The Myth of Peasant Revolt

...They have not yet found "a bone to gnaw in the colonial system...

...Here the mass of ex-peasants, settled in the huts and shanty towns around the fringe of the city, assumes a major strategic role...

...A man who can speak in earnest about North African Arabs, of all people, "recovering their lost innocence" can believe anything — anything, that is, which feeds his anti-Western masochism...

...European civilization, Fanon argues, by its very success in taming the forces of nature, has only succeeded in dehumanizing man—colonial man in the first place, but ultimately, European man also...

...They will say that the people are too ignorant, that they do not understand the intricacies of political decisionmaking...

...Revolutionary virtue can be maintained in the village square...

...some times they are prodded into the world of modernity by tax collectors, recruiting sergeants, or party organizers...

...The soft life of the city must not be allowed to corrupt the new governing elites...

...one must take them as a whole, as historical forces, and...

...The anti-colonial revolution must hence be a peasant revolution...

...It is to prevent such a state of affairs that Fanon has fashioned his myth...

...The peasants' lot differs in the various new nations, to be sure, but in none of them have they become historymaking subjects, as Fanon expected and hoped...

...Fanon wishes to do a great deal more...

...One must not try to analyze such complexes of pictures," he added, "as one would break down a thing into its elements...

...He wishes to show how the native, degraded by his conquerors, can reconquer himself...

...Fanon is at his most original when he attempts to locate potential revolutionary actors within the structure of colonial societies...

...Fanon's myth involves a much more profound rejection than do the ideologies of a Ghandi or of a Nehru, a Lenin, or a Stalin...

...The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays...

...the local party leaders are given administrative posts, the party becomes an administration, and the militants disappear in the crowd and take the empty title of citizen...

...Frantz Fanon was born in 1925, on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies...

...Matters stand very differently with Fanon...

...Each one was thus personally responsible for the death of that victim...

...Africa may see a repeat performance of Europe's peasant revolts before it enters the new world of modernity...

...Truly, the last will be the first...

...A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement...

...They may be the most faithful followers of the nationalist parties but when the chips are down, they realize that they have much to lose when the colonial regime is overthrown...

...255 pp...

...it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type...

...The city lumpen-proletariat is the predestined ally of the rural masses...

...For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms...

...The party, the leaders, once arrived in power will attempt to exclude the people from participation...

...During the Mau-Mau revolt, it was required, he writes, "that each member of the group should strike a blow at the victim...

...This rule of conduct enlightens the agent because it indicates to him the means and the end...

...Nor is there reason to believe that the national bourgeoisie can play a role...

...Sorel was, to be sure, a man given to apocalyptic visions, yet upon inspection his heroic violence turns out to be more literary than real, more a figure of speech than a concretely envisioned event...

...Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket...

...It seems hardly necessary to say here that I consider Fanon's myth an evil and destructive vision...

...This assumed responsibility for violence allows both strayed and outlawed members of the group to come back again and to find their place once more, to become integrated...

...If the working class can be bought off and the national bourgeoise is "good for nothing" where, then, can the true agents of total transformation be found...

...Violence is a cleansing force...

...Fanon's picture hardly fits the reality of 1966...

...Its incantatory prose appeals not to the intellect but to the passions...

...must above all refrain from comparing actual accomplishments with the images of them that • The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon...

...One must never forget while reading Fanon's book that it was written in anguish and heartbreak, even though one might recognize in it elements of a "paranoid style" with which we have become familiar in many a sinister context...

...He warns the nations of the Third World that they should not create a Third or Fourth Rome, a pale imitation of a civilization, decaying at its very roots...

...And even though I believe them ultimately doomed to failure, they may for a time, perhaps in alliance with disaffected city intellectuals, create large revolutionary movements...

...During the Algerian revolt against French domination, Fanon was assigned to an Algerian hospital and soon threw in his lot with the revolutionists to become one of their major ideological spokesmen...

...The book is, above all, an apologia for violence...

...The anti-colonial revolution is primarily a revolution of the peasant people and it can maintain itself only as long as it remains rooted in that people...

...The vision which informs the book may be profoundly repellent, but we must not forget that the violence and hatred it breathes on every page is a reactive violence, a testimony to the havoc the white man has loosed upon Africa...

...He was a marginal man, torn from his moorings, most of his adult life working in the world of French medical professionals without being of that world...

...Violence unifies the people...

...Hence only geographic decentralization of power can save the revolution...

...Peasant discontent will persist as a consequence of the dislocation of traditional styles of life which the modernizing regimes attempt to institute...

