Fanon, violence liberates both self and nation, i.e. it creatively distinguishes the nation and the people from colonial violence. The combination of the exercise of violence as a counter to colonial violence with the democratic aspirations of the people is located in the people’s army, people’s war and the political practice of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas were to be the people in arms, the armed militants; the guerrilla army was the people at war: ‘we are armed militants, not militarists’, Cabral proclaimed (cit. Davidson, 1981: v). The various sites of a genuinely emancipatory mode of politics, when that existed, varied, but were likely to include the mass movement and its constituent organisations, the guerrilla army and peasant communities. Militarism was a statist deviation from this conception (easily fallen into, given the centrality of ‘armed struggle’), when technical military solutions became dominant over political ones. Given the centrality of organised military resistance, which frequently became a dogma, the dominant trend – however much this was opposed by thinkers like Cabral – was for national liberation movements to end up providing a mere mirror image of colonial politics in their subjective practice.
In general, in the same way that a demarcation of a ‘proletarian politics’ was central to the Bolshevik mode, the demarcation of a ‘national politics’, of the nation itself constituted by such politics, was central to the NLS mode. The questions of this politics were thus: who is the nation and its people? (not, what is the nation?) and what are its politics? The answer provided – at least by the most emancipatory versions of that mode – was that the nation is constituted by those who fight consistently against colonialism and neo-colonialism – hence by a certain amount of political equality. To the extent that this was adhered to, this politics could be said to be partly structured ‘in interiority’. The nation is not race, it is not colour, it is not class, it is not gender,18 it is not tradition, it is not even state, but through transcending these divisions it is open to all Africans, irrespective of ethnic, racial or national origins, i.e. to all people. It is a purely political subjectivity (Neocosmos, 2003). In Cabral’s terms: ‘In Guiné and Cape Verde today the people ... mean for us those who want to chase the Portuguese colonialists out of our land. They are the people, the rest are not of our land even if they were born there. They are not the people of our land; they are the population but not the people. This is what defines the people today’ (Cabral, 1980: 89).
Hence the question of who was a member of the nation or the people acquired a purely political, not a social or historical, answer. As we have seen, for Fanon, the nation during the liberation struggle was also a purely political construct undetermined by any social category other than those who simply lived there (e.g. Fanon, 1989: 152). As a result, this politics was coloured by pan-Africanism, which only gave rise to a contradiction once nation was equated with state. In the meantime, national consciousness was mediated by the popular movement. In Cabral’s words: ‘if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture ... The liberation movement must ... embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture – which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society’ (Cabral, 1973: 43–4 emphasis in original).
Thus, in so far as the nation has a social base, it is the poorest, the most excluded (the ‘wretched of the earth’) and particularly the rural peasantry who form it. The nation has a bias towards the rural; not only are rural people a numerical majority, but they are the most politically excluded (the ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s terms); they have nothing to gain from the continuation of colonialism; only they can be truly universal and consistent in their demand for national freedom and democracy. The (petty) bourgeoisie and workers, as well as the inhabitants of the towns more generally, acquire some benefits from colonialism; they vacillate politically and are not consistently anti-colonial; their political and cultural references are to the metropolis. There is, among the bourgeoisie in particular, a tendency to ‘compradorisation’ evidently realised during the postcolonial period (Shivji, 1985). In the final analysis, the nation is composed of those who fight consistently for national freedom, irrespective of social origins. This is what national politics amounted to for this mode, at least in its popular-emancipatory version, in so far as this existed. Yet the constant reference to the class foundations of the politics of national emancipation throws up a contradiction expressed most clearly in Cabral’s well-known remark concerning the need for the petty bourgeoisie to ‘commit class suicide’ if it is not to betray the objectives of the struggle for national liberation:
in order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one road: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to repudiate the temptations to become ‘bourgeois’ and the natural pretensions of its class mentality; to identify with the classes of workers, not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that ... the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class, to be restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which he belongs (Cabral, 1980: 136).
The contradiction consists in the fact that, despite the insistence on the idea that politics represents class interests, it becomes apparent that if liberation/emancipation is to be achieved, especially after the moment of independence, interests must be superseded by a politics irreducible to class interest. While understanding this crucial problem, Cabral is only able to express it in moral rather than political terms, to move out of politics into psychology and the apolitical: ‘This alternative – to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class – constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle ... This shows us, to a certain extent, that if national liberation is essentially a political question, the conditions for its development stamp on it certain characteristics that belong to the sphere of morals’ (p. 136).19
It is arguably, therefore, the problem of political representation that lies at the core of the difficulties faced by the NLS mode. The fact that representation was mainly understood in Marxist – or, in the case of Cabral, Leninist – language does not constitute its main problem, for even when national liberation came to be understood in liberal terms (as in South Africa in the 1990s) the problem remained. In sum, the NLS mode was caught within its own subjective limits. However, only in a small number of cases was a politics inspired by this mode not thought exclusively by means of external referents. These rare instances, in the writings of Fanon and Cabral in particular, were brief and contradictory. What is interesting to note is that both these figures were spared the status of becoming ‘state revolutionaries’. Fanon in particular was excluded by his foreignness from holding high office in Algeria and died at a young age, while Cabral was assassinated before assuming state power. Of course, it was the national movement (made up of a ‘front’ or ‘congress’ of a number of organisations) that usually embodied the organisational subjectivity of the nation, not always a party as such. However, there were differences here: parties were, for some (like Fanon), Western imports with few roots among the people; for others (like Cabral), the party represented the vanguard: ‘Why have we formed a party and others formed movements? ... We called it Party, because we understood that to lead a people to liberation and progress, the fundamental need was a vanguard, folk who show in fact that they are the best and can prove it in practice’ (1980: 85).20
The dominant tendency, of course, was for political movements to become state parties more or less rapidly as popular politics were gradually fused with the state. This subjective fusion is apparent in Cabral’s last speech before his assassination in 1973:
The proclamation of the existence of our state ... will be the basis of the active existence of our nation ... legitimate representatives of our people, chosen by the populations and freely elected ... will proceed to ... declaring before the world that our African nation, forged in the struggle, is irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonialists and that from then on the executive of our state under the leadership of our Party, the PAIGC, will be the sole, true and legitimate representative of our people in all the national and international questions that concern them (Cabral,
