Ramnath
some and harmed others. A critique of modernism (or
colonialism) or any of the phenomena of modernity
(or coloniality) is not necessarily a bid to "go back" but
instead an attempt to seek a different way fo rward that
doesn't destroy beneficial aspects of an existing fabric,
while improving on those aspects that were detrimental
to the expansion of freedom and equality. Far from being
reactionary, as an orthodox Marxist teleology would deem
it, anticolonial critique of modernity was not necessarily
an attempt to halt progress-as if the only options were to
go forward or backward along a narrow track-but rather
to choose a different direction-oblique, perpendicular,
or spreading in a skewed delta of potential alternatives. In
other universes, with other histories, maybe they are what
modernity looks like. Resistance thus contains a range of
adaptive, subversive, redirectiona! or dialectically synthetic
'
responses not just to halt or reverse modernity but also to
generate alternate modernities or countermodernities.
Anarchism = Modernity?
And what about anarchism? In its attempt to solve the
problems of oppression and exploitation, is it inherently
modernist or antimodernist? Rationalist or Romanticist?
This debate has implicitly structured much of the past
and current terrain of We stern anarchism. It also underlies
a pervasive confusion among those who, in the effort
to define anarchism historically, give up and dismiss it as
incoherent and contradictory.