Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decoionization , 37
langue as "a language system shared by a given community
of speakers" -that is, anarchists-with parole, "a concrete
speech act of individual speakers" -that is, what's said or
done by any type of anarchist. 10 The totality of the conversation
generated by a particular set of ethical questions and
concerns can't be identified solely with any one utterance,
or any one answer to its defining questions.
The anarchist tradition is a continuously unfolding
discourse-meaning not just the writings and rhetoric
of anarchism but also its body of practices and history of
performative acts. And the content of this discourse-the
thematic that defines its boundaries-is the quest for collective
liberation in its most meaningful sense, by maximizing
the conditions for autonomy and egalitarian social
relationships, sustainable production and reproduction.
The tradition consists at the same time in the argument
over what anarchism is, and the argument over the proper
balance between a whole constellation of key pairs: freedom
and equality, liberty and justice, the individual and
the collective, the head and the heart, the verbal and the
sensual, power relations and economic relations. India's anticolonial
history represented a similar conversation. Here
too the totality of the discourse is characterized by a shared
thematic of defining and attaining liberation, through a
dialogic counterpoint of the modernist/rationalist lineage
(exemplified in the twentieth century by Jawaharlal Nehru,
B. R. Ambedkar, and the People's Science Movement) and
its variously positioned critics.
It is a crucial and delicate issue, however, to recognize
that some of these critical positions have included fascism