... The national bourgeoisie ... must not be opposed because it threatens to slow down the total, harmonious development of the nation. It must be stoutly opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing (1990: 141).
It should be apparent here that the national bourgeoisie refers to a social category as well as a political category. ‘It’ is a socio-economic entity that acts politically coherently; it is a political subject. It is this circulating notion of class – a category circulating between political economy, on the one hand, and the thought of politics, on the other – which enables Fanon to analyse the decline of the politics of the people-nation and their replacement by state politics, by the politics of the nation-state, for the national bourgeoisie succeeds in representing the whole nation as well as its own interests: ‘nationalism, that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors, stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed’ (p. 163). It is clear, then, as Lazarus (1996: 207) makes plain, that it is not the advent of a state politics that destroys emancipatory politics but the saturation of emancipatory politics that makes statism possible, for ‘the return of a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation’ (my translation). To understand the way Fanon analyses this process, we have to look first at the role that the category of class plays in his argument and then at his understanding of the party. Both these categories clarify the limits of Fanon’s emancipatory thought and, more especially, the subjective political impasse faced by the NLS mode of politics itself.
Fanon accounts for the collapse of nationalism into a statist project primarily by reference to the collapse of liberatory pan-Africanism – ‘African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached’ (1990: 128) – into a vulgar xenophobic chauvinism after independence: ‘we observe a permanent see-saw between African unity which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion and a heart-breaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form’ (p. 126). The reason for this is to be found, for Fanon, primarily (but not exclusively) in the economic interests of the national bourgeoisie, who wish to move into the posts and the businesses vacated by the departing Europeans. As a result, they assert a form of nationalism based on race and indigeneity in order to exclude; their concern is with access to resources, and a claim to indigeneity is, from their perspective, the only legitimate way of privately accessing such resources. Fanon notes that ‘the racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defence, based on fear’ (p. 131). In any case, whether the concern is accumulation or asserting a ‘narrow’ racially based nationalism (p. 131), ‘the sole slogan of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner!”’ (p. 127). As a result:
The working class of the towns, the masses of the unemployed, the small artisans and craftsmen for their part line up behind this nationalist attitude; but in all justice let it be said, they only follow in the steps of their bourgeoisie. If the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the Europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans ... the foreigners are called to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked (1990: 125).
The nation now refers to something other than a purely subjective collective affirmation; it refers to a social category founded on indigeneity. Who is and who is not an Algerian, a Ghanaian, an Ivorian, now becomes defined in terms of a state politics founded on asserting indigeneity: birth, descent, history, race or ethnicity. We should note that it is not simply a class politics that is at stake here, one representing economic interest, but more broadly a politics associated with ascribing the nation to an objective social category of the indigenous; a politics concerned with maintaining divisions, hierarchies and boundaries: in sum, a state politics. It is thus the state that defines the nation in social terms and that is unable to sustain a purely affirmative politics. The nation is now a representation, no longer a presentation. At the same time, this statist way of defining the nation is gradually naturalised in thought, as given by history and communitarian ‘belonging’ (birth, descent, etc.). Yet it should be abundantly clear not only that it is the effect of a state form of politics but that such naturalisation is made possible by its social embeddedness; for it is impossible to naturalise the purely subjective without first locating it in the social, without objectifying it. Moreover, the state also technicises as it depoliticises, something which Fanon deplores, emphasising that ‘if the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat’ (1990: 162). Harsh words. Fanon’s difficulty consists in not being able to imagine a more appropriate political response to the technicism of the state, for when faced with the saturation of emancipatory political thought and the exclusive offer of technical solutions in the form of ‘development’, people will think it better to have a bridge than none at all.
Fanon is thus fully aware of the collapse of a politics of popular affirmation into statist subjectivities, yet what he sees as the way out of this problem is limited precisely by his understanding of class politics and the representative role of parties. His difficulty is no more than that of the politics of the NLS mode. I outline some of the fundamental features of this mode of politics below; at this point it is only necessary to note that its categorial features are such as to locate it squarely within 20th-century ways of conceiving politics. Broadly speaking, this mode is one that followed the 20th-century’s conception of politics, which saw parties as the core term of such politics (in the 19th century it had been insurrection and movements). As I have already noted, the revolutionary party, though inaugurated by German social democracy and theorised by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, was seen by all shades of radical opinion throughout the century as ‘representing’ socio-economic classes and groupings in the political arena (Lazarus, 2001a, 2007). Parties were understood as the link between the social and the political domain structured around the state, and they recruited their members from throughout the population. Their class character was thus determined less by the social origins of their membership than by their ideological positions, which were said to ‘reflect’ class in political subjectivity. Mass parties of this type developed in Europe after, and often as a reaction to, the Paris Commune of 1871. For some social-democratic parties, it was a matter of organising the working class to avoid a similar disaster; for others, it was about drawing workers into their organisations so as to enable the control of bureaucracy and elites.9 Of course, the objective of the party is for its leadership to ‘capture’ state power. Radical Left-wing parties thus began with a contradictory character, one that exhibited a certain anti-state or mass revolutionary content along with an ambition to control the power of the state through which social programmes of various sorts could be technically enacted. Without exception they were founded on a politics of the representation of the social.
In Africa, similar contradictions characterised the party founded upon and ultimately leading the disparate organisations of interests making up the ‘national liberation movement’. In an African context, nationalist parties were recognised as the sole ‘genuine representatives’ of the nation often long before independence itself, as colonial regimes and nationalist movements battled for legitimacy. It was through the party that freedom was to be actualised both in the form of political independence and in the form of socio-economic development, which was to provide the much needed economic independence from the West to the benefit of all in the nation. In Kwame Nkrumah’s famous biblical aphorism: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee.’ Freedom in the NLS mode could only be attained through control of the state, as it was only the state that could drive the process of ‘catching up’ economically with the West – the only guarantee of full independence in the long term. From the nation being equated with the people, it came more or less rapidly to be equated with the state; given its social foundation, ‘national consciousness’ could therefore easily collapse from a pure affirmation into a state-legalised indigeneity. For Fanon, the party was a problematic but necessary form of organisation. Popular politics, like class politics, could only be realised through a party; the people or the class could only become a political subject through the medium of a party; and thus the nation could only become the agent of its own liberation through
