The March/April issue of Against the Current (ATC) features the essay by Alan Wald Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence. Wald is a member of ATC’s editorial board. The magazine describes itself as “the analytical and activist journal sponsored by Solidarity.”

Wald takes as his starting point two books by Adam Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

World-Outlook is reposting Wald’s essay with the author’s permission. Our views are not identical to all of those expressed in it. But we believe the main issues Wald raises deserve further discussion in light of the gruesome October 7 attack led by Hamas that targeted civilians in Israel and the genocidal war Israel unleashed in retaliation on the entire population of Gaza.

Wald writes:

The issue is not the validity of armed resistance in itself, but the policies, programs, ethics and culture of any revolutionary or nationalist organizations presently in contention to lead an anticolonial social transformation….

Joined by other factions and individuals, the Hamas-led raid spun into acts of gruesome counter-violence against everyone encountered, including defenseless and helpless victims. Scores of civilians, not just Israeli and other Jews (many attending a Peace music festival), but foreign workers and Arabs (especially Bedouin) were slaughtered or taken hostage, and women likely raped and tortured. Israeli soldiers became prisoners of war.

Many aspects of the bloody clash are still in dispute; Israeli state propaganda should not be automatically believed, especially since there have been lies about beheadings of babies and cover-ups of Israelis killed by crossfire of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force).

Nonetheless, October 7 was immediately exploited as a pretext for a dramatic intensification of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on the far greater number of defenseless and helpless Palestinians in Gaza.

The whole lacerating sequence soon catapulted the problem of what constitutes politically effective resistance to colonial oppression to the foreground of debate and discussion.

World-Outlook has expressed our own views on these issues in several previous articles. These include The Palestinian Struggle and Lessons from South Africa, On the Character of the Oct. 7 Attack by Hamas, and others.

Oppressors are the main source of violence

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 employed extreme violence resulting in more than 700,000 Palestinians being expelled or fleeing from their homes. Israeli violence has been a brutal fact of life for Palestinians for more than 75 years since. Israel’s victory in the “Six-Day War” in 1967 resulted in its military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, institutionalizing a sharp escalation of daily violence against Palestinians.

In the face of violence by the oppressors — whether in Palestine or elsewhere — the oppressed have the right to defend themselves. It is the unrelenting violence of the oppressors that often dictates the need for armed actions in self-defense. The assertion of that right, however, does not settle the issue of what strategy and methods can lead the struggle for liberation to victory.

We believe political program, strategy, tactics, and methods are connected. World-Outlook’s view is that the lessons taught by Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), in the decades-long battle to overturn the apartheid regime in South Africa, have received insufficient attention by many who support Palestinian liberation today. Careful study of that history reveals that the example of both the political program and strategy advocated by Mandela, and put into practice in the South African struggle, offer a clear alternative to that of Hamas.

Those who led the struggle to overthrow apartheid insisted on complete equality for all who lived in South Africa and the need for a democratic republic. That was spelled out in the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955, which declared in its second sentence: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.”

From that starting point, as ANC leader Walter Sisulu explained in 1959, the ANC “has repudiated the idea of ‘driving the white man into the sea’ as futile and reactionary and accepted the fact that the various racial groups in South Africa have come to stay.”

While fully recognizing the legitimate anger Black South Africans felt towards European settlers, Sisulu argued that in the struggle for freedom, fighters would “rise to the broad non-racial humanism of the Congress movement.”

The strategy that was intimately connected to this program was concisely described by Mandela in a 1991 speech to a conference of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s military wing launched under Mandela’s leadership in 1961:

“The foundation stone of the ANC’s strategy, is that no group of revolutionaries, acting on their own, no matter how courageous, disciplined, and self-sacrificing, can hope to overthrow the system of oppression.

“Victory in the national liberation struggle is dependent upon the active and conscious participation of the masses of the oppressed people, determining their own destiny through struggle…. It was always our view therefore, that the armed liberation struggle was based on and grew out of the mass political struggles waged by the oppressed.” (Emphasis added.)

This is the opposite of the course taken by Hamas.

Algeria

In discussing the life and writings of Frantz Fanon, Wald refers to the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonialism (1954-1962), in which Fanon was deeply involved. “Too many of the pitiless deaths of civilians were due to internecine factional struggles among the Algerians,” Wald writes.

