From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Algeria
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 02:15:07 -0500


Harald,

I do not mind your tone.  I actually think you do a nice job being sharp
without losing the sense of comradeliness.  If only I was so balanced, but
we all have goals, eh?  As long as we are being direct...

> Briefly  first on your statement (made in regards to Iraq etc,
> which I will try to reply to later) my "argument is based on a
> moral approach to the problem, not a political one."

Then we shall deal with it later.
>
> What Lenin would have called bourgeois liberalism, does not interest
> me much, even if exclude the fact that is view on "national
> self-dermination" was wholly opportunistic. But then there were not much
civil rights
> involved when the Red Army abolished such self-determination.

Sorry, was reading Lenin over actually since I find few people grapple with
Lenin in any substantial way. I do not think his position was 'wholly
opportunistic', though his concept of revolution made it impossible to
defend his ideas.  This has as much to do with vanguardism, with statism,
etc, but has to be raised in a more sophisticated manner and is relate to
the composition of the working class in Russia at the time.  Lenin did not
arise in a vacuum and he was hardly the worst.  Nevertheless, he cannot ever
grappl with the deeper issues and much of what Lenin raised in 1913 is not
relevant in a world (mostly) without colonialism.  Anti-colonial struggles
forced a massive recomposition of the capital-labor relation in the
periphery/former colonies, one which could have failed in several places,
Algeria among them.  After that recomposition, the RIGHT of national
self-determination became relevant to fewer and fewer places (Palestine and
parts of the USSR being among them.)

> I find your strong objections to my, as I see it, quite rational statement
> that the vast majority  of Algerians very likely would have been much
better
> off today (and so would the global class struggle) had they opted for
> struggling for nominal and real equal rights as citizens of France,
> including for having the Arabic (and Berber I might add) accepted
> as an official language together with French.
>
> You write".. to call for that is to accept the nationalism of the
oppressor
> nation, of the colonizer."
>
> Why is this so? I would to the contrary claim  and I think history
> has proven me right on this  that turning the struggle into a nationalist
> cause,  both French nationalism and nationlism as such was
> strengthened, while turning the struggle into a civil rights issue
> would have been to confront both French nationalism and
> nationalism as such.

I am not sure how much of your comments to begin with. Frankly, I nowhere
see any reason to believe that France was about to allow Algeria and its
citizens full political rights.  Do you think that the French bourgeois had
any intention of ceding any political power to Algeria, to millions of
Algerians as full French citizens with full political and social rights?
What possible place could Algeria have even in bourgeois democratic terms?
This is absurd.  Maybe you would like to tell me how France would
internalize Algeria economically in a non-colonial way?  And do you think
France would not enforce French as the official language?  French
colonialism involved the cultural annihilation of the colonies and a
Francification of the colonies.

Also, it strikes me that your position already fails to ever raise French
violence against Algerians: police and military violence, expropriation of
land, denial of culture, torture, etc.  Instead, you start with and end with
the violence of the Algerian nationalists, who are to blame for the
increased nationalism of the French.  Really, isn't this too much?  What
next?  The Black Panther Party in the US was responsible for the KKK?
Indeed, the struggle against oppression always engenders a backlash, but
that backlash is not the fault of the oppressed, and your refusal to
concretely recognize that France oppressed Algerians as Algerians is
stunning to me.

Did they oppress all Algerians equally?  Duh.  No.  In fact, the desire for
civil rights often came from assimilationist sections of the urban petty
bourgeoisie and a small layer of the working class in the cities who were
most tied to France, not to French revolutionary workers.

All of this is an apology for French nationalism, Harald.  I am surprised
that you cannot see that you have made the Algerians the villains and
allowed France off the hook.
>
> And this you have decided once and for all? It does not matter
> then that in the real world that your approach have implied an
> endless trail of blood, immensely undermined an international
> class struggle and as such fortified capitalist reign, has led to
> regimes frequently as oppressive as the colonial rule itself,
> and brought about an endless numbers of racist and national-
> chauvinistic forces, as escalating or maintaning poverty. All this
> for the abstract idea of  nationhood or the far more concrete
> one of the state. Yes, I know this is a generalisation and simpli-
> fication but still pretty near to the truth.

