email: hobgoblinlondon@aol.com
Hobgoblin 3 2001
Solidarity and the Dialectics of Defeat - past and present By Christopher Ford
Contents: Editorial: Staying Out of the Swamp- can the movement strike a pathway to a new 'Socialist United States of Europe'.
The Debt and the Law of Value By Andrew Kliman.
From the Archives: Marxism and the 'Party' by Raya Dunayevskaya.
Reviews: Adam Hochschild's 'King Leapolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa' (Richard Abernethy)
'Rethinking Fanon: the Continuing Dialogue'. Edited by Nigel C Gibson (David Black)
Solidarity and the Dialectics of Defeat - past and present by Christopher Ford. Workers Aid in Africa - report from Namibia by Jade McClune. What Happened to the Idea of Women's Liberation in the Women's Movement? By Maya Jhansi. Istvan Meszaros 'Beyond Capital' - critique by Peter Hudis. After Prague, what now - a view on the Anti-Capitalist movement. Helen Macfarlane - translator of the Communist Manifesto. feminist and Hegelian philosopher. By David Black
STAYING OUT OF THE SWAMP
Can the movement strike a new pathway to a 'Socialist United States of Europe'? (Editorial)
"Only [large] national states constitute the normal political framework for the dominant European bourgeois class (Burgertum), and, in addition, they are the indispensable pre-requisite for the establishment of the harmonious international collaboration of nations without which the rule of the proletariat cannot exist". Marx 1866.
Tony Blair's speech in Warsaw calling for the European Union to become a "European Superpower" (though 'not a superstate') was met by complaints from champion chauvinists such as Murdoch' paper, The Sun, which asked why was the New Labour leader using words like 'collective': "These are the words of Marx and Engels". Of the Communist Manifesto". The irony is that some of the self-styled Marxists predominantly echo this type of chauvinism. Whilst a new anti-capitalism has emerged with more recognition of the necessity of internationalism, this has not permeated thinking of the left on the question of Europe.
Since the end of World War II the European bourgeois states have taken successive steps to realise the pledge of the Treaty of Rome for an "ever closer union". The integrationists saw many of their ideals realised by the new millennium: the old Tariff walls were broken down and replaced by free trade in a unified market; national 'customs' have given way to common social and economic policies; and a European Parliament was set up. This historic process is but ever-new forms of appearance of the general law of the further concentration and centralisation of capital as outlined by Marx put forward by Marx in his great work Capital:
"It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into large capitals".
This law of centralisation, by which the capitalists extend the scale of their operations, is neither new, nor has it emerged without conflict. Marx pointed out that it could take place either through violent annexation and expropriation or through a smoother and less traumatic process of accumulation. In the 1930s it appeared in various forms of state capitalism emerging from the Great Depression and the drive to unify Europe under the heel of Nazi Germany resulted in World War Two. Today's European Union, in contrast, has been more successful from a bourgeois perspective. Whilst not without internecine conflict over terms and speed of each step taken, it has survived since 1957 and continues to evolve. Initially the opponents of the 'Common Market' laboured under the illusion that wealth from its former Empire would make the Commonwealth the inherent partner in the future of British capitalism. But fhe force of reality held sway. Great Britain saw a rise from 15% of trade with the Common Market in 1957 to 31% by the time the UK joined in 1973. Trade within the EU has accelerated along with US investment, strengthening the EU as a rival to the US quest for world mastery.
With regard to Europe the capitalist class has displayed higher-class consciousness than the labour movement and knows that it must surrender some of its national prerogatives in order to survive. They have no more chance of rolling back this integration than the old aristocracy had in halting the rise of bourgeois society. Unlike the aristocracy the working class could not fuse into a new ruling class of capitalist overlords and - as demonstrated by the history of Chartism in the 1835-50 period - it required an independent class-line to move forward.
Some called for a return to the land and cross class alliances against the 'Lords of Capital', but Marx and Engels described such 'reactionary' socialisms as displaying a "total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history". Equally reactionary would be for us today to take as our standpoint the same ground of the 'Euro-sceptics' and their campaigns. The workers of the 19th century wanted to turn back the clock of industry can be understood in the context of their attempt to find solutions for terrible deprivations within a system that seemed to hold no promise for the masses. Yet even then the attempt to restore small-scale production and smallholding agriculture was opposed by those who argued against such illusions as a solution for labour. Bourgeois society had created the proletariat whose freedom would be realised by the abolition of all classes.
The question is: does the historic process of European integration create the potential for a more universal fight of European labour. The anti-Europe campaigns in their various guises are a demand to turn the clock back; their standpoint is one of preserving particularistic privilege and narrow nationalism. The ideal of British "independence" is upheld even if, as Raya Dunayevskaya observed in 1961, "that independence is the insularity that has kept not only capitalistic Britain but labor Britain as 'exceptional' and therefore not integral to the European mass movement".
In the case of the fuel protests, which spread from France where it began as cross-class action by unions and small capitalists, even the sympathetic press sounded alarm. The Evening Standard warned "The arrival in Britain of political direct action - should not be dismissed lightly" and added that, as a result of European integration, it "could become a regular feature of European life". This is the heart and soul of all the campaigns from the 'Get Britain Out Campaign' to 'Save The Pound'. No matter how much socialist rhetoric is peppered on such campaigns their reactionary nature comes through. In the 1975 referendum, even Socialist Worker, the Morning Star and Tribune found themselves on the same side as Enoch Powell and the National Front in opposing the Common Market. If the anti-Europe campaign had won it would have represented no more of a working class victory than this year's Danish vote on the Euro which saw the left line up with the anti-immigrant, fascist Danish People's Party. European capital was not rocked by any resurgent radicalised working class as a result of the 'no' vote; rather it was bigots like William Hague and The Sun who were triumphant. Despite the desire of Danish Marxists like Margit Johansen, editor of Socialistisk Arbejder Avis to stand for "internationalism and workers' solidarity" this position can only undermine European workers unity. The issue of Europe reveals all that is rotten in a Tory party depleted after electoral defeat and it has fallen back on the basest prejudices. This conservative nationalism continues to play a prominent part British politics; and it is swamp we will do well to keep out of.
However, rejecting anti-European chauvinism does not mean adopting the dreams of 'Euro-socialism' or of a Third Way that a new Camelot centered in Brussels. The EU has revived the visage of Hitler in the Schengen Agreement's "fortress Europe", a term coined by the Nazis. Whilst we must defend and extend every aspect of freedom and democracy as the European rulers construct their Union we should not become embroiled in capitalist games. The current situation demands regroupment of Marxists who will not divide theory from practice, philosophy from revolution and use the idea of a united Europe in order to push forward a new conception of the Socialist United States Of Europe. This idea cannot be actualised by the vanguard party or a 'Euro-socialist' led state but by the European masses, from below who empowered by the idea of freedom reorganising European and therefore global foundations. # Hobgoblin No. 3 Winter 2000/2001
Solidarity and the Dialectics of Defeat - past and present
By Christopher Ford
"There is no denying that bourgeois society has for the second time experienced its 16th century, a 16th century which, I hope, will sound its death knell just as the first ushered it into the world. The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and the production based on that market". Karl Marx 1858
From our 21st century vantage point, can we find common ground with Marx's observation on the new stage of globalisation reached with the surge of glabolaised capitalism in the second half of the 19th century? Now as then confronts a barrier under the sign: there is no alternative. It is not coincidental that such mind forged manacles emerge so forcefully in periods which have seen movements arise that have challenged the course being taken by the existing order. The great demonstration at Seattle in Novemebr 1999 signalled a fresh impetus from an array of movements and communities of resistance.