“Some sources estimate that 12,000 militants were killed in an internal purge, and another 70,000 in clashes between parties.”

Wald’s essay does not offer a full assessment of the Algerian revolution, nor do we offer one in this introduction. In that struggle Algerians confronted the murderous violence of French colonialism and ultimately won independence. The Algerian revolution brought to power a workers and farmers government, led by Ben Bella and the National Liberation Front (FLN, from its initials in French), which in 1965 was overthrown in a military coup by a faction of the FLN.

The use of violence against opponents within the national liberation movement is also part of the history of the Palestinian struggle. As World Outlook wrote in No to Israel’s New Nakba in Gaza (II), “In 2007 Hamas launched a war against Fatah and other Palestinians, executing some, taking some prisoner, and expelling others.”

Lessons from Grenada

In 1983, the revolution in Grenada, which had tossed out a brutal dictatorship and established a workers and farmers government in 1979, was overthrown. This defeat resulted from the execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and other leaders of the New Jewel Movement by a faction of that organization. These events opened the door to a U.S. invasion of the island nation.

Cuba’s revolutionary leadership was unequivocal in opposing the use of these methods. “No doctrine, no principle or position held up as revolutionary, and no internal division,” they said, in an October 20, 1983, statement, “justifies atrocious proceedings like the physical elimination of Bishop and the outstanding group of honest and worthy leaders killed yesterday.” The statement then concluded, “No crime must be committed in the name of the revolution and freedom.”

We believe these words also deserve study by those of us who support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination today. More is involved than avoiding violence within the movement, as important as that is. We believe the targeting of civilians, as Hamas and others did on October 7, is an example of crimes “committed in the name of the revolution and freedom,” as the Cuban leadership put it.

The Palestinian fight for national liberation is a just struggle that legitimately claims the support of millions committed to freedom and democracy worldwide. Methods like those used in the October 7 attack undermine that support and run counter to the goal of national liberation; they are reactionary.

Nelson Mandela and Cuba’s revolutionary leadership recognized that every popular struggle needs to take the moral high ground in fighting for its aims and objectives. Mandela gave an instructive example in 1985 when, after long years of imprisonment, the apartheid regime offered to release him if he “renounced violence” in the fight against apartheid.

Mandela seized the opportunity to explain the real issues involved. “I’m surprised at the conditions that the government wants to impose on me,” Mandela said in a statement read to a gathering of supporters of the liberation fight. “I am not a violent man… It was only when all other forms of resistance were no longer open to us that we turned to armed struggle.

“I cherish my own freedom dearly,” Mandela said. “But I care even more for your freedom.” What is the point of accepting the government offer, he continued, when apartheid still effectively reduces freedom to almost nothing.

We believe all of these lessons are directly relevant to the discussion Wald addresses in his essay.

Due to its length, we are publishing Wald’s essay in two parts, the first of which follows. The headline, subheadings, photos, and footnotes below are from the original.

—World-Outlook Editors

*

Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence

(This is the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part I.)

By Alan Wald

Fanon: Fusion of Life and Work

Shatz’s genius at recovering the multifariousness of authentic people from the gray mists of ignorance, prejudice, or hagiography, is on full display in The Rebel’s Clinic. With Fanon we confront an all-embracing radical political commitment that means the fusion of one’s life and work in a common goal.

First, Fanon’s writing and psychiatric practice are put in the context of his biography, and then his biography is put in the context of his developing engagement in revolutionary struggle. This sometimes contradictory progression is explained as a kind of palimpsest of stages, a long and fitful evolution wherein each new development doesn’t erase but challenges and stretches what came before.^[1] Such a narrative reads like a mystery that only gets more intriguing as it unfolds.

The skeleton of biographical facts about Fanon is well-known from numerous previous book-length studies, one of which I reviewed for the Marxist journal International Socialist Review fifty years ago.^[2] Born to a middle-class Afro-Alsation family on the island of Martinique, then a French colony in the Eastern Caribbean Sea, Frantz Omar Fanon attended school there until he volunteered to fight fascism in General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces in 1944. He served in North Africa and then in Europe, where he was wounded and received the Croix de Guerre.

During a sojourn back in Martinique he befriended the poet and Communist activist Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), from whom he absorbed an interest in Negritude (the movement accentuating pride in one’s African heritage). He then attended medical school in Lyon, where he was profoundly affected by the lectures of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961).

