Kyla Hazell
It is essential, in reading A Dying Colonialism, to give
serious consideration to Fanon’s purpose in writing the book. Argentinian
journalist Adolfo Gilly’s introduction to the text is elucidating in this
regard. He describes Fanon’s intention as being “to go to the essentials” and
show the spirit of the struggle, the initiative and capacity of the Algerians,
and the extent of their commitment to liberation – a commitment which carries
them even to the point of altering their own modes of existence where it is
found that those do not accord with the fight for freedom (Fanon, 1959: 2). By
discussing the wearing of the veil, the rejection of transistor radios, and the
distrust of Western medicine (Fanon, 1959: 121), Fanon demonstrates more than
simply the rational inner dialogue of a colonially objectified and oppressed
people, but also a deep commitment to action and, most significantly, a message
of inevitability: to France, he says that the Revolution is already won. This
short essay will discuss Fanon’s project with reference to Italian philosopher
Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the role it plays in revolutionary
struggle. Though the fact of direct coercive rule by the colonial power may
seem to exclude notions of hegemony, it will be argued that A Dying
Colonialism validates Gramsci’s argument about the role of hegemony in
revolutionary struggles and that the underlying thread of Gramscian thought
throughout the book might have affected its receipt in France, the country to
which much of its message was directed. Furthermore, it will be contended that
Fanon’s description of the French failure to establish true hegemony in
pre-Revolutionary Algeria points towards certain limitations of Gramsci’s idea
when applied in the colonial context.
Fanon shows how struggle latently manifested in the Algerian
consciousness long before the Revolution (Fanon, 1959: 1). Throughout the
narrative, the key to the Algerian’s decisions is resisting oppression.
Hegemony, in Gramsci’s view, refers to political leadership which is grounded
in the consent of the led secured by spreading a dominant class’s worldview
(Bates, 1975: 352). The success of a particular class’s ability to establish
hegemony is measured by their ability to attain the voluntary agreement of the
masses to their rule. Regimes which fail to establish this will traditionally
resort to force in order to maintain control (Bates, 1975: 353). A
Dying Colonialism shows how the French government failed to
successfully proliferate its values and worldview. The latent resistance of the
Algerian people in refusing to buy radios or use Western medicine and their
attitude towards those who chose to take on Western modes of dress demonstrates
a mass of people unconvinced by the rhetoric of their rulers. This lack of
“spontaneous consent” also in part accounts for the incredible violence
displayed by the French colonial government and described by Fanon. Bates
(1975: 360) describes how Gramsci believes a certain political passivity will
prevail where people remain oppressed by a worldview that does not accord with
their interests or experience. This puts them in an ambivalent position and renders
them without the conceptual tools to take appropriate action (Femia, 1975:
268). A Dying Colonialism shows that the Algerian people
recognised and rejected the ideas of the French which dominated messages in the
media, education, and other institutions (Fanon, 1959: 65). This will be
unpacked further below, but for now accepted as a sign that the French had
limited success in establishing hegemony in Algeria.
Fanon devotes much time to demonstrating how the Algerian people’s
decisions alter during the course of the revolution as new behaviours and
decisions become contextually more appropriate than their traditional
practices. Through this, he shows a flexible, “modern”, and adaptable people.
He makes it clear, moreover, that such a radical transformation of attitudes
and actions has created an entirely new Algerian who will never more be bound
by oppression. The book thus conveys the message that the Algerian struggle is
one which can only end in liberation. Powerfully, he says that “The old Algeria
is dead” (Fanon, 1959: 27) and that “the blood that has flowed onto national
soil has produced a new humanity and no one must fail to recognise this fact”
(Fanon, 1959: 28). It is in fact Fanon’s view that the new Algeria already
exists for Algerians at the time of writing this book, and he explicitly says
that it but remains for France to be convinced (Fanon, 1959: 28). By showing
the hegemony that the Revolutionary FLN movement had managed to establish in
Algerian thought (with the effect that they could “mobilize any Algerian at any
time” (Fanon, 1959: 31)), Fanon pushes France towards recognition in a way that
French society might have found more palatable for its apparent valorising of
“Western” values such as individualism, freedom, and equality.[1] While it
may seem incongruous to say Fanon pushes these or in any way reflects Gramsci
as a Western theorist given that the book discusses the express rejection of Western
values, I think it fits in with his actional intention to assist in French
society’s realising that Algeria needs to govern herself.[2]
Fanon (1959: 5) says that what defines a revolution is not the armed
action, but the social struggle of the masses which that armed action supports.