Within days of the May Day 2000 events the Greater London Authority elections saw discontent with Blair find expression through the election of Ken Livingstone as Mayor. As well as the manifestations of anti-capitalism on the streets of Millau, Washington, Los Angeles and Prague, there have also been mass strikes, which have also rocked capital, from China to Norway. These new passions and new forces are a welcome relief after a decade of the proclaimed death of socialism and counter-growth of 'Third Way' and post-modernist influences.
Yet amidst the enthusiasm, there is amongst militants some dangerous illusions. The Socialist Workers Party and its international affiliates for example, inform us that "there is no better time to be a socialist" whilst parading (peacefully) around in Prague with their archaic Bolshevik slogans, completely oblivious to the Czech proletariat's experience of Stalinism. Theirs is the rhetorical response of those who pay lip service to the concept of the proletariat as subject of history, but who in practice replace it with that of the vanguard party. Their enthusiasm for the historic moment has more to do with the selfish ambitions of a particular socialist sect than what is actually historic. The historic moment demands thinking creative human beings engaged in the creation of our own freedom. The existence of global capital is a barrier to freedom does not absolve us from the need to scrutinise what has arisen against it or, more precisely, in response to it.
As the experience of the many unfinished revolutions of the last century shows, the recognition of a new phenomenon - "globalisation" in this case - does not automatically open new paths to freedom. Reading some literature you could be led to believe we have a new capitalism and that the movement of labour has been successfully obliterated by "turbo-capitalism" - indicated starkly by the long decline in union membership and industrial actions. Nevertheless, it remains an essentiality of capital that it actually brings workers together in the workplaces; whether under the old or new old hierarchies of control workers still co-operate to produce the goods and services. And out of this co-operation trade union organisation has continued to survive and organise on new ground.
When Marx wrote of a 'new 16th century' there were barely 250,000 trade unionists in Britain, 100 years later there were 10 million; and 150 years later there are still over 7 million, with 164 million globally. The immense speed of changes brought about by greater global organisation and integration poses an immense challenge and tremendous opportunity to labour. Despite all the capitalist offensives, the ability of workers to defend their organisations and forge new ones has not been universally broken. But any such "optimism" will be ill founded - and corrupted with leftist sentimentality and nostalgia - unless the response of labour to global capital does not separate the problem of "organisation" from that of the new ideas needed to overcome the rule of capital. Capital and Labour:
Conciliation and Class Struggle
What marks the labour movement in the period of the "internet revolution" isn't just the abandonment of any concept of an alternative to bourgeois society (confirmed by TUC President John Monks when he said, in the language of the Third Way "Philosophic conservatism", that the "debate on the centre-left is no longer about socialism versus capitalism, it's about different kinds of capitalism"). The movement has also abandoned the previous working class programs for "industrial democracy" and other radical reforms in the relations between capital and labour.
After the retrogression of the 80s and 90s, what is offered instead is 'Social Partnership' between those with power and those without it. The advocates of social partnership between capital and labour claim that the very existence of global capital is justification enough. But the Third Way belief that we are in the midst of a new industrial revolution is not some blinding revelation arrived at the "End of History"; it has historic roots in the first industrial revolution. In the 1830s, when the Whig (Liberal) government tried to replace parish relief for the poor with universalised workhousing, the first national workers movement - the Chartists - besieged the British State. As the London Chartist, Julian Harney argued: "It is not any amelioration of the condition of the most miserable that will satisfy us; it is justice to all we demand. It is not the mere improvement of the social life of our class that we seek; but the abolition of classes and the destruction of those wicked distinctions that divide the human race into princes and paupers, landlords and labourer's, masters and slaves. It is not patching and cobbling of the present system we aspire to accomplish; but the annihilation of that system, and the substitution in its stead of an order of things in which all shall labour and enjoy, and the happiness of each guarantee the welfare of the entire community". Harney socialist views (160 years ago!) were not, of course, universally accepted within Chartism. His moderate Birmingham rival, Thomas Atwood, put forward 'social partnership' even then: "The interests of masters and men are in fact one. If the masters flourish, the men are certain to flourish with them; if the masters suffer difficulties, their difficulties must shortly affect the workmen in a threefold degree. The Masters therefore ought to take their workmen by the hand and knock at the gates of government and demand the redress of their common grievances".
By the 1850's the revolutionary challenge of Chartism was defeated as capital entered its second 16th century, expanding in all directions. The period of retrogression which followed also saw the 'partnerhip' ideas gain hegemony in the movement. Listen to one union leader, T. J. Dunning in his 1860 Trade Unions and Strikes: their Philosophy and Intention:
"Applying this to the employer and employed, it is of the highest importance that there should be a good understanding between them; that neither should vex or offend the other…. We have before said that the true state of employer and employed is that of amity, and that they are the truest friends. Each should consider this state their true relation and consider its interruption the greatest of calamities."
There were no shortages of "interruptions" in the early 1860s. Marx however, recognised, in his report to International Working Men's Association, meeting at Geneva Congress in 1866, that the unions had become too "exclusively bent upon local and immediate struggles with capital" and "kept too much aloof from general social and political movements" - and this in a period of actual advance in working class organisation, with trades councils emerging directly out of strike committees. The fact was that labour's fights with capital were restricted within the confines of industry; and opportunism of an aristocracy of labour based on imperialist wealth curtailed and regressed the revolution of ideas.
When new moves were made to finally win the vote for the working class, it was not on the principles of Chartist militancy, but pacifist reformism. The myth of'pure and simple' trade unionism and moderate reformism being capable of winning real gains for the workers as a class is hardly borne out by experience. In the period of militant actions in the decade preceding Thatcher's election in 1979, we can see that there were real gains, such as the Health & Safety at Work Act, Race Relations Act, Sex Discrimination Act, and aspirations for workers self-government in industry. But the final wave of a-political militancy in the 'Winter of Discontent' led not to mass socialist consciousness but to the election of Thatcher, the split in the Labour Party and the "New Realism" of the TUC. Such was the legacy of the severing off of socialist, anti-capitalist politics from 'union struggles'. Uniting the old and creating the new.
There is a message to today's generation in Marx's survey of how in the years of retrogression following the defeats of 1848-51 the bourgeoisie had "unmanned the English working classes, and broke their faith in their own cause". Emigration had led to an "irreparable void in the ranks of the British proletariat" and all "the efforts made at keeping up or remodelling, the Chartist movement, failed signally…If then there had been no solidarity of action between the British and the continental working classes, there was, at all events, a solidarity of defeat".