In these years his consciousness of French racism deepened as he came to see it and colonialism as noxious betrayals of the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired his military service.

After publishing Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, he married radical journalist Marie-Josèphe “Josie” Dublé (1930-1989), and relocated to Algeria as head of the Blida-Joinville Hospital. Drawn quickly into support of the Algerian Revolution, he found himself treating victims of French torture and sometimes the torturers, to whom he responded with inordinate compassion.

After two years Fanon was forced to resign his position when his political affiliation with the FLN (National Liberation Front, formed in 1954 in a split from the MTLD, Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties) became known. He then relocated to Tunisia where he held an editorial post on the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid.

Having now become a representative and public spokesman for the FLN, he attended political and literary congresses, even after he was seriously injured by a land mine along the Algerian-Moroccan frontier in 1959. This was the year he published A Dying Colonialism, a virtuoso analysis of the Algerian war for independence.

In 1960 he was appointed Ambassador of the Algerian Provisional Government to Ghana but was diagnosed with leukemia and traveled to the Soviet Union for therapy. In 1961 he went to Washington DC for treatment at the National Institutes of Health, dying on the eve of the publication of his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth.

The Rebel’s Clinic, however, is much more than just a portrait of Fanon. In the process of recounting Fanon’s evolution, Shatz situates many intellectual figures who interacted with him and influenced his writing.

In addition to several already discussed, some of the most noteworthy include the abovementioned Sartre; the Catalan psychiatrist and anti-Stalinist Spanish Civil War veteran Francois Tosquelles (1912-94); the French Freudian psychoanalyst Jean Oury (1924-2014); the Senegalese poet and first president Léopold Senghor (1906-2001); the Algerian-born French author Albert Camus (1913-1960); the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986); the French journalist and political activist Frances Jeanson (1922-2009); the French pro-FLN doctor Pierre Chaulet (1930-2012); the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni (1899-1989); the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981); the French publisher Francois Maspero (1932-2015); and the French-Tunisian essayist Albert Memmi (1920-2020).

Although his admirable qualities of discipline and dedication were paramount, Fanon himself was not a man without vanity, and he had several disturbing traits. One was a dangerous attraction to strong men in the revolutionary movement, the type who disparage emotions and sentimentality, and too often conflate a personal drive for power with the good of the struggle.

Another was a troubling homophobia, reflected in Fanon’s skepticism that homosexuality could have existed in his native Martinique. (206) And then there was a male chauvinism, exhibited in the possibly abusive treatment of his wife, Josie.^[3] She had become a capable and committed revolutionary editor, to whom Fanon dictated much of his work.

Fanon has been panned by feminists for his portrayals of colonized women, and Shatz notes that he slighted de Beauvoir, who seems to have inspired his ideas with The Second Sex (1949) but whose influence was never openly acknowledged. (89, 97)

As a member of a disciplined cadre group, the FLN, Fanon remained silent about the strangulation murder of his mentor, Abane Ramdane (“the architect of the revolution”), by jealous rivals who later said he died in battle.

Fanon was then duped by the Angolan CIA agent Holden Roberto and played a questionable part in the downfall of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. Nonetheless he held up rather well overall, in spite of having to endure the mental strains of being a marked man under threat of assassination.

Specialists in Fanon, and well-informed readers of books and articles about him, may not find copious new factual material in The Rebel’s Clinic. Moreover, certain matters that radicals hold to be of political importance are not mentioned, such as the claim of Marxist scholar Peter Hudis that during a Paris residence prior to Lyon, Fanon “obtained and studied the works of Leon Trotsky as well as the proceedings of the Fourth International.”^[4]

Violence, Perils and Promise

The virtue of Shatz’s book is that its thought-provoking arguments are reasoned out with a savvy cogency, craft, and assurance that draw on decades of distilled research. A good deal of Fanon’s formidable impact on contemporary thought is reviewed by Shatz with admirable lucidity and concision.

Fanon’s influence on psychiatry is immense among those who understand personal pathologies as political symptoms and advocate varieties of social therapy that consist of group settings. His understanding of Black alienation as a form of amputation or imprisonment under colonialism has long been celebrated, as has been his argument that colonized people internalize feelings of inferiority and aspire to emulate their oppressors.

More recently Fanon has become established as a major interlocutor in post-colonial discourse analysis (PCDA), especially regarding the presentation of historical events from the standpoint of the colonized and delving into matters such as the connections between language and social structures of power. Such developments lead Shatz to proclaim that, in the new millennium, Fanon would be “reborn as a French theorist.” (370)

When it comes to the question of Fanon and anticolonial violence, the focus of this review essay, it is imperative to recognize that Shatz is hardly the first biographer and commentator to observe the existence of ambivalences and contradictions throughout Fanon’s work.

The competition to be the latest ”Fanon Whisperer” has been steep, and many books and articles have deplored the tendency of partisans to latch on to certain sensational passages about violence in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. These may be used to rationalize acts of brutality of which they approve, or which they don’t wish to acknowledge for what they are, while most of the rest of this book, as well as Fanon’s writings as a whole, are ignored.

To this day, one sees decontextualized Fanonian references to violence as a “cleansing force” that frees the colonial rebel “from his inferiority complex and his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” Another common quotation from Fanon is that “it is precisely at the moment he [the native] realizes his humanity [through a violent action] that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure his victory.”^[5]

There are certainly more than a few phrases like these that stand out like daggers in The Wretched of the Earth. Yet to grab onto such sentences, as zealously as a religious person recites favorite passages in a holy book, is simply to co-opt Fanon as symbolic capital for a politics that he may have abhorred.

Much in Fanon remains open to multiple interpretations, but there is no doubt that the totality of his dispersed views on anticolonial violence adds up to the paradoxical assessment that the violence of the colonially oppressed is fraught with as much peril as promise.

Many nuanced views by Fanon are indicated by specific statements that Shatz brings to light. Moreover, the horrific trajectory of the revolution in the years after the 1962 victory completely contradicted Fanon’s prediction of a “new Humanism” in Algeria.

In brief, what he meant by “New Humanism” was a restructuring of relationships distinct from European liberal imperialism, one that emphasized decentralization, new subjectivities and cultures (not fundamentalist and traditional ones), and also a rejection of the one-party states already appearing in revolutionary societies in Africa.

Fanon’s failure to recognize that his FLN was producing precisely what he opposed suggests that he was subject to romanticization and naiveté, too readily succumbing to a pressure to conform — traits we dare not repeat today.

Here are a few examples of the book’s elucidations. According to Shatz, the word “cleansing” in the above quotation is a mistranslation of “disintoxicating” (155), which is not quite the same in meaning.

Yes, to stand up physically to one’s oppressor can be liberating and empowering, an action famously dramatized in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life (1845) where the future abolitionist strikes down the slave-breaker Edward Covey.

However, Shatz believes that Fanon’s emphasis on this stage in a violent revolt was not intended to advocate a long-lasting cure-all. Rather, it described a perilous but necessary step in the journey toward decolonization and reclaiming identity. That’s because there is plenty of evidence in Fanon’s writing to show that violent behavior is damaging and easily turned in the wrong direction.

Moreover, although Fanon understood that violence was inevitable in the colonial situation, he also argued in The Wretched of the Earth that violence should not be taken as a political strategy and that all members of the French settler population should not be seen as existential enemies:

“The people who, in the early days of the struggle, had adopted the primitive Manichaeism of the colonizer — Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel — realize en route that some Blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and interests…The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.” (156)

Shatz points out that Fanon publicly lied about the FLN’s responsibility for the June 1957 massacre of 300 Muslim inhabitants of the Melouza village, a community allegedly sympathetic to the rival rebel group MNA (Algerian National Movement, successor to the MTLD). But Fanon also made a general statement against atrocities in A Dying Colonialism:

“(B)ecause we want a democratic and renovated Algeria, because we believe one cannot arise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression nourish and give rise to.” (195)

Beyond this, it is clear that Fanon’s emphasis on the necessity of violence was primarily connected with his view that de-colonization must be seized, not given, and there are instances where Fanon advised specifically against the violence of hate and revenge, arguing that any violence must be disciplined and targeted.

On the other hand, none of this adds up to a clear policy for practice today, and certainly not one as well-defined as the Freedom Charter of the ANC (African National Congress) about the centrality of non-racialism, and the limits of violence as articulated by Nelson Mandela.^[6]

Challenging Questions

What can we conclude from this investigation? Atrocities and acts of terrorism have always happened when there is an armed struggle against colonial oppressors who have committed far greater atrocities, and this has never derailed socialists from support of a just cause.