...It has none of the characteristics of its Western counterpart...

...Here he departs most markedly from classical Marxist theory...

...The revolution can be saved provided it is not halted prematurely, and provided it remains permanent...

...it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect...

...If this is done, the nation will become a living reality to each of its citizens...

...it signifies total rebirth and it can only be the work of new men, men reborn through acts of violence...

...He studied medicine in France and specialized in psychiatry...

...Yet while the future, contrary to what Fanon believed, belongs to the city and not the countryside, the death throes of traditional peasant society will last for a very long time and may well be punctured by uprisings and revolts, a variey of peasant Jacqueries...

...Europe has declined all humility and all modesty...

...Hence Fanon's message, and this distinguishes him from almost all previous colonial rebels, rejects the whole heritage of Europe...

...The biblical "The last shall be first and the first last" runs like a refrain through the book...

...This is not a work of analysis...

...The lumpen-proletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of colonized people...

...So much for the traditional proletarian vanguard of the Marxist textbooks...

...Decolonization does not mean the substitution of one kind of regime for another...

...In the West this book will be read for a long time and might indeed become a bible for romantic rebels and sophisticated university students in quest of primeval revolutionary innocence...

...So, comrades," says Fanon on his last page, "let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her...

...Scarred and humiliated, stripped of his previous identity, he searched for redeeming wholeness through a cataclysmic destruction...

...Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardor, cynicism and violence...

...Corrupted to the core, the West can teach nothing but death of the soul...

...It is such a myth that Frantz Fanon has created and I ven ture to think that it will have an enduring influence in the world of politics and ideas, perhaps more so than Sorel's own myth of the General Strike...

...Its author wished to create a modern myth, and he must be rank ed among the very few great mytho poeists of our age even by those who, like myself, think he has created an evil myth...

...but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness . . . she has only shown herself parsimonious and niggardly where men are concerned...

...Only rarely does a book immediately convey a sense that it will rank among the influ ential works of the time...

...Most previous colonial revolutionaries paid tribute to the West in the very act of revolting against it...

...Hence the birth of a national bourgeoisie or of a privileged caste of bureaucrats must be vigorously opposed...

...The Wretched of the Earth could be read as yet another indictment of the evils of colonialism, but so to understand it would by-pass its real importance...

...They have tasted power or gained at least a modicum of higher standards of living, and they are most probably not willing to risk these...

...He hates it with the traditional hatred of the peasant...

...But all this is finally unimportant...

...The workers enjoy a comparatively privileged position...

...he means it...

...And this holds true for colonizer and native alike...

...The peasantry does make up the great majority in these nations and will remain so for a very long time to come...

...The Algeria of Boumedienne bears but little resemblance to the peasant democracy of which Fanon dreamed...

...I find his view of violence as a healer profoundly mistaken...

...Violence is the only effective individual and social therapy...

...Fanon treats this national bourgeoisie with a withering contempt which is only matched by his contempt for the assimilationist and partly Westernized intelligentsia...

...The author's reasoning is often shoddy and obviously defective...

...All decolonization creates a tabula rasa at the outset, and this is the precondition for all further advances...

...But what after the morrow of victory...

...it will inevitably succumb to the vices of the city if power comes to be centered in the capital...

...These are self-serving lies...

...Jean Paul Sartre's incredibly naive Introduction gives a foretaste of what may be in store...

...Everywhere they are the subjects of historical processes over which they have, at best, only minimal control...

...In Sorel's hands the myth of violence had a somewhat bloodless character...

...When the revolution grows cold, its leaders tend to develop into cold and calculating monsters...

...Finally, one might hope that the myth Fanon has wrought may move some Western men to that compassion and sense of fraternity with the downtrodden of Africa which Fanon —who expected only white hatred and, at best, condescension—plainly believed impossible...

...Violence may sometimes be necessary, but those who wield it systematically cannot help becoming brutalized by it...

...It "is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor...

...African rulers have grown fat on resources pumped out of the countryside and they have flocked to the central cities where they build skyscrapers and airports, slavishly imitating Western models...

...This is a persistent danger of which Fanon is acutely aware...

...The city, to Fanon, is always corrupting...

...For quite some time to come, the new rulers of the African nations will be faced by the specter of peasant uprisings and disaffection—and Fanon's myth will haunt them, much as the Communist Manifesto and its myth haunted the mill owners of Victorian Europe...

