Today’s Algeria confirms Fanon’s warnings about the divisiveness of national bourgeoisies and the limits of conventional nationalism. The Hirak and the New Algerian Revolution In Algeria today, the ruling classes in Algeria have trapped the country in an extractivist model of development where profits are accumulated in the hands of a foreign-backed minority, with the majority of the population dispossessed through austerity policies dictated by the new instruments of imperialism, such as the IMF and the World Bank. In this context the national bourgeoisie offered one concession after another to the West, undermining the country’s sovereignty and endangering its population and environment - the exploitation of shale gas and offshore resources being just one example. In Algeria, this national bourgeoisie, closely connected to the ruling FLN, from the 1980s onward ushered in an age of deindustrialization and pro-market policies, at the expense of the popular strata. Here, he identified the sterility of national bourgeoisies that tended to replace the colonial force with a new class-based system replicating colonial structures of exploitation. This lack of democracy under FLN rule went hand-in-hand with the ascendancy of a comprador bourgeoisie (a ruling elite subordinate to the interests of foreign capital) that was hostile to socialism and genuine land reform.įanon foretold this development in The Wretched. The revolution was a top-down, authoritarian, and highly bureaucratic project, even if some of the redistributive measures taken by the new state did significantly improve people’s lives. For Fanon, revolution is a transformative process that will create new souls.Īfter its victory against French colonialism, Algeria’s revolutionary experience was defeated, both by counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions. His book A Dying Colonialism shows how liberation does not come as a gift: it is seized by the masses with their own hands. Thereafter he was active in the fight for freedom, writing in support of the struggle and traveling across Africa on FLN missions.įanon had high hopes for revolutionary Algeria. His experiences led him to resign from Blida hospital in 1956 and to join the National Liberation Front (FLN). There followed one of the longest and bloodiest wars of decolonization, with the rural poor and lumpenproletariat joining the struggle in massive numbers.Īrriving at Blida psychiatric hospital in 1953, where he treated both colonial torturers and indigenous victims, Fanon saw colonization as a systematic negation of the other and their humanity. Algerians declared their war of independence on November 1, 1954. The colonial period in Algeria was characterized by expropriations, proletarianization, forced sedentarization of nomadic populations, and brutal violence by the French colonial regime. Six decades after Fanon’s death, his revolutionary thought and experiences remain an inspiration for today’s struggles - and offer insights into how Algerians can finally free themselves from the exploitation and oppression bequeathed by French colonial rule. But the struggle against the military regime continues. Historic Friday marches followed by protests by various parts of the population put an end to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s twenty-year rule in April 2019. In 20, millions of people, young and old, men and women from different social classes, have taken to the streets in a momentous uprising, re-appropriating long-confiscated public space. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon had written that “Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” This statement is relevant for the current generation, too - especially in light of the explosion of revolts and uprisings all over the world in the last few years, including in the Arab countries, from Algeria to Lebanon and from Sudan to Iraq.Īs part of this general convulsion, over the last three years Algeria has seen a new revolution against its national bourgeoisie. A radical intellectual and a revolutionary dedicated to his adoptive country’s national liberation, his transformative ideas went on to inspire Pan-Africanism, the Black Panthers, and anti-colonial struggles all over the world. But he could easily have said the same about the popular uprising that gripped the country over the last three years.īorn in Martinique but Algerian by choice, Fanon (1925–61) wrote about the Algerian revolution against French colonialism, and his own experiences on the African continent. This oxygen which creates and shapes a new humanity - this, too, is the Algerian revolution.” With these words, Frantz Fanon was talking about Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s. “The revolution in depth, the true one, precisely because it changes man and renews society, has reached an advanced stage.
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