As the unions began to grow in the 1860s so too did an awareness of the direct connection between international activity and immediate interests of the working class, reinforced by the problem of immigrant labour being used to break strikes. Enough of the internationalist legacy of Chartism was retained to find expression in a movement of solidarity with the abolitionist cause in the American Civil War and the Polish rising for independence in 1863. It was support for the Poles, which brought together English and French trades unionists at St.Martins Hall in London to found the IWMA in 1864. But again principles of working class independence were counter-posed by a different view of the relationship between amelioration and emancipation. Some union leaders, such as Robert Applegarth, still saw political power as reversing the "excessive" power of one class and winning the "full confidence of our employers". With conflict frozen social welfare would prevail. But what prevailed for Marx was written by him into the rules of the IWMA: that the struggle for emancipation meant, "for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule".
Furthermore it was emancipation which was the "great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means". Workers had to be "united in combination and led by knowledge". This is an important reminder to those who today seek quick fix solutions in organisational questions alone. Marx emphasised that the thread of internationalism, which ran through the revival of the British working class movement, could not be taken for granted.
"The present revival of the working classes in the most industrious countries of Europe, while it raises a new hope, gives solemn warning against a relapse into the old errors and calls for immediate combination of the still disconnected movements".
Relapse is precisely what happened after the disintegration of the IWMA with the defeat of the Paris Commune. Marx's 1874 Critique of the Gotha Programme saw the "revisionists" as not only being in "opposition to the Communist Manifesto" but also "all earlier socialism" in that they "conceived the workers movement from the narrowest national standpoint"; and he added that "In fact the internationalism of the programme stands even infinitely below that of the Free Trade Party".
The contempory relevance of Marx's insights was apparent in the dispute at the BMW's Rover plant at Birmingham. This saw a section of the English working class, traditionally amongst the vanguard and previously part of nationalised industry, organise the 'Save Rover' demonstration in Birmingham, with massive support from the general public and the rank and file of the labour movement. It was however, another lost opportunity. The union leadership did not turn to international labour by seeking the support of German BMW workers; rather, in the words of Bill Morris of the TGWU, "For us, the initials BMW must mean British manufacturing workers"!
The union leaders fell behind a buy out by rival British capitalist John Towers and signed up to fresh job cuts, 'flexibility' etc. etc The irony of the national chauvinism that permeats the policy of partnership between capital and labour is that it is the policy of the capitalist bloc know as the European Union. Organisational 'Form' The events around the Rover/BMW dispute pose some important questions to those who wish to fight global capital, highlighting the need to combine the disconnected radical and labour movements.
The South African Marxist, Neville Alexander, in looking beyond the party form has posed the idea of re-composition along the lines of the IWMA, which is an interesting alternative perspective to that of the trotskyists, who argue that the vanguard party of the early 20th century solved the 'organisational problem' for all time. But it is worth recalling what Marx said in the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme':
"The international activity of the working classes does not an any way depend on the existence of the International Working Men's Association. This was the first attempt to create a central organ for that activity; and attempt which was a lasting success on account of the impulse which it gave but which was no longer realisable in its first historical form after the fall of the Paris Commune".
When Belgian socialists attempted to refound the IWMA in 1880 Marx opposed them:
"Doctrinaire anticipations of the programme of action for revolution in the future divert us from the struggle of the present…It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Workingmen's Association has not yet arrived, and for that reason I regard all workers congresses, particularly socialists congresses, in so far as they are not related to the immediate given conditions, in this or that particular nation, not merely useless but harmful. They will always fade away in stale, generalised banalities".
Again returning to today, workers own activity shows that their internationalism does not depend on any fixed organisational form. For example there has been in contrast to Rover, successful cross-border labour actions on the continent. What came to the fore at Rover was not only the organisational inadequacy of the labour movement but also of leftist ideas as well - the "stale, generalised banalities" may fade, but they also come back in new guises. Forgetting the experience of state-capitalist regimes in Eastern Europe, which called themselves communist, those who reduced state-capitalism to a Russian question and not a new stage of world capitalism have played down the question of the State as an instrument of class-rule. Whilst in the existing public sector there is a willingness to resist the retrogressive effects of outsourcing and Public Finance Initiatives, there was little indication of a willingness of the Rover workers to fight for a restoration of state ownership (although a motion calling for public ownership was passed by the West Midlands Regional Council of MSF, this did nothing to inspire rank and file resistance at shop-floor level).
The negative response of the workers to the statism of the Left is itself a measure of the duality in workers own resistance to this form of capital; the workers actions were based on their knowledge and experience of what life was like in a nationalised plant, by the crisis in the which industry showed the impotence of the national state in the face of global capital. New Labour's policy towards Rover was simply a caricature of the free trade advocates of the mid-19th century. Tony Blair, rather than appeal to the old ideals of social planning and nationhood, offered the management-speak of the "new economy": "governments in the past, of both major political parties, have been drawn towards rescuing a company in difficulties. We see our role now as helping to equip people and business for the new economy - as encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship."
In a new book On The Edge edited by the Third Way philosophers Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, Robert Kutter says:
"The world's top corporations are now engaged in a bout of unprecedented global merger, acquisition and concentration. They have become not only centres of concentrated economic and financial power; they have become the bearers of the prevailing laissez-faire, globalist ideology. As their economic power grows, so does their political and intellectual reach, at the expense of the nation state that once balanced private economic power with public purposes and national stabilisation policies. The very economic success of global corporations is taken as proof that their world- view has to be correct: that global laissez-faire is the optimal way to organise a modern economy".
But state-capitalism and corporate globalisation are not opposites. There is not an industrialised country on the planet, which is not characterised by one form or another of state planning or intervention. Despite Blair's repudiation of calls for re-nationalisation, a generous £152 million in state aid to BMW was offered. The problem isn't that Kutter's beloved bourgeois governments are being "enfeebled", but that the enfeebling of labour and the Left by illusions in state-ownership only weakens the challenges to the power of global capital. Social Partnership claims to offer mediation between the hostile forces of capital and labour with reconciliation to the benefit of all, but as Marx put it philosophically, in opposition to Hegel:
"This system of mediation can also arise when a man wishes to thrash his opponent but must at the same time protect him against other enemies so that his dual role prevents him from carrying out his original intention. It is remarkable that Hegel could have reduced this absurd process of mediation to its abstract, logical and hence ultimate undistorted form, while at the same time enthroning it as the speculative mystery of logic, as the scheme of reason, the rational mode of deduction par excellence. Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation for their natures are wholly opposed."
Giddens and Hutton say that Marx has been proved wrong because "capitalism has buried the working class" and they argue that the leftist-inspired "growing backlash against the anonymous forces of capitalism" is simply in a futile search for new ideas. "….there is no alternative blue print to hand. Global socialism is an exploded and defunct concept…The task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it. It is all we have; it is both a source of creativity and global enrichment but equally it faces risks from all sides that need to be confronted and managed". These advocates of "beyond left and right" call for a new internationalism which simultaneously abandons looking beyond global capital itself. But their Third Way philosophy envisions labour in virtual Stalinist fashion as the role of "one of the building blocks in the creation of a new global civil society".
