Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Oecolonization I 35
The crux is this: ifby asking "Is anarchism modern
or antimodern?" we mean "Is anarchism really part of the
rationalist or Romanticist tradition? Is it a child of the
Enlightenment or its counterrevolution? Does it do the
work of Dionysus or Apollo?" then we fail to grasp that the
cultural profile of modernity itself is not wholly identifiable
with either side. Rather, its very fabric is woven from
the dialogic counterpoint of both, as a play of energies that
exists within the field of material conditions symptomatic
of modernization. Generated in response to these conditions,
anarchism is part of modernity, and like the rest of
modernity, partakes in the same interplay of energies.
What's unique about the anarchist tradition among
\'Vestern political discourses is its continuous struggle for
a synthesis between the two polarities, rejecting neither.
Taken as a whole, it's a cumulative attempt to find a balance
by making contextually appropriate adjustments along the
spectrum. Nowhere is it a reduction to one or the other,
and indeed a quest for balance implies a critique of such
a reduction at either end. True, even within the broadly
drawn boundaries of anarchism, there are those who have
staked out positions near to one or the other. But to argue
over which pole truly represents the tradition is to hear
only half the conversation. We might ask, for example,
whether in a specific context the source of oppression is
an excess of either instrumental reason or superstition,
whereas the existence of rationality itself is neither disease
nor cure. I like to use a lemonade metaphor: depending
on the circumstances and what's already been mixed, you
might need to increase or decrease your ratio oflemon juice