While Hamas cannot be reduced to a “terrorist organization” — it carries out social service functions and has a religious dimension — it has surely committed terrorist acts (starting with suicide bombings) according to the common definition: violence and intimidation against civilians for political ends. And so has the Israeli state, a hundred times more.

Marx himself regarded violence and terrorism against oppression as “inevitable” and “as useless to discuss as an earthquake.”^[7] That’s why radicals don’t renounce the Haitian revolution against the French (1791-1804), or Nat Turner’s Rebellion against slavery (1831), or even the Mau Mau Rebellion against British rule in Kenya (1952-60) that killed thousands of their fellow Africans, on account of horrific violence against civilians.

Yet it is a separate matter for socialists to strategize or champion civilian murders, indiscriminate terrorism, and atrocities. Such conduct cannot be perfunctorily accepted as effective or even just necessary in advancing the cause of a new society. This includes the relegation of such deaths and brutalization to a minor issue in the way that imperialist powers commonly refer to “collateral damage.”

To me, there is nothing mysterious or hard to grasp about recognizing substantial civilian casualties as an issue to be frankly deliberated.

We know that socialists are not absolute pacificists. We maintain the right of armed self-defense, acknowledge the unfortunate likelihood that decolonization will not occur peacefully, and accept the possibility that, in military combat, individuals on one’s own side may go rogue and commit acts that one abhors.

Nonetheless, there are surely ethical matters to contemplate about targeting, or endangering, non-combatants.

During World War II, the United States took the stance that the civilians of Japan were worthy of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons because their government was committing crimes. Marxists and many others responded to this with horror at what Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon called “an unspeakable atrocity,” the intentional killing and injuring of “The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married and the well and the sick, men, women, and children….”^[8]

This “collective punishment” is surely what the Zionist state is carrying out at present, under the figleaf that “terrorists” are using tens of thousands of people as “human shields.” Should we now turn around and declare that “collective punishment” will bring about social justice so long as it is employed by anticolonial forces?^[9]

Ethical and strategic questions are often intertwined. Atrocities carried out by rebels can produce political setbacks through the unification of the enemy and enabling it to deflect attention from its own violence. With greater resources for world-wide propaganda, the colonists can readily depict the resistance movement as barbaric and inflame its own population to perpetrate horrific reprisal.

Unnecessary brutality on the part of an anticolonial or radical movement can also create a malign culture with qualities that will destroy its future liberatory possibilities. For example, Shatz notes that the practices of the FLN — authoritarianism, top-down decision-making, killing rivals and villagers suspected of rival sympathies — played a role in post-independence repression.

Did atrocities and mass terror in the Civil War following the Russian Revolution really help the Bolsheviks, or did they pave the way to the further brutality of the Stalin regime?^[10] It’s no secret that a militarized and violent state of affairs attracts people on all sides who use ideological claims but are motivated by sadism and a lust for power over others.

Sadly, it is not only defenders of the status quo who have the capacity to opportunistically compartmentalize abhorrent behavior. And yet socialists surely envision a different world, operating on different principles from those with bloodless responses to ordinary human suffering.

No doubt somewhere V. I. Lenin would be gasping in disbelief at the way that some contemporary Marxists are simplistically conflating “unconditional support” of a struggle with uncritical political backing of whatever political organization happens to be taking action.

I’m the furthest from a Lenin idolator,^[11] but generations of socialists have been educated in what can be a useful distinction that is now being blurred, or at least parsed in unhelpful ways. Too often phrases from Lenin, like ones from Fanon, are evoked instrumentally, for polemical purposes.

Fortunately, we have access to a number of well-contextualized histories of Lenin and his disciples discriminating between an appropriate struggle and tactics that impede. Famously, Lenin was unforgiving in condemning the terrorist methods of the agrarian Social Revolutionary Party in Russia, even as he was thoroughly committed to proletarian revolution and understood that Czarist violence would eventually have to be met with counter-violence.

Decades later, Leninists in Great Britain were categorically in support of the Irish Republican cause but took their distance from the nationalist bombing campaigns that killed innocent bystanders. And when Leon Trotsky insisted on “unconditional defense” of the Soviet Union against imperialism, does anyone in his or her right mind think he then hushed up his merciless criticisms of its Stalinist leadership?