A concept of a society erected over humanity is set as the object for the new subjective challenges to global capital:
"A start has to be made in fashioning a philosophy that can underpin globalization which is not neo-liberal but no less importantly represents a clear rupture with the old framework of nation-states or of a utopian internationalism that rested on extending socialism on the globe. The philosophy to hand in our view, is an internationalist third way, blending more effective economic and social democratic values, passionate belief in democracy and an intense concern with human rights".
The "Left alternative" to this is based on a return to "fighting unions" - which may well be a necessary truth but it is quite inadequate as a response today's global capital. As the Marxist-Humanist. Raya Dunayevskaya, warned: "For the Movement to limit its attack on capitalism by talking only about the oppression of labour without focusing on the equally integral dialectic of liberation, is to miss the proletarian totality. That is to say, the proletariat as Reason as well as muscle, as form of revolt from below which is that new beginning which determines the end." To restrict ourselves to organisation and tactics, not subject to a universal goal of a new society, is to remain on the same ground as the philosophic conservatives.
What is lacking in the unions is any discussion on how a totally new kind of labour might replace global capital. New Labour, new struggles after Seattle. In any case, the myth that partnership is disciplining labour and reducing resistance to new flexible practices is contradicted by the latest Trade Unions Trends Survey. Just as the TUC launched the Partnership Institute their own report showed that the number of strike ballots doubled last year with unions carrying out 983 ballots compared to 464 the previous year. It also reveals that 95% of ballot's result in a vote in favour of strike action with 141,000 workers involved in actions. This increased combatitivity shows that beneath the bureaucracies of capital and labour the rank and file workers and shop-floor union reps have more confidence in themselves than we are led to believe especially by the radical intellectuals. Most importantly there has been organising and struggles in the 21st century sweatshops, the call centres, and in the service sector and the knowledge industry. Union membership overall has been rising for the first time since 1979. 600 campaigns for union recognition are currently underway, covering 500,000 workers. These new moves involve increasing numbers of women, Black workers, immigrants and youth. This re-assertion of labour poses questions as to where the movement from practice is heading; and as to how this new combativeness relates not only to the retrogressive ideas around us but importantly to the anti-capitalist movement. The form of the anti-capitalist movement has been one of a series of mass protests focused on the central organs of global capital such as the IMF or WTO.
The Battles of Seattle and Prague have grown to symbolise the anger of a new generation over the state of the world today. The question is whether or not such demonstrative acts can generate and give expression to a new movement against the rule of capital itself. The May Day 2000 events in London also showed what was missing. There was no recreation of the universality that took place around the Liverpool Dockers dispute with the support of Reclaim the Streets. The effort by the London Region of the RMT with the demonstration against tube privatisation was a pale shade of Seattle. It is not enough to blame the labour bureaucrats for this. The reality is that just as much of the problem is with the theory and practice of the self-appointed "autonomist" and Anarchist leadership of the anti-capitalist actions.
There is a strong similarity to the "happenings" organised by the Polish surrealists (the 'Orange Alternative') in the 1980's under the communist regime. The 'happenings' helped break the fear of open protest after Martial Law but themselves became a limitation in the quest for universality. Just as the vanguardists have fetishised the "Party" and subsumed the subject within it, some of the anti-capitalist happenings have done the same with the "Carnival". Lev Levidow, at the last Conference of Socialist Economists, indulged in some rewriting of history in to justify his sectarianism towards organised labour: "At Hillingdon Hospital, after unionised Asian workers refused to sign a new contract from an employment agency, they were replaced by cheaper, non-union staff on short-term contracts. Initially UNISON attempted to discourage picketing; eventually it recommended that the strikers accept redundancy payments, ceased official support, and even tried to expel the recalcitrant strikers from union membership. UNISON and management found a common interest in 'normalising relations', i.e. Formalising the new-style casualised terms of employment". Contrast this view with that of strike leader Malkiat Bilku that: "The fight in the union is just beginning…Our victory shows that it is possible to win. If we few can beat a big company like Granada on our own, imagine what a union with 1.3 million members could do". Levidow's alternative is an ultimatum that: "Labour internationalism cannot be simply equated with international links among trade unions. Trade unions face either a choice: either encourage broader resistance networks and share authority with them, or else co-operate with management to attack that resistance - i.e., to legitimise and manage flexpliotation". But this formulation says nothing of the dualities in the movement, of conflicting ideas, leaders and rank and file. None of this is accounted for when "resistance networks" and trade union class collaboration are posed as absolute opposites.
As Seattle and Prague showed there is also class collaboration in the "resistance networks". The party that dare not speak its name. Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme advocated an "agreement for action against the common enemy", rather than the retrogression of an unprincipled hash as happened at the Gotha unity conference of the German left. Today, the new stage of cognition has found a shift on the traditional left, one reason for this being a self-realisation, as the Weekly Worker noted, that "there is not a housing estate in London where the revolutionary left has a base" (and there are very few union branches in which the left has more than formal or token influence). The Left has tried to regain influence with the formation of the London "Socialist Alliance" and similar bodies across England, which has implicitly, though perhaps only for tactical reasons, presented a 'non-sectarian' alternative to the one-faction vanguard party, which Tony Cliff left us as the 'latest model'.
Whilst it is a positive move that the far-left is co-operating, and sections of the unions have moved away from New Labour in the direction of the Alliances, it is nevertheless a fact that beyond standing in elections they agree on very little and the unity is very limited. Firstly there is little or no discussion on ideas over and above issue of amelioration they can unite around. Again Marx's phrase about "stale, generalised banalities" springs to mind. Banalities versus Philosophy Hegel expressed the problem of posing the particular and the universal within the whole when he wrote: "When one understands by the universal, that which is common to several individuals, one is starting from the indifferent subsistence of these individuals and confounding the immediacy of being with the determination of the Notion. The lowest possible conception of the universal in its connection with the individual is this external relation of it as a merely a common element" The particular, in this case the LSA, is unable in itself to fully express the universal that the historic moment demands because there is a contradiction between the form and the content of the new initiatives on the left.
Predominantly the the various factions that make up the content of the LSA desire 'at the end of the day' a vanguard party, dominated by a single faction through "democratic centralism". Precisely for this reason, the vanguard party, whether in a reformist or revolutionary guise as fixed particular, cannot open the way to the actuality of the universal. Chris Harman of the SWP argues that the experience of the anti-capitalists protests demonstrates that "the movement will reach a point when it begins to fragment unless activists find a way of going beyond symbolism. It means, in other words, beginning to build revolutionary organisations among the world's workers". The important word is "among" as opposed to of. Contrast this view to Marx's opinion that it was the business of the IWMA to "combine and generalise the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever".