This speaks strongly to Gramsci’s idea that “man is not ruled by force alone,
but also by ideas” (Bates, 1975: 351) because it shows that the struggle is as
much for legitimacy in the minds of the masses as it is for superiority in
battle. The notion of hegemony in revolution highlights the significance of a
cultural and ideological overhaul which invigorates society. Gramsci argues
that because of the significance of hegemony, a revolution must first wage its
battle at the cultural level and create mass support for its ideals if its
eventual seizure of the state is to be successful (Femia, 1975: 269). Fanon’s
description of revolutionary Algeria demonstrates competing ideologies fighting
for purchase and his book ultimately shows that the FLN will succeed. The
Algerian refusal to engage Western ideas (Fanon, 1959: 73) discussed above was
less passivity than a form of latent resistance. Nonetheless, such latent
resistance had to emerge in to action whereas before “The conqueror had settled
in such numbers, he had created so many centres of colonization, that a certain
passivity encouraged by the colonial domination made itself evident and
gradually took on a tinge of despair.” (Fanon, 1959: 52) According to Gramsci,
achieving a revolutionary outlook depends upon liberation at the level of
ideology and involvement in the revolutionary struggle (Bates, 1975: 361). It
is such involvement that gives the oppressed person a sense of their active
role in a greater movement and generates a clearer self-conception (Bates,
1975: 361). This seems to be what Fanon describes in his account of the inner
changes that different sections of Algerian society undergo in the course of
the struggle. In his estimation “It is the necessities of combat that give rise
in Algerian society to new attitudes, to new modes of action, to new ways.”
(Fanon, 1959: 64) If the theory of hegemony stands, this loss at the level of
ideas essentially dooms France’s desperate attempts to maintain power.
It is interesting to me that selected works of Gramsci’s were translated
in to French shortly before A Dying Colonialism was first
published (Thomas, 2014). If part of Fanon’s project is the conversion of the
French, we may wonder how those already becoming aligned to Gramscian thought
in the French Left would have responded to his argument. The 50s saw the rise
of the “nouvelle gauche” in France, a precursor to the British and American
“New Left” movements that were influenced by Gramsci’s work and the ideas of
counter-hegemonic movements (Hall, 2010). The Comité de liaison et
d’initiative pour une nouvelle gauche (CLING) was established in 1954
as arguably the first professed New Left organisation (although the term itself
was only later coined in Britain) and then merged in to the Parti
Socialiste Unifié (PSU) in 1960. Their agenda was very much based on
prioritising a “cultural revolution” and fighting for democratic control of
institutions like education and the media, core players in the proliferation of
hegemony. Very interestingly, opposition to the war in Algeria was one of the
struggles which unified the PSU until 1962 (Lucardie, 2008: 2). I imagine that
this might have positively affected their reading of A Dying
Colonialism which foregrounds the acceptance or rejection of ideas
disseminated through institutions of the media, healthcare, and culture. Though
the New Left was in no way a dominant movement in France during the period (so
would have had only limited sway in the change of mind France had to undergo),
the work of the New Left went on to gain currency in France in the course of
the 60s (for example, with students in the May 1968 revolts) and so is not
wholly insignificant.
With the above said, I think it is worth acknowledging the limits of
Gramsci’s thought as it relates to A Dying Colonialism. In order to
do this, I return to the discussion of France’s failure to establish proper
hegemony in Algeria and consider how this provides a critique of Gramsci’s
idea. The critique largely stems from the fact that the colonial situation is
deeply racialised and based on a challenge to the black individual’s ontological
identity (Mignolo, 2012: 214). This is a question that Gramsci did not directly
address in his writing, but which fundamentally affects questions of knowledge
and culture in colonial contexts. Hegemonic ideas must have at least some
foothold in the experience of the people in order to result in consent.
Colonial imposition inflicted such a complete affront on Algerians’ very being
that this was impossible (Fanon, 1959: 49, 65). Excluded entirely from
participation in knowledge formation on the basis of race (“Algerian
society, the dominated society, never participates in this world of signs”
(Fanon, 1959: 75)), Algerians recognised the invalidity of colonial rule.
