From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Algeria
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 22:16:45 -0500


> I have read Fanon, though it is a very long time ago, but that is wholly
> beyond the point here. I did not write 10 pages about the oppressive
> nature and brutality of French colonialism, or even mention it, as I did
> not think it was needed, as I am not having a discussion with Le Pen
> or the ghost of General de Gaulle.

But we are discussing the possibility of national oppression and the
possibility of something called national self-determination, which has no
bearing unless we take both sides into account.  I think you do not assume
French colonialism into the equation, I think you tend to ignore it.  Let me
try to explain why i say this below.

> I could of course had written that the sins of the French colonisers
> were so great that should burn in eternal hell, and called thse folks
> "evildoers ".

Why would I want you to do that?  I am asking for a consideration of the
power relations between oppressed and oppressor, not a demonizing.  This is
why I think you are at time moralizing.

But I do not think by not doing this, I have "blamed"
> the Algerians for French racism, "made the Algerians the villains and
> allowed France off the hook, "defended French colonialism, etc.
> This is all in your phantasy. We are having a political discussion,
> not writing a prelude to Judgement Day.

Indeed, we are having a political discussion.  However, if I remember
correctly, we are discussing 'Judgement Day' for thousands, maybe tens of
thousands or more Afghanis, which is how this whole conversation started.
Even though I am not defending some notion of national self-determination
with Afghnistan, I am arguing that the defeat of the United States would be
the only positive outcome of this war.  I am arguing that we need to fight
the, IMO, incorrect correlation of Islam and Muslims with Islamic
Fundamentalism.  As such, the US is certainly at issue, and with Algeria so
would the French.  But I rush ahead.

> My interest here have been in the real world results following from
> different political courses. Whether I am right or wrong in my con-
> clusions, I find this as important as talking about good and bad
> intentions, moral resposibility, etc. Acts tend to have unintended
> consequences. I seldom find it very interesting to talk about the
> morals, "double standards," etc., of our rulers.. That is their problem.
> I am not a priest. It find it far for more fruitful to talk about blind
> alleys taken by popular movements, as this is far more critical on
> the road towards a world beyond capitalism.

In all of this, you nowhere say that you find it useful to lay out the logic
of the rulers, the ways in which it is possible to capitulate to great power
chauvinism from the Left, etc.  I am not calling into quetion the morals of
the rulers and I never have in this entire discussion.  I have called into
question how we defend a people in struggle, whose struggle will happen with
or without our approval, but which we certainly have a stake in and a
relation towards.  It is the nature of our relation and its possible
complications that I have directed my comments, of the possibility that in
an abstractly 'no war but the class war' position is contained a deep
national chauvinism.  That does not mean that we do not subordinate all
considerations to the 'class war', but that in doing so we exactly recognize
the concrete features of each movement and we recognize that capital does
not present itself to us nakedly but in forms of existence, forms of
appearance, which mediate and obscure that content and that those forms
actually represent part of the reality.  Therefore, i think you are right in
an abstract sense about the content but you do not take the form of the
content seriously at all, never investigate how that form develops and
therefore take a rather sterile (at best, national chauvinist at worst)
position.

Nowhere in that have I argued that we should be concerned with the morals or
hypocrisy of the capitalists or the nationalists.  I have not, quite
consciously, ever raised the idea that nationalists could 'betray' the
people.  nationalist politics cannot betray that to which it is an enemy.

> And by the way, I do not neither think that Lenin was "wholly
> opportunistic," even if did write that,  I rather think he was very
> religious and a great believer in Justice, just like Saint-Just.

Heh, well you did write it.  You also think he was a capitalist.  I will
disagree there as well.  He was a revolutionary who represented the left
wing of social democracy, who never really broke with its underlying
politics, and who therefore followed a policy of state capitalism during the
revolution because that is all social democracy could ever do.  It
represented reformism in the workers movement, even with Lenin, since we do
not judge reform vs revolution by the violence of the means employed.

> So to the substance:
>
> Let me start with this troublesome, ambigious  word: Right.
> I take it as self-evident that those revolted against French
> colonial rule had not right to self-determination. I they had
> so had, they could have taken their case to court. Other
> than in a juridical sense, I find the term quite meaningless.
> "Freedoms ar not given they are taken," wrote on of the old
> mens with beard, similarily rights are not something we
> have, but something we have the power to impose ot not.

So rights only exist when they can be taken to court.  Interesting.  So you
would never argue for civil rights, in reality, because you would not have
to fight for them if they already existed.  And I find it funny that you
suddenly become a supporter of bourgeois legality.  But given the sentence
structure, maybe this is a linguistic issue.
Anyway, I am arguing that the Algerians took their rights, were taking their
rights.  We had a choice.  Defend that right or try to deny it.  In the face
of French colonialism, which sought to repress at every moment every act of
self-defense (since the Algerians did not have real legal recourse), what is
a logical choice?

> Further, any substantial answers to your question would require
> an in-depth study. I will gladly admit that there has gone much
> time since this period of French-Algerian history has been
> anywhere near the front of my mind.  You can always question
> how realistic a civil rights strartegy would have been, even
> had it gained massive support. What I will maintain in al cir-
> cumstances, is that, had it suceeded, this would also implied
> both a better situation for the working classes of Algeria today
> and a step forwards for the class struggle in a more global
> perspective.

