Category: Anarchism

Decolonising anarchism, according to Jesse Cohn, amounts to freeing it from its modernist assumptions: that culture is opposed to nature, that human culture progresses by an expanding autonomy from the heteronomy of nature, a progress grounded in the technological dominion over the natural world (and the human worlds closest to nature, e.g., those of the “indigenous” of the americas) and the freedom of human thought and life from the illusion of its dependency on transcendent sources (e.g., religion). To the extent that anarchism is imbued with or assumes such ideas, it is modernist and colonialist, susceptible to all of the hierarchies and forms of oppression that it has claimed to contest in its brief modern history.