As late as 1880, in the Program of Workers Party in France, Marx defined its worth in the following way: "this very brief document in its economic section consists solely of demands that actually have spontaneously arisen out of the labour movement itself. There is in addition an introductory passage where the communist goal is defined in a few lines". Marx was scathing with his French supporters who attacked this program as "revolutionary phrase-mongering". He refused to erect a wall between the fight for amelioration and emancipation of "all human beings". In Philosophy and Revolution Raya Dunayevskaya wrote that "No new stage of cognition is born out of thin air. It can be born only out of praxis. When workers are ready for a new plunge to freedom, that is when we reach also a new stage of cognition".
It could now be credibly argued we are on the verge of such an historic moment and that the movement from practice is crying out for universality, to move from the 'solidarity of defeat' to 'solidarity for freedom'; thus breaking out of this period of retrogression, with its parallels with the period following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions. The response to global capital requires not simply breaking down obstacles such as the proponents of 'no alternative' - to either a global capital or a global vanguard. Solidarity for freedom is about human beings actively changing this world and the creation of a new humanist society. Without that that object being restored and its full meaning addressed all responses to global capital will be inadequate.
The dialectics of liberation from global capital is a struggle not simply of breaking down obstacles to "Universalism, i.e., freedom" as Hegel described, but of the "negation of the negation", solidarity for freedom to achieve the actuality of a new humanist society. Such is the total uprooting of this class ridden, sexist exploitative society required, that the very form must itself be truly universal in order to open the way to this actuality. #
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Marxism and 'the party'
Editor's Note:
As part of our commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, we publish Raya Dunayevskaya's 1980 critique of John Molyneux's MARXISM AND THE PARTY, a 1978 work by a British Trotskyist which largely focused on the MANIFESTO. Written as a letter to an Iranian Marxist-Humanist on Sept. 4, 1980, the critique has been slightly edited and shortened; we have also supplied headlines, footnotes, and the material in brackets. The original is in the SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, microfilm no. 15235.
Nothing reveals more sharply how deep into the mire a Marxist can land when he disregards the philosophy of Marx in considering organization, as when that separation of philosophy and organization occurs on the theory of permanent revolution. It is there (pp. 20-22) where John Molyneux's inglorious achievement in Marxism and the Party occurs.
In the very first chapter of his book he deals with Marx's [March] 1850 Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League. (1) There is hardly a line in his three pages on the Address that doesn't display a total deafness to Marx's new continent of thought. Just listen to a few of Molyneux's fantastic conclusions:
1) His misreading of the Communist Manifesto begins with his reference to "the main scheme set out in the Manifesto," and ends with the outright slander that Marx was "led to depart somewhat," in the actual 1848 Revolution, from that "scheme": "Instead of coming forward as a clear advocate of proletarian revolution and the representative of an independent working class party, Marx was forced to act through the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the extreme left wing of radical democracy..." (2)
There is no point in going into the details of Marx's magnificent revolutionary journalism in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, when obviously Molyneux has not read a single issue of it and got third-hand its subtitle, "an organ of democracy." And if he ever did read a copy, he proves himself to be as deaf to it as to that greatest of all Manifesto, which, though ordered as "the program" of the Communist League, turned out to be the unfurling of so historic a challenge to capitalism and for proletarian revolution, that no one could possibly recognize the document under Molyneux's description of "its main scheme." Evidently it doesn't seem to enter his mind that both writings and the actual revolution were the very ground for Marx's famous 1850 Address onÉpermanent revolution.
2) Molyneux, to the contrary, thinks that it is the organizational question-the independent political organization of the working class-which predominates over the question of "the theory and practice of Marxism." No wonder Marx felt compelled, when he heard such day define Marxism, to declare, if that is what Marxism is, "I am not a Marxist."
3) Marx supposedly issued the March 1850 Address because the preoccupation with "practical realization" [of] party organization couldn't be realized in the autumn of 1849, when Marx was already in London. Since Molyneux's preoccupation is with organization, he chooses to quote two paragraphs from that Address, from its organizational part, [on the proletariat's need] to reorganize itself "if it is not to be exploited and taken in tow again by the bourgeoisie as in 1848."
One would think that at this point even a strict SWP vanguardist (3) would follow Marx in his report on the dialectics of revolution....The further continuance of revolution, Marx concludes, would be "the party of the proletariat...Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence."
4) No such logic flows from the mind of a Cliffite. Instead he concludes his analysis with something out of the blue: "Marx makes his closest approach to Lenin's concept of the vanguard party (though of course there are still major differences)" (p. 21)....Even when Molyneux makes some acknowledgment of revolution, he embellishes it with such loaded phrases as "the plan to tighten the organization" and "only then does it become an integral part of the perspective of dynamic revolutionary action."
MARX AND LENIN ON THE PARTY
Let us first clear up some of the misstatements that are supposed to parallel Marx's and Lenin's concepts of the vanguard party, which would certainly shock Lenin to no end.
So far as the historic periods are concerned, while Marx in 1849-50 was still thinking of an impending revolution, Lenin, in 1902, when he was working out What Is To Be Done?, was very far from expecting an impending revolution, much less a proletarian revolution. Nevertheless, at the 1903 Congress [of Russian Marxists], Lenin did apologize for his emphasis [in What Is To Be Done?] on the need to limit party membership, saying that the stick had to be "bent" in such a direction both because the party had been so loose and because without a theory of revolution there can be no revolution.
Indeed, when the 1905 Revolution burst out so spontaneously, it was just then when Lenin changed his position on "tightening" the organization, demanding that it be thrust wide open. Later he was to declare that whereas everyone attributes the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks to that 1903 Congress when it "technically" took place, he considered that it was 1905 where the two tendencies [became] opposites.
Where Molyneux discovered "the similarity between Marx's concept of the party. . .and Lenin's 50 or more years later derives in large part from the parallels in their situation" (p. 22), Lenin and the whole Social Democracy of the time saw parallels- and dissimilarities-between the revolutions.
To grasp the total ramifications all the way to our day, one [must] however grapple with the 1907 Congress [of Russian Marxists], the only one where all tendencies-Bolshevik, Menshevik, Luxemburgist, and even the Bund (4)-argued the 1905 Revolution, [in] its relationship to and departure from 1848. Quite clearly, though that Congress was the most organizational in the sense that all tendencies were there, the battle of ideas was never separated from the organizational form. Above all, the relationship of spontaneity to organization, both in Lenin's and in Luxemburg's speeches, was never more sharply expressed. That, however, is out of the purview of Molyneux....
5) Molyneux diverts so totally from Marx that a reader would take for granted that Molyneux has no claim to Marxism. Thus, as he approaches the so-called second period of Marx, 1850 to 1864, which Molyneux calls "the years of retreat," he allows it all of two pages. Please keep in mind that this is the period in which Marx wrote a) the 1857-58 Grundrisse, b) the 1859 Critique of Political Economy, and c) the 1863 second draft of nothing short of Capital itself, not to mention all the articles against colonialism and for the Abolitionists and the Civil War in the U.S., which led him to reorganize the structure of his greatest theoretical work.