Moreover, “armed struggle,” supported by socialists under appropriate circumstances, can be exploited as a catchall phrase to cloud distinctions. There are many types of such activity and one can debate their appropriateness in various contexts.

Armed struggle can be the central strategy, as when an armed group tries to take over a government. There can also be an armed wing of a mass movement that provides self-defense. Or a Marxist party can have a special unit that engages in targeted military strikes.

As historian Ronald Grigor Suny explains, in the early 1900s both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party “were … critical of acts of terrorism,” but still open to “armed self-defense, assassinations of state officials and police spies, and expropriations of state treasure if it were tied to and contributed to the more important mass struggle.”^[12]

From Shatz’s narrative of Fanon we can see the danger of adapting to an organization that began with a democratic and secular perspective but progressed to authoritarianism; one that evolved to the resurgence of patriarchal oppression and social conservatism, allowed the killing of internal and external critics, and worse.

Due to a misplaced organizational loyalty, Fanon ended up an unwitting propagandist for the political leadership that would ultimately destroy his dreams.

To be clear: No one knows what Fanon or Lenin would be saying if they were responding to current events. They lived in a different era, and a work like The Wretched of the Earth is more useful as an investigative resource than a how-to-do-it manual. At best, writings by Fanon and Lenin might provide conceptual frameworks that one can use in strategically appropriate assessments of unique situations.

The same goes for judging the Hamas by the policy and practice of the FLN or ANC. One can talk in terms of analogies or comparisons, but the historical and political reference points are always distinct.

Many of us are not Third World experts and need to recognize that, in every case — Algeria, Palestine, South Africa — one faces a complicated situation. All deserve serious attention and discussion by use of knowledgeable sources that come from a range of activists who are from, or at least fully informed about, the countries themselves.^[13]

To be sure, abstract Marxist formulae do not provide templates and instant answers. When workers of one nationality are participating in the state repression of another nationality, the issue of class unity becomes highly complicated.

Much of the Israeli-Jewish working class, for example, is overwhelmingly privileged in relation to Palestinians due to Zionist conquest. Socialists traditionally call for an end to oppression based on bringing together the working class of an entire region, yet the racism of the Israeli Jews and Zionist ideology is a major stumbling block. That’s why calls for Jewish-Arab proletarian joint struggle seem at present to be as utopian as believing that a democratic socialist transformation of Arab states in the Middle East will come to the rescue.

There’s no point in hiding the truth that many facts confound such redemptive scenarios. On the other hand, material conditions change, populations are not a static essence, and consciousness alters. Our task is to historicize this tragic impasse, not to reify it.

Marx famously wrote in 1852: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”^[14] This is true when it comes to the paradox of supporting anti-colonial violence.

We all walk along a well-trod moral tightrope with no one exempt from accusations of hypocrisy and double standards. If we fail to remain alert to the duplication of deleterious patterns of thought and behavior, a new generation will be molded by a record of previous failures and misjudgments. That means we must sometimes engage in a corrective scrutiny of our own political fidelities and ethical boundaries, in order to avoid repeating the past instead of going beyond it.

As an alternative, we must start by disallowing such taboos as the view that defense of social revolutions or anticolonial struggles tolerates no space for substantial criticism of policies (whether they be reformist, ultraleft, or needlessly cruel). Or that expressing compassion for all children and other non-combatant victims is tantamount to betrayal or “bothsidesism.” We know too well where that kind of thinking leads.

I can’t speak to this as an authority on ethics or morality, but there is some general guidance from Ernest Mandel, a veteran of the World War II underground resistance, in his 1989 Socialist Register article on “The Case for Revolution Today”: “The essence of revolution is not the use of violence in politics but a radical, qualitative challenge — and eventually the overthrow — of prevailing economic or political power structures.”^[15]

We create ourselves by the decisions we make, and gain nothing by emulating the same mentality of those we oppose with their selective empathy, euphemisms and evasions. When it comes to undoing the legacies of imperialism, the new generation of socialists has no option but to rush toward the flame of resistance and continue the fight.