Academic at the University of Hyderabad, Arun Patnaik, argues in a review of
the book The Postcolonial Gramsci that a true acceptance of
Gramsci’s ideas in the postcolonial context must mean a championing of the
Gramscian form of enquiry: one which examines a particular situation and
searches for new modes of resistance to find “new forms of power and struggle”
(Patnaik, 2013). Fanon acknowledges this in The Wretched of the Earth (1967:
39), saying “Marxist Analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we
have to deal with the colonial question.” Thus, Fanon’s work, which while
prioritising the active role of ideas in Algerian society also seems to
intentionally bring forth the rationality of Algerian actors, goes beyond
Gramsci and raises the question of how the notion of hegemony stands in
societies where race continues to determine an ontological hierarchy of being,
and due to the centrality of rationality in knowledge production hence also the
issue of control over ideology. A regime that disregards one’s very being so
insults the human spirit that it undermines its own legitimacy. The
Wretched of the Earth, I imagine, might then deal with the question of how
hegemony operates in the post-colonial context, where the sense of
participation in the creation of society’s governing ideas legitimates the
state in the eyes of the people, but colonial structures (which on a Marxist
account will have an effect on social consciousness) persist.
By way of concluding briefly, this response takes it that A
Dying Colonialism reflects the power of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony
in a way which might have affected French thinking, but shows that the idea can
be taken further. Where exclusion from the realm of ideas is based not just on
class but on race and so by implication ontology, new questions arise. An
important message in this regard is provided by Fanon (1959: 125) in the book:
“It is necessary to analyse, patiently and lucidly, each one of the reactions
of the colonised, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves
that we are at the heart of the drama – that of the impossibility of finding a
meeting ground in any colonial situation.” The fact that a Gramscian analysis
finds some foothold in Fanon, but fails to go far enough should then encourage
further thought and serious consideration of what makes colonial (and
postcolonial) problems particular. This is part of what makes A Dying
Colonialism so valuable – not only does it do actional work in
demonstrating the unstoppable march of Algerian liberation (which at the level
of ideas and in the minds of the populace is already fact), but it also does
valuable theoretical work in highlighting new questions for study.
References
Bates, T.
(1975) “Gramsci and the theory of hegemony” found in Martin, J. Antonio
Gramsci Vol II – Marxist, Philosophy and Politics, Routledge
2002.
Fanon, F.
1959. A Dying Colonialism Grove Press: New York.
Femia, J.
(1975) “Hegemony and consciousness in the thought of Antonio Gramsci” Political
Studies 23 found in Martin, J. Antonio Gramsci Vol
II – Marxist, Philosophy and Politics, Routledge 2002.
Hall, S.
2010. “The life and times of the First New Left” New Left Review.
61 (1): 177-196.
Lucardie,
P, 2008, “The New Left in France, Germany and The Netherlands: Democratic
Radicalism Resurrected?” available at: http://dnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/publicatieLucardie/newleft/DemRadRes-08.pdf
Mignolo, W., 2012, “Mariategui and Gramsci in ‘Latin’
America” in The Post-Colonial Gramsci Routledge: New York.
Patnaik, A,
2013 “Gramsci and the Postcolonial World” Review of The Postcolonial
Gramsci (edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya, New
York: Routledge) Economic & Political Weekly (accessed
via the Frantz Fanon Blog).
Thomas,
M. “Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s” published on Worker’s
Liberty 5 February 2014 and accessed at http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/02/05/marxism-1960s-and-1970s.
[1] Though it would warrant a full separate discussion, I found
interesting parallels between a) the way in which Fanon speaks of Algerian
society taking on modern technologies and realising, on its own terms, greater
equality between the sexes or amongst family members and greater individual
freedom of movement and expression, and b) the way in which ostensibly
progressive South African legal theorists argue that Customary Law might not
stand in such apposition to Constitutional Law on questions of, say, gender or
inheritance, were it not for the fact that the Colonial government codified and
so reified a system which had always been spoken and innately adaptable. While
this is a very interesting argument, it does suggest that Customary Law,
allowed to develop naturally in dialogue with history since the arrival of the
West in South Africa, would likely have developed more equitable systems of
inheritance and family authority. The assumption is then that these are
desirable outcomes with the implicit message then being that Customary Law
would have somehow “caught up”. It seems as though Fanon could be saying
something similar in the way he seems to cast judgment upon certain traditional
practices. If this is the case (and it would require further argument to
establish whether it is or isn’t), one would need to ask why and how that fits
in to the work this book does.