6) Even when one wants to so narrow Marxian organization as to be willing to disregard Marx's writings during the period that do not concern the party, the party, the party, one has to be careful with dates. It is not 1850 when there was no "party"; Marx's March 1850 Address was to the Central Committee of the Communist League, which he didn't leave until 1852. Secondly, in the same two years [1850-52], there were meetings with both the Chartists and the Blanquists to discuss the founding of a "World Society of Revolutionary Communists."
In 1851, when Marx was already in the British Museum developing some very great new theories, he was still attending meetings of the London Council of the Communist League. And when members of the League were arrested and the 1850 Address was found on their persons, the Cologne Trial followed. (5)
While it never dawns on Molyneux that Marx explained how important his theoretical work was to the party as Marx understood it-"a party in the eminent historical sense"-he should have at least known of the May 1861 meeting Marx organized in London to protest the arrest of Auguste Blanqui by the French police. It is doubtful, however, whether Molyneux would recognize a party "in the eminent historical sense," or in the sense that Blanqui expressed his deep gratitude for what "the German proletarian party had done," which Marx answered: "No one could be more interested than I in the fate of a man who I always held to be the head and the heart of the proletarian party in France."
In rounding out the totality of his misconceptions of Marx, Molyneux becomes arrogant enough to tell Marx all about how "the essential starting point for a theory of the revolutionary party is rooted in what we called earlier the 'optimistic evolutionism' of his (Marx's) view of the growth of working-class political consciousness." Then Molyneux kindly releases Marx from any "blame" because he lived when "reformism had not emerged as in any way a major threat." Therefore, says Molyneux, it is "understandable" if Marx bent the stick "in the direction of economic determinism" (p.35).
Molyneux's arrogance has not yet reached its apex. Here it is: "But it is also necessary to understand that in the sphere of his theory of the party, the legacy of Marx's work, whatever its positive achievements, was something that had in time to be overcome by the Marxist movement if capitalism was to be overthrown" (p. 35).
As you can see, once an SWPer has surrounded himself with quotes from Tony Cliff and other leaders, he follows Hegel's analysis of what comes after one "gains power": "In place of revolt, comes arrogance," arrogance sufficient to demand the "overcoming" of the theory of the party Molyneux attributes to Marx.
THE FETISH OF THE PARTY
Having "overcome" that theory, Molyneux, in the final chapter, sings the glory of the Party, "the revolutionary party today," and manages to throw overboard reality itself. Thus, he forgets (it would be more correct to say never recognized) that a whole new Third World arose from the mid-1950s and that it was in that period that the historic, first time ever, revolts from under Stalinism occurred in East Europe-he mentions neither the East German 1953 revolt nor the 1956 Hungarian Revolution which brought onto the historic stage Marx's 1844 Humanist Essays.
Instead he attributes to [the mid-1960s to mid-'70s] "the appearance of a number of studies devoted to disinterring the Marxist tradition on the question of the party and indicating perspectives for the present" (p. 163). But why then forget the revolution in Portugal, which did present a revolutionary Marxist group (which as a matter of fact the SWP solidarized with) which came up with a beautiful new category: apartidarismo (non-partyism)? Is it that the SWP hardly focused on that word in its support of the PRP/BR, much less revealed that the head of the party was a woman, Isabel do Carmo? (6)
The sexism in Tony Cliff is matched by equally subtle racism in Molyneux as he characterizes the reactionary fascist 1930s as "black reaction" (p. 128). If there is any color that characterizes Hitlerism, it certainly is not black. The master race was lily white. For someone to be so insensitive as to characterize that period as "black reaction" discloses a great deal.
Peculiarly enough, even when he greatly admires and praises his leader, Tony Cliff, he does so in mere footnotes. Thus footnote 45 (p. 184) ends with a reference to Cliff, "who, in 1947, produced the first fully worked out analysis of state-capitalism in Russia." That again is incorrect. The first "worked out" analysis of state-capitalism was produced in 1941, not 1947. It was written by Raya Dunayevskaya, not Cliff. Indeed, the six-year lapse between Dunayevskaya's study and Cliff's could tell quite a story about non-cooperation with state-capitalists in the Trotskyist movement. Tony Cliff was quite adamant about making such an analysis "purely economic." (7)
* * * * *
Unless you recognize Marxism as a whole new continent of thought, you cannot but divide Marx up into economics, politics, a little bit of philosophy and -"no theory of the party." Now, it is true Marx had no theory of the party as we know it since Lenin's What Is To Be Done? What Marx thought of as "party" [was] organization as tendency, political-philosophic tendency, so that the class nature of workers can become a movement from spontaneity to a "party of their own," so that it becomes what he described Communists to be-an integral part of the working class, [which has] a view of the class struggle as a whole and not just of the immediate demands; and that they are internationalist and not nationalists.
After Marx unfurled that great historic class and international banner in the Communist Manifesto, and participated in both the 1848 revolutions and the greatest revolution of his day-the 1871 Paris Commune-he criticized unflaggingly the 1875 [German] Social-Democratic program, in the Critique of the Gotha Program, to which only Lenin measured up-and not with Party, but with State and Revolution. . . (8)
When Molyneux does get to mention Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks, he has nothing to say, excusing himself on the grounds that he'll discuss philosophy when he deals with Gramsci. And when he finally deals with Gramsci's philosophy of praxis, he does not return to Lenin, much less grapple with Lenin's statement, "Cognition not only reflects the world, but creates it"....That is exactly where the great tragedy comes in. That is to say, whereas Lenin reorganized himself, [in] his position[s] on State and Revolution, on Imperialism, on the National Question and Colonialism, on dialectics "proper" and on the Will, he did not reorganize his concept of the Party. Had John Molyneux paid any attention to the single word, dialectic, that Lenin uses in his Will regarding Bukharin, (9) he would have gotten a great deal further in comprehension of Lenin's concepts than the whole 188 pages of his book. His full Trotskyist mentality comes out most clearly when he deals with Luxemburg: He is so happy that there he can appear to be for spontaneity that he doesn't even know how economist he is and how he steps back into vanguardism as he attributes all of Luxemburg's mistakes to a single phenomenon-her supposed lack of appreciation for the "unevenness of development."
Needless to say, he never even poses, much less tries to answer, the crucial question: does a Marxist group have a historic right to exist?
NOTES
1. Marx's March 1850 Address to the Central Authority of the Communist League, in which he projected his concept of "revolution in permanence," can be found in Marx and Engels, COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 10, pp. 277-87.
2. The NEUE RHEINISCHE ZEITUNG was the principal vehicle of Marx's revolutionary journalism during the 1848 revolutions.
3. SWP stands for the British Socialist Workers Party, led by Tony Cliff. Its contemporary U.S. counterpart is the International Socialist Organization (ISO).
4. The Bund (Algemener Yiddischer Arbeter Bund) advocated the autonomous organization of the Jewish proletariat. The 1907 Congress of Russian Marxists is discussed in detail by Dunayevskaya in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION.
5. See Marx's "Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne," in COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 11, pp. 395-457.