...This safely settled petty-bourgeois moralist dreamed of heroic virtues, but fantasies of a real blood bath seem to have been utterly alien to him...

...All that wells up from the depth of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous...

...The myth that he has helped to create will stay alive, I believe, precisely because the reality of the new nations departs so very crucially from the image he has drawn...

...It leads to a comprehensive transvaluation of values...

...Very little, he argues, can be expected of the embryonic working class...

...New York: Grove Press...

...had been generally accepted before the action...

...Myths," wrote George Sorel, "are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act...

...Fanon was quite right, of course, when he noted that the young working class and the bulk of the Westernized intelligentsia would not, as a whole, play a revolutionary role in the history of the new nations...

...After independence, the party sinks into an extraordinary lethargy...

...By virtue of the privileged position they hold in the colonial system, they constitute a "bourgeois" faction of the colonized people...

...These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood...

...Out of this experience came two books, The Year V of the Algerian Revolution and the present volume, first published in France in 1961...

...Yet this revolution, in order to succeed, must of necessity spread from the countryside into the towns...

...it is only men that she has killed and devoured . . . today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their [the Europeans] triumphs of the mind...

...Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon...

...Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then...

...Will the heroic days of struggle not be followed by the dullness of quotidien routine...

...A peasant maquis can hardly be ex pected to take the cities...

...Their very presence is "the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination...

...But all of this, thinks Fanon, while an ever present danger, is not a necessary outcome...

...But it is conceivable that dissatisfied peasants may come to learn of this book in due course and make it a kind of breviary for their aspirations...

...Fanon plays many variations upon the theme of the revolt of the wretched, the eruption of colonial society, bringing to the fore the new heroic man created in and through revolutionary violence...

...Similarly, I think that the course Fanon charts for the new nations is not only morally dubious but politically inept and self-defeating...

...The specific weight of the peasantry in the political life of the underdeveloped nations is low indeed and the tutelary power of the new states comes to lie as heavily on today's peasantry as it rested upon them in the colonial past...

...it helps overcome a schism of the soul which has been caused by colonialist contempt, and it wields together a body social which had been rent by the colonial system...

...5.00...

...The book closes with a violent diatribe against European civilization...

...Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand . . . when the people are invited to partake in the management of the country, they do not slow the movement down but on the contrary speed it up...

...Pampered, and sheltered from the worst slights and the worst misery, they can easily be bought off...

...For the native, life can spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler...

...Yet it would be foolish to dismiss his work as a mere regressive fantasy—though it may be that, too...

...Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth* is just such a book...

...Anti-colonial violence is to Fanon the only way to bring about a total transformation in the former colonies...

...So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men...

...The city represents softness and relaxation in contrast to the lean and hard energy and dedication of the countryside...

...Fanon died of cancer, at the age of thirty-six, soon after the book appeared...

...To work means to work for the death of the settler...

...The peasants have fallen back into the immemorial routines of traditional life styles...

...What I have tried here is to convey Fanon's symptomatic importance rather than engage in refutations of his views...

...During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated...

...The last in colonial society are the peasants and they are hence the true agents of the revolution...

...The violence of the conquest, he argues, has dehumanized the native and only counter-violence can make him whole again...

...Only these, he thought, can make colonial man whole again...

...it is to him the true whore of Babylon...

...If, contrary to Sorel's prescription, one compares actual accomplishments with the mythical images that Fanon set forth only a few years ago, one is brought up against the fact that the book has already dated...

...Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete and absolute substitution...

...The tough military men who now run independent Algeria presumably look at men like Fanon as ideologists whose usefulness to the regime has long been exhausted...

...The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence...

...To him, the call to violence, the belief in its redeeming quality, is no rhetorical device...

...It is badly writ ten, badly organized and chaotic...

...He declines to accept guidance even from the West's revolutionaries...

...The masses must be educated so that they can form the politically decisive arms of the revolution...

...He believed in the cleansing quality of the knife, the gun, the bomb...

...It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction...

...They are physically near the city but spiritually very far from it...

...Once it freezes into bureaucratic mould, it becomes but a means for the advancement of its functionaries, and the pursuit of their private pleasures replaces the heroic dedication to public revolt...

...Here Fanon, true to an age-old millenarian tradition which, by the way, strongly informed the thought of the young Marx, answers: Only those who are totally disinherited, those who have nothing to lose in the old system can be the architects of the new...

...The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain...

...Spengler coined the term "historical pseudomorphosis" to "designate those cases in which an older alien culture lies so massively over the land that a young culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expressionforms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness...