Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath
and racial hierarchy, the categorical imperative of resisting it or acting in solidarity with those doing so should require no justification to any anarchist. Yet anarchists in the global North often feel conflicted by the sense that opposing colonialism requires supporting national liberation struggles. This in turn implies compromising their own principles to allow for a provisional alignment with nationalism, with all its distasteful corollaries of statism, chauvinism, and patriarchy. This is precisely why an anarchist approach to anticolonialism is needed: to sketch out a more comprehensive emancipatory alternative to the limited nationalist version of liberation.
It begins, perhaps, with distinguishing between the negative (much simpler) and positive aspects of liberation.
Resistance is by definition a negative project, aimed at the removal of that which obstructs equity and emancipation. Such a goal may be held in common—even if for different reasons—among many who share nothing else. The positive counterpart is the prefigurative project of creating the conditions that generate equity and emancipation. Many anarchists emphasize this as a distinguishing feature of their praxis; here limitless variation is possible among divergent visions of an idealized future. Of course we insist that even in the midst of struggle, the visions can’t be postponed, since the route we choose determines where we end up. But since resistance is the common denominator, clarifying the nature of the enemy is a logical place to start. In redefining what we’re for, it always helps to understand what we’re against.
Anticolonialism ≠ Nationalism
The words colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably, although there are some nuances. Imperialism is the projection of power by a political entity beyond its territorial jurisdiction, whether through economic or military means, hard power or soft, or some combination thereof. It may take the form of direct occupation along with some degree of administrative control, though strategically located bases or concessions are cheaper, easier, and demand less responsibility for the residents. Colonization, which originally denoted settlement within metastasizing enclaves, has more recently come to imply hegemony through the export of culture.
In the national liberation context, using the terminology of imperialism as opposed to colonialism suggested an analysis of global capitalism, which was thus more radical than simply opposing foreign rule or presence per se. In the corresponding metropolitan context, anti-imperialism was a term used on the Left to add an anticolonial component to a domestic anticapitalism focused solely on localized (and ethnically bounded) class struggle.
The goal of modern imperial power projection is the accumulation of capital, considered necessary for the strengthening of the colonizing state relative to other states. Capitalism in the north, particularly in its industrial form, required “underdeveloped” areas in order to continue expanding and stave off periodic crises in its wealth-generating system, constantly renewing the founding act of primitive accumulation along new frontiers of dispossession. By seizing resource-rich areas, enlisting the resident populations as cheap labor and a captive market, a “great power” could externalize its costs on to its colonies while enabling a massive extraction of surplus. In this way, colonialism embodied the symbiosis of global capital with the interstate system, underpinned by the crucial legitimizing ideologies of cultural and racial supremacy. Colonialism was in fact instrumental in generating the logics and structures of capitalism, nationalism, and racism during their formative periods.
Nationalism developed in tandem with the period of high imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to what’s often termed the first round of globalization at the turn of the twentieth. The logic was that a great nation needed a strong state, and a strong state needed a colonial empire in order to secure an advantageous balance of financial and military power against its rivals. Furthermore, in the escalating paranoia of realpolitik, maintaining autonomy became equivalent to achieving supremacy. World War I was the inevitable result of imperial competition running up against its material limits, combined with the increasingly vehement and organized objections of these empires’ subject peoples.
A restive or insurgent colony was even better than a pacified one as a laboratory for states to develop their military, bureaucratic, disciplinary, policing, and surveillance capabilities. Here administrators tested new techniques for future application to domestic security in the metropole. In the later stages, coercion came to the fore as sporadic revolt swelled into irrepressible resistance, but earlier—initial conquests aside—colonizers attempted to consolidate their control (and claim moral legitimacy) by training the racialized “primitive” through the ideological apparatus of both liberal and religious civilizing missions. The “white man’s burden” was the onus of enlightening the ungrateful savage, the heathen, the eugenically challenged—while doomed never to be appreciated for this selfless effort. Hence, some of the most pernicious and persistent aspects of colonization involved not just military occupation, political domination, and economic superexploitation but also the systematic assault on cultural integrity, languages, lifeways, and ethnic identities. But are these always defined as national identities?
So far I’ve been referring to the nationalism of the colonizers, not the colonized. Is the widespread instinct that one is good and the other bad as simple as the difference between overlords and underdogs? While nationalism lies at the root of many evils, its emotional force and historical significance for freedom fighters cannot be ignored, and so the notion of national liberation struggle requires some attention.
Indian Marxist literary theorist Aijaz Ahmad took Perry Anderson to task in an essay for stating that “all third world literature is nationalist literature.”[1] The same objection could be made regarding the historiography, not just the literature, of the global South. Periodized in terms of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, a nationalist narrative moves from primordial purity to unjust enslavement to destined redemption. A cycle of restoration and rebirth, combined with a linear progression toward teleological fulfillment, results in a triumphal spiral toward statehood: the destination for the nation’s journey, sign of its legitimacy, and guarantor of its autonomy and well-being.
The fundamental assumption of nationalism is that in order for a people to be recognized as holders of collective rights and freedoms, it must be constituted as a nation duly manifested in a state: an exclusive institution defined by its monopoly on sanctioned force and revenue extraction. A state is, in the starkest terms, a mechanism designed to accumulate wealth in order to make war, to make war in order to protect its wealth, and to make laws to facilitate its functioning, meaning to protect its own stability. This includes the maintenance of a reasonable degree of contentment among its members; the liberal or social democratic state adds the requirement of legitimation either by formal mechanisms of consent for its members or its claim to serve the members’ common welfare. Therefore, the only anticolonial militance retroactively recognized as a legitimate freedom struggle (violence by an anticipated future state) rather than a crime (nonsanctioned violence within a state) or terrorism (as extrastate violence) must be nationalist. The nationalist fairy tale culminates in the marriage of (spiritual) nation and (physical) state, where the people live happily ever after.
By this circular logic, without a state a group is merely a marginalized minority, hoping at best to exist on sufferance as outsiders within someone else’s jurisdiction where safety and success cannot be guaranteed. This logic became particularly important in South Asia, where the movement for a separate Pakistani state emerging from the Indian national liberation movement depended on the argument that the Muslims of the subcontinent constituted an ethnically distinct nation defined against the numerically dominant Hindus, correspondingly framed as the quintessence of a more monocultural Indian state—never mind the immense variety of regional and linguistic identities that crosscut either religious identity, or their centuries-old coexistence and cultural cross-fertilization.
The same fractal pattern has been repeated many times since independence from British rule, by separatist movements objecting to the domestic practices of postcolonial national states, exercising forms of “internal colonialism” on border areas and hinterlands (for whom internality was exactly the question) and deploying the same forms of governmentality. In seeking to replicate the techniques of colonial rule by institutionalizing states rather than abolishing them, the nationalist goal diverged from that of substantive decolonization.