6. For a discussion of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 and its concept of apartidarismo, see Dunayevskaya's WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION.
7. For the distinctiveness of Dunayevskaya's theory of state-capitalism, see her Marxism and Freedom and her writings published posthumously as THE MARXIST-HUMANIST THEORY OF STATE-CAPITALISM.
8. Dunayevskaya was later to argue that Lenin's State and Revolution nevertheless failed to concretize Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program when it came to the question of organization. See ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, (1982), chapter 11.
9. In his Will, Lenin said Bukharin "never fully understood" the dialecticFrantz Fanon and Marxist-Humanism
Rethinking Fanon: the Continuing Dialogue. Edited by Nigel C Gibson. Humanity Press, New York, 1999
Reviewed by David Black
Franz Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1925. After serving with the Free French forces in World War Two and afterwards he made contact with other Black intellectuals in Paris who constituted the “Negritude” movement and were influenced by existentialism.
Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon took a post at a hospital in Algeria and in 1953 he wrote his first major book, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’. In 1956 he joined the Algerian independence movement, the FLN. Fanon died in December 1961, just before independence was won.
This anthology edited by Nigel Gibson, entitled ‘Rethinking Fanon’, features 16 contributors. It covers Fanon’s politics and revolutionary activities, his philosophy of a “new humanism”, his contribution to psychiatry and cultural criticism, and his views on gender and nationalism.Subject and Object – Colonizer and ColonizedEdward Said, in ‘Travelling Theory Revisited’, speculates that Fanon’s most famous book, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, is in part a dialogue with George Lukacs’ 1922 analysis of Reification in ‘History and Class Consciousness’. Lukacs examines commodity-fetishism in capitalist society as the basis of the process by which human creativity is fragmented and quantified. Said claims that “Fanon seems to have read Lukacs’ book and taken from its reification chapter an understanding of how even in the most confusing and heterogenous of situations, a vigorous analysis of one central problematic could be relied on to yield the most extensive understanding of the whole.”
According to Lukacs, the alienating social reality is manifested philosophically in the split between Subject and Object. Although this is an age-old problem in western philosophy, Lukacs reformulates it in the context of capitalisy commodity production. He examines how the most creative of activities – labour – becomes objectified as alienation, as abstract labour, and how the the subject – the worker – is treated like an object who exists for capital as merely as the source of value.
Lukacs’ critique centres on neo-kantianism, which places an unbridgeable gulf between subjective cognition and the real world; and which declares that the dynamic social process in its totality is an unknowable “thing-in-itself”. Lukacs concludes that the entire impasse of Western philosophy and bourgeois thought in general could only be resolved from “the standpoint of the proletariat”.
Why the proletariat? Lukacs says, in ‘Reification’, that the working class, unlike any other class, is in a position to transcend the alienation, because in the case of the worker, consciousness becomes "the self-consciousness of the commodity". The immediacy of the worker’s alienated existence "turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations", which are grasped by the workers as a class. The working class, in making itself the subject of history, brings about "an objective structural change in the object of knowledge".
For Fanon, the problematic of subject-object becomes one of colonizer-colonized. Fanon sees his task, not as the the reconciliation of subject and object within western civilisation, but rather as leaving that “civilization” behind:
“Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking about Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them… in all corners of the globe.”Manicheanism
Whereas Lukacs says, in the best hegelian-marxist manner, that “It is the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false are later transcended”, Fanon, says Said “will answer that there is nothing abstract or conceptual about colonialism”, which has robbed the colonozed people of what is “the most concrete”: their land, bread and dignity. In Fanon’s words:
“As far as the native is concerned: morality is very concrete; it is to silence the settler’s defiance, to break his flaunting violence – in a word, to put him out of the picture”.
The traditional Left will protest, while stressing that of course they oppose imperialism and support self-determination, that Fanon did not recognize that a lot of the “settlers” in French Algeria were organized into trade unions, with connections to the ‘workers parties’ in Europe. Surely, the Left will say, the ‘correct position’ should have been along the lines of ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’.
However, as Tony Martin points out in ‘Rescuing Fanon From His Critics’, Algeria before the Revolution was 80 per cent peasant; and most of the remainder were unemployed. There were only about 300,000 workers, most of whom still “had one foot in the village”.
Martin also points out that Fanon “accepts Marx’s analysis of the peasantry for the time and place Marx was describing” (France in the mid-19th century): “The main difference, for Fanon, is the fact that the individualistic behaviour Marx ascribed to the peasantry has now become the hallmark of the colonized proletariat [of French Algeria]”. Futhermore, Fanon argues in an almost “leninist” fashion that the reforms were won by the labour movements of European from capital to the same extent that the colonialist state exploited its occupied territories.
Leftist critics of Fanon are even more taken aback by his supposed designation of the lumpen proletariat as revolutionary – contrary to Marx’s opinion based on the counter-revolutionary role of the lumpen in 1848-51. But as Martin says, for Fanon “the lumpenproletariat is but an urban extension of the peasantry. And it is for them, more than any other element, that the revolutionary violence will prove a magnificent rehabilitation… However, the difference with Marx must not be overstressed, for Fanon recognizes that, if not mobilized, the lumpenproletariat will be used against the revolution”.
Emmanuel Hansen in ‘Portrait of a Revolutionary’ says that “Sartre, though regarding negritude as revolutionary, nevertheless described it as ‘anti-racist racism’ and pointed out its limitations, indicating that is only a movement in the dialectic”. Sartre, a great friend of Fanon and firm supporter of the Algerian Revolution, expressed these views in his introduction to ‘Black Orpheus’, an anthology of Black poetry.
Lou Turner and John Alan, in ‘Fanon, World Revolutionary’ quote Fanon’s reaction to “Sartre’s analysis of class as the ‘universal and abstract’ and race as the ‘concrete and particular’, which led Sartre to the conclusion that ‘negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression’.”:
“Orphee noir is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black, And Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source… he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term. In all truth, in all truth I tell you, my shoulders slipped out of the framework of the world, my feet could no longer feel the touch of the ground.”
As with Lukacs, Sartre restates the problematic of “western civilization” and its “dialectic”. Fanon however, is in a fight where “two zones [colononizer and colonized] are opposed”, but “not in the service of a higher unity… they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for one of the terms is superfluous”. The colonial revolution “is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.”
Nigel Gibson draws attention to Raya Dunayevskaya’s claim that although Hegel presents absolutes as syntheses (though also as “concrete totality”), for both Marx and Fanon the absolutes end in “total diremptions – absolute, irreconcilable contradictions” (Dunayevskaya has in mind the “absolute” of capital accumulation versus human emancipation in Marx’s ‘Capital’). As Gibson puts it, the absolutes, in this sense, “are at the heart of the program of ‘complete disorder’ put forward by decolonization.”