In this process, however, we also must defend the norms of reasoned debate, rejecting facile ideological amalgamations and denunciations, as we collectively formulate positive alternatives. Above all, we must learn from lives of Fanon, Mandela and many others if we are to advance to the culmination of the long arc of liberation from colonialism.

(This was the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part I.)

NOTES

[1] A compelling alternative interpretation of Fanon’s trajectory can be found in Gavin Arnall’s brilliant Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Arnall’s argument is that “Fanon’s metamorphic thought is ultimately split between two distinct modes of thinking about change.” (205)

[2] Alan Wald, “Frantz Fanon, by David Caute,” International Socialist Review (November 1974): 42-43. [This journal, which was published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, is not to be confused with the more recent publication (1997-2019) associated with the International Socialist Organization —ed.]

[3] This matter is discussed by Anthony Alessandrini in the 7 February 2024 issue Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ambivalent-fanonism-on-adam-shatzs-the-rebels-clinic/. One of the examples cited is that “The Beninese writer Paulin Joachim, an acquaintance of Fanon, told [Felix] Germain that he had seen Fanon hit Josie on a number of occasions….”

[4] Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (London: Pluto, 2015), 20.

[5] These quotations from Fanon appear in a recent essay by a writer scornful of any public criticism of Hamas’s actions: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/the-unthinkability-of-slave-revolt/.

[6] Recent discussions of the ANC have appeared in Dissent, World-Outlook, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/terror-and-the-ethics-of-resistance/; https://world-outlook.com/2024/01/25/the-palestinian-struggle-lessons-from-south-africa/;  https://www.startribune.com/to-defeat-injustice-follow-mandelas-castros-example/600314042/

 This is not to suggest that the practice of the ANC was always consistent with the theory. See “ANC Apologizes for Deaths in Anti-Apartheid Fight”: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9705/12/safrica.amnesty/index.html.

[7] This is cited in an informative essay on “Marxism and Terrorism” by Gareth Jenkins in International Socialism 110 (April 2006): https://isj.org.uk/marxism-and-terrorism/.

[8] This appeared in the Militant, 22 September 1945, and is available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1945/hiroshima.htm.

[9] “Collective punishment” is usually facilitated by the loose use of labels to demonize a group; the Right has used “terrorist” but the Left has a history of terms such as “kulak,” “bourgeois,” and “counter-revolutionary” to stigmatize populations, and of course the Stalinists used “Zionist” to persecute and execute communist dissidents and others. Referring to the killing of civilians by both Hamas and the Israeli state, Canadian activist Naomi Klein eloquently made the point that all children have the right not to be slaughtered. Naomi Klein, “In Gaza and Israel, Side with the Child Over the Gun”: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/why-are-some-of-the-left-celebrating-the-killings-of-israeli-jews.

[10] For a recent discussion of the mistakes of the Bolsheviks by a Leninist, see the material on violence on Paul Le Blanc’s October Song (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), especially pp. 219-254.

[11] See Wald, “In Defense of Critical Leninism,” Against the Current, January-February 1987: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc006/in-defense-of-critical-leninism/.

[12] Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 372.

[13] Mark LeVine, Director of the Program in Middle East Studies at UC Irvine, offered in Aljazeera some useful observations on differences between Algeria and Palestine. He suggests that a strategy of military overthrow of the Zionist state, aiming for the departure of the Jewish population from the region, “could lead to a redux of the Nakba, as many Israeli politicians are now screaming for.” See: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/fanons-conception-of-violence-does-not-work-in-palestine.

[14] See: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.

[15] Mandel certainly held that the rulers of society would use violence to protect their interests, and that armed self-defense will be required. Nevertheless, he observed: “No normal human being prefers to achieve social goals through the use of violence. To reduce violence to the utmost in political life should be a common endeavor for all progressive and socialist currents.” Ernest Mandel, “The Case for Revolution Today,” Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 159-184. While the organized Trotskyist movement is long past its sell-by date, some of its writings on terrorism and violence might be revisited with some benefit. George Novack, a leader of the US Socialist Workers Party when it was still on the Left, wrote a 1970 essay on terrorism. It focused mainly on the difference between individualist and mass action, but his call to “experience” and “reason,” and conclusion that “The Marxist attitude is based on grounds of revolutionary efficiency,” are useful watchwords. See: George Novack, “Marxism Versus Neo-Anarchist Terrorism,” International Socialist Review, June 1970, 14.

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