Would defending Algeria's RIGHT to self-determination have undermined
internationalism?  Or is it the shameless apologies for this or that
nationalist group by the Left?  The only practical solution would have been
working class revolution, but that did not happen.  Should we then have
said, "Better to accept French 'Civilization' and all of its Francophone
racism, to trust in bourgeois democracy and civil rights, than to attempt
revolution."?  In Algeria this had no support except among a thin layer
because the rest of the population was frankly not stupid enough to believe
that French colonialism could create Algerian democracy.

Apparently you need to read Franz Fanon to get an understanding of what
French colonialism in Algeria was.  You are guilding the lily.  Besides, the
endless trail of blood started in France.  Maybe French workers refusal to
support French colonialism or French revolutionaries support of
non-nationalists (even while supporting Algeria's RIGHT to secede) would
have been important.  But that might assume that France bears some
responsibility in this, not just Algerian nationalism.

> You write: "The best thing a French worker could do would
> be to say: "Do what you must.  We will defend your right to
> determine your own course.  Understand that the nationalists
> are your enemies as well.  But, like workers on strike, we
> will defend your fight regardless of the leadership, while
> critiquing the destructive and reactionary nature of those
> leaders."
>
> This in my esyes is "bourgeois liberalism" if anything is,
> as well as position conctradictory at its core. First, I am not
> denying anybody "the right," or rather the freedom to commit
> suicide, but that does not imply one should actively support it,
> or that one should not argue against it and for other options.

I never said do not argue for other options.  but to argue that staying
within colonialism is no less suicidal is absurd.  Would you defend the
defeat of French colonialism by the Algerians?  Can you think of a situation
where you would defend French colonialism?  If you can asnwer yes to the
second question, then you are concretely opposed to their RIGHT to break
with France and you are defending French national chauvinism because you
defend France's right to tell the people of Algeria what to do.

> Anyway, what you seem to be saying above is: "we will defend
> your nationalist struggle but be aware that nationalists are
> your enemy." It does not make much sense. Of course you
> to not say precisely this but that "we will defend your right to
> determine your own course".  It is this term "right" which
> causes the confusion.

As opposed to your call for 'civil rights'?  What can civil rights mean for
people who are not citizens in the fullest sense?  Algeria was a colony, not
a department like Brittany.  And saying that we defend their right to make
their own choices makes perfect sense.  It means I DO NOT ORDER THEM AROUND
or hinge my support of their struggle for freedom on them agreeing with me,
Harald.  It means I recognize that the Algerian struggle was real and more
than just the NLF or the other groups but a real, mass struggle.  Maybe you
have forgotten that?

Can you tll me in what way arguing
> for that they follow another course take away from them
> any "right" or freedom  for others to determine their own
> course ? There is an implicit statist premise in you argument,
> namely, that express ones politically view is the same as
> forcing others to adopt it.

Refusing to oppose French colonialism and recognize it as the main enemy of
both the colonized subject and the French worker is support for French
colonialism.  As such, your refusal to support the Algerian RIGHT you secede
from France is a denial.  This supports the wrong end of the intra-class
hierarchy which existed between colonial worker and colonized worker.  I do
not have a statist assumption because I do not believe that national
oppression and the freedom of the Algerian worker can be solved by national
self-determination.  Rather, I only think that defence of that right is a
premise to fighting French national chauvinism and to displaying real unity
with the Algerians, who you blame for French racism.

> You also say: "If one is not a member of the group being
> oppressed, one does not have a right to tell people what
> to do."
>
> Now this is a wholly moralistic position,  But again what
> do you mean with "tell" here. I am neither in a position, or do I
> want to be in one, to order (if that is what is meant with
> "tell" here) anybody else to do anything. What I can do
> is to argue and try to convince others. That is politics.

But it is exactly in the assumption that we, from the colonizer countries or
from the position of the colonizer, can tell the colonized what is in their
best interests.  It is not a question of study, but of breaking with our own
national, religious, imperial chauvinism.  Until we do that, we do tend to
order the colonized around as if we knew better all along because we had
'real class politics'.

Even so, I never said don't intiate a dialogue and critique.  Critique
nationalism as much as you want.  Critiquing nationalism is not the same as
saying "We will support Algerian workers' and peasants' struggles, but only
if Algerian workers and peasants do what we want.  Otherwise, to hell with
you, you are all 'nationalists'."  And believe me, by the time that exchange
is over, they damn sure will be.

> How many "national"/ethnic so-caled liberation struggles
> do you think there is going on within Africa and other
> parts of the world right now? An almost endless number.
> And then we had som in the late Yugoslavia I seem to
> remember. Yes let us applaud the slaughter. I am sure
> that will do a lot to undermine the power of Washington
> and the capitalist world disorder and promote a globalised
> class struggle.

First, you confuse different periods with different political problems.
Last I checked we were discussing colonialism and colonial Algeria.  I never
argued for national self-determination in Afghanistan.  What would that
mean?  I never argued for it in Yugoslavia, although it was absurd in
relation to Croatia and Slovenia, who were never oppressed by Serbia.  In
Kosova, certaily one can say that Serbian reactionary nationalism had
support almost nationwide on treating the Kosovars like shit.  It does not
seem to me that Kosova had a reason to expect love from Serbia any time
soon.  But sometimes we also live with the fact that there are no
alternatives, no matter what we want to happen.

>         From my viewpoint, this is nothing but an absurd
> idealism: The idea of "the nation," "national self-determination,"
> and then the magic formula "right". As far as I can see, this
> reactionary bourgeois propaganda. No wonder capitalists
> like Lenin promoted it.

You know, I may think that Lenin was fundamentally screwed politically, but
I think he was more of a revolutionary than most.  Lenin was never a
capitalist, he was a revolutionary who, mistakenly, badly mistakenly,
thought that state capitalism in Russia was progressive and would lead to a
strengthening of the working class.  His notion was not based on the
transformation of human social relations.  But for all of their strengths,
the council communists and Bordigists were wrong on this too.  I am not sure
how much better they would have done.

>         That we unconditionally should oppose all forms of
> oppression that  is a whole other thing,  but this is a position
> it is hard to reconcile with a defence of nationalism.

You insist I defend nationalism.  I insist that the oppressed have the right
to decide to secede from colonial oppression, even if it means creating a
bourgeois state, because if we fail to defend that right, we fail to oppose
colonialism and oppression.

> You might have argued differently. For instance that my
> position would had been wholly unrealistic even if it had
> been adopted. There were Algerian organisations who
> did promote a civil rights strategy, but it had not gotten
> them very far. Petitions alone seldom do.

The point is not what is practical, but what is pricipled.  Only workers'
revolution is practical in our sense, and the idea of defending the right of
separation, is to forestall separation and to bring the workers closer by
displaying our refusal to support the colonial conquerer.

>
> At last, I think this discussion might be better served
> by looking at concrete cases. Algeria was a particular
> case in that the high and mighty in Paris claimed it
> to be part of France. Secondly, in that the idea of nation
> in France had been founded on citizenship and not
> ethnicity. You can ask about the reality of that, but it
> none the less differed from what had been the ideological
> basis of German nationalism.

But the reality was highly racist.  Can you imagine the French allowing
Algeria to hold a democratic parliament to decide if they wanted separation
or unity?  It was not up to France to decide, but France made a democratic
decision in Algeria, even along bourgeois democratic lines, impossible.
Where is your critique of French refusal to allow this?  This is what I
mean.

> If you want to give me a challenge, East Timor
> would be a far better case. Personally I find my
> argument in the case of Algeria self-evident. What
> is far from self-evident is if it would have been
> possible to gain a general acceptance for such
> an idea at the time, though it was promoted by
> some. The rejection of it might have as much
> to do with those who agitated for a whole other
> course than any "will of the people". When an
> armed "national liberation" struggle first has
> gained force it has its own logic, and is almost
> impossible to stop, if not drowned in blood.

As I said, blame the Algerians.  Not France.  Harald, this is great-power
chauvinism of the worst sort.  East Timor (or South East Asia) would be too
easy.  I prefer Algeria because it shows that in every case you have blamed
the Algerians and the 'little nationalists' for every evil, every
chauvinism, every increase in chauvinism, etc while you have mentioned
French expropriations, land-grabbing, enclosures, torture, police and
military abuses, etc, NOT ONCE.  As I said, the nationalism at hand is not
the NLF but imperial chauvinism.

Chris



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