Fanon doesn’t “apply marxism”; instead, like Marx, he rediscovers dialectic for his own time and place. Said points out that, just as Lukacs and Marx saw the proletariat’s self-liberation as self-abolition, so Fanon saw “national consciousness” becoming, not nationalism – a “sterile formalism” and a “blind ally” - but a New Humanism.Counter-revolution within the RevolutionFanon’s relationship with the Kabyle revolutionary, Ramdane Abane, was, according to Lou Turner “his single most important intellectual link to the leadership circles of the FLN”. As political head of the FLN underground in the Algiers region, Abane was “strategically positioned within radical intellectual circles to develop the international, secular, democratic perspectives that became the hallmark of the Soumman program and the FLN… After Abane’s death [in 1958 at the hands of FLN rivals] the ideological void would be filled by Arab nationalist and Islamicist tendencies.”
Turner challenges those critics and biographers who see in Fanon’s thesis on the revolution and the party in The Wretched of the Earth only an abstract belief in the spontaneity of the masses or his supposed “metaphysics of violence”. Turner writes of Fanon’s turn towards the peasantry, following the destruction of the FLN networks in the Battle of Algiers:
“with the urban mass movement checked and with the peasantry having military but not political representation in the FLN, the bourgeois nationalists in league with the colonels assumed control of the FLN and the provisional government."
The former leading exponents of Negritude, such Aime Cesaire of Martinique and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, became political leaders in their own countries only to compromise with French Imperialism. By this time – the late-1950s - Fanon was turning his critique onto those who he knew would become imperialism’s new collaborators in the post-colonial/neo-colonial period. ‘Tradition’ and ResistanceAbout a quarter of the book consists of contributions by feminists on the ambivalence in Fanon’s writings on the woman question, including essays by Diana Fuss and Anne McClintock which investigate Bhahba’s psycho-analytical approach, as inspired by Jacques Lacan. The discussion on gender produces the most controversy; which is hardly surprising considering the current situation of women in present-day Algeria, caught between the oppression of the corrupt FLN regime and fundamentalist terrorism. Zouligha’s essay on ‘Challenging the Social Order – Women’s Liberation in Contempory Algeria’ doesn’t mention Fanon but gives a chilling yet inspiring account which helps put the dabate in a present-day context in all its urgency.
McClintock finds no concept of woman as agency in Fanon’s writings and Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas implicates Fanon himself in the transformation-into-opposite of the Revolution. She further alleges that he, along with the famous film he inspired (‘The Battle of Algiers’), created a myth regarding womens’ actual involvement – and she has all the details of how women were marginalised by the FLN. Taking off from Helie-Lucas’ analysis, T Denean Sharpley-Whiting points out that “the veil was rarely worn by practicing Muslim Algerian women in the rural areas where a great deal of the fighting took place. And Kabyle women never donned the haik. Prior to 1957, the veil had been abandoned by the women in the city… The public unveiling of Algerian women to battle hymn ‘Vive l’Algerie Francaise’ prompted Algerian women to redon the veil”.
As Helie-Lucas says, this was hardly voluntary, since not to don the veil under such circumstances would be seen as betrayal of the nation. However, Sharpley-Whiting points out that “Fanon relates that the rending of the veil has particularly sexualizing, indeed violently sexual, antiwoman implications for the Algerian woman in the male colonialist imagination… What he unveils is the hypocrisy of the male colonizer’s desire to unveil/liberate the woman only to imprison her in steorotypes that render her violable, more ripe for rape.”
In Fanon’s words “To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil”. The Revolution produced a “new dialectic of the body of the revolutionary woman and the world”. Sharpley-Whiting’s defence of Fanon is a critical one: “An ethics of feminist criticism should allow one to critically engage and expose flaws in Fanon’s writings… to acknowledge and put to use the best of Frantz Fanon.”
The issue of “Fanon and the Veil” is further discussed by Gibson in ‘Radical Mutations’. Fanon says that a “whole universe of resistances” develops “to justify the rejection of the occupier’s presence”. In the first instance, Gibson says, this is characteristic of a “Manichean stance”. Gibson argues that the “traditional” offers “a refuge from from colonial predations… Such resistances were characteristic of the whole period of resistance up to 1954. Fanon says that the native even rejects values which might “be objectively worth choosing”.
This calls to mind another movie with Fanonian resonances: in ‘Apocalypse Now’ the crazed special forces commander played by Marlon Brando speaks admiringly of the Nietzchean “will” of the guerrillas who hacked off the arms of children who had been vaccinated by US Army doctors. What doesn’t come across in that film, but is clear in Gibson analysis in this book, is that that doctors in such situations are far from “neutral”. Fanon writes of the French doctors, “attached to various torture centers [who] intervene after every session to put the tortured back into condition for new sessions”. As Gibson says, in the atmosphere of colonial oppression, “there is a real difficulty in being ‘objective.’ There is no objective truth.” And as Fanon says in his essay, “Medicine and Colonialism”, “truth objectively expressed is constantly vitiated by the lie of the colonial situation”; furthermore, “every qualification is perceived by the occupier as an invitation to perpetuate the oppression, as a confession of congentital impotence” in the face of the “close an contagious death” of endemic famine and underemployment.
In Gibson’s reading of Fanon:
“Whereas the first stage of anticolonial resistance expresses the contradictory interrelation of ‘tradition’ and resistance, the second stage expresses the breaking up of this interrelation.”
Crucially, Fanon says:
“The struggle does not give back to the national culture its former values and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or content of the people’s culture.”
In this “fighting culture”, however, Fanon says “everything becomes possible”, even a “science depoliticized” and in the service of the people.
Gibson also writes about Fanon’s views on how the Algerian masses reacted to the advent of revolutionary radio as providing “a fascinating example of a dialectic of revolution and the leap from Manicheanism”. PostmodernismHenry Louis Gates Jnr, who is well known in Britain for his lavish BBC documentaries which presented a “Black American view of Africa”, contributes an overview of Fanon’s status in US academia as a “global theorist”, not of revolution, but of “literary critical criticism” with “colonial discourse theory”, as expounded by Benita Parry and Homi Bhaba (who also contribute to this book).
Gibson points out that for Bhaba “the more subversive Fanon is not found in dialectical transcendence but in the explorations of the gaps created by shifting and crossing Manichean boundaries… there is no essential power structure, no grand event, only the political day-to-day”. Gibson argues that paradoxically, post-colonial Africa – the actually existing, present-day Africa Fanon warned his readers might come about – is intimately connected with postmodernism, for “despite the hybrid appearance of the premodern with modernity, Africa never became ‘modern’ in the sociological sense.”
In Africa today: “capitalism rehashes the ‘rosy dawn’ of its primitive accumulation over and over again with the native ‘middleman’ playing a familiar role. Yet despite the postmodernist’s insights into Africa’s present it erases Africa’s real multifacted anticolonialist struggles and closes off the historical context of Africa’s present predicament. Africa is still playing out the problematic of decolonization.” Gibson believes that there is a “marxist-humanist” dimension to Fanon which can still speak to those still seeking an emanicipatory course in the struggle of the Third World. Hopefully at some stage he will bring out a full-length study on the subject. In the meantime if you want the best selection of readings of Fanon on offer, this is it.
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