And I think that this means nothing because nowhere did colonialism resolve
itself in this fashion.  To say that if the Algerians had prostrated
themselves before French bourgeois legality, the class struggle would have
strode forward is to say that only under the French state, an imperial and
colonial state, could progress have been made.  And I say to you in this
case that separation was the only course that would allow for mutual respect
and dignity because only separation offered the end of the colonial
relation.  Of course, I could say that revolution in France would have made
a different set of possibilities and this is true.  And this is what we are
obliged to fight for.  We should first concern ourselves with how we will
get our own house in order.
>
> You write: "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?"
>
> No, I don't. The question is if it would have been possible
> to impose it on them, and in the process turning their own
> stated national ideology (citienzenship founded on liberty,
> equality and fraternity ) against them? Could such a strategy
> have caused less bloodshed (one million died in the war
> for "national self-determination")

See, this is what I mean.  Did the Algerian nationalists want a million
Algerians to die?  Did they kill a million Algerians?  No.  Mostly the
French did.  (And the nationalists often use a lot of violence against the
mass in order to prepare us for the discipline of their new state apparatus,
too.)  The NLF would have taken separation with no violence, I bet.  And so
would the Algerian people.  But France would not hae allowed the Algerians
to decide that.  If they had, then, and prolly only then, would not have
separating been possible.  And if there was no issue of self-determination,
if we had a unified Empire with one ruling class, you would not have to kill
a million people to have a separate nation state.  If the nation state was a
meaningless fiction, a million people would not have had to die.  If the
French working class had defended the Algerians, a million people would not
have died.  The Algerians separated because French colonialism would not
allow peaceful separation because they had no intention of granting any
liberty and equality.  In the absence of French working class revolution,
the Algerians would not get rid of French colonialism except by separation.
Would I have preferred proletarian revolution in France and Algeria?  Yes.

and given better long
> term results? The demand could have been formulated as
> full and equal rights within France or, if not, full independence.
> Now there is many additional questions linked to this, such
> as distribution of land. There are a lot of other objections
> that might also be posed. You seem however, have I under-
> stood you right, to reject it on principle. But I could be wrong
> on this.

I do not reject it on principle.  I reject it in certain cases.  In some
cases, the only path to full and equal rights is separation.  Let me give an
example.  If the majority of African Americans wanted political separation,
I would defend their right to it.  Howevber, I do not think it makes any
sense at all and I would say that anyone posing separation today would have
to be a fool or a reactionary.  But I do not rule it out as a possibility,
one that would pit me either for against the Black population of the US.  I
know which side I stand on already and I would remain there.
>
> "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."
>
> These are again all questions of struggle, including the
> ideological struggle for the solidarity of as broad a section
> of the working class of France.as possible, even of as far
> as possible to try to bring a split into the ranks of the settler
> colonalist (the lesser ones against the greater ones). Had
> one succeeded with the first task, the economically question
> might have evolved within a framework of class struggle
> more like that between north and south of Italiy and Spain.
> There are many unanswered questions here, of course,
> given the hypothetical nature of the subject, also due to
> that in order to all gain support for this would have involved
> a process that would have changed the mindset of both
> considerable sections of Algerians, as well as French
> workers, and at least a minority of the settler colonialists.

Except that Algeria is not a pat of France.  To compare Algeria with Italy
or Spain makes no sense.  Even the Basque are closer to the Spanish than the
Algerians to the French.  The Norwegians separated from Sweden (somehow I
suspect you know that:) and it did not add to the abiding hostility between
the workers of both countries.  Indeed to have forced the Norwegians to stay
with Sweden would have fostered Swedish national chauvinism.  But that is
closer to Italy and Spain.  You are comparing apples and oranges here.

> Now we know very well that things did not develop this way.
> So what then? This question is very easy. To do whatever
> one could do, in this it is no different than during the Vietnam
> war, to work against the war and oppression.of the French
> state, against French racism, and try to keep in contact with
> and strengthen what ever Algerian forces there were with a
> more social revolutionary, internationalist perspective. (And
> no, I do not blame those who saw this exclusively as a
> struggle to get their French oppressors of their back.)

Ok, but then how is this different from what I am saying?  I am not
proposing that we support the nationalists or that we support the Taliban.
I am proposing that sometimes we can do no more than oppose our own state,
its national chauvinism and racism.  Sometimes all we can do is fight for
'our' state to lose.  We do not always get to pick our allies and sometimes
we do not really have any allies.  Then we have to hope that the working
class mass of that place figures out what to do.  To give the nationalists
the weight you do sometimes, that all the ultra-left seems to, seems similar
to Leninism's over-arching belief that consciousness comes from the outside.
If the workers don't find another way to organize, nothing we can say will
convince them otherwise.  All we can do is to raise a banner that says "The
workers or imperial state X oppose imperial state X and its policies, and we
fight here for your right to decide your own fate because it goes hand in
hand with us deciding our own fate."

In light of that, to return to Afghanistan: is there any situation in which
US victory would be positive?  (I am asking the entire list here)  I have
heard the Sparts argue that the Soviets were bringing a workers' state to
Afghanistan, therefore we should support them.  When I said that the USSR
was capitalist, they said that even bringing capitalism would be better,
would be 'progressive'.  You have taken the flip side: its all capitalism,
so its all bad.  Same coin.

I am saying that if the US gets to decide the fate of the Taliban, and not
the Afghani people, then the US will have imposed itself ON TOP (I wish I
could do italics, I am not trying to shout, sorry) of whatever
fundamentalists they will put in power.  If the US loses, regardless of who
they lose to, that means the US cannot throw its weight onto a regime that
is an enemy of the Afghani people (even if the regime that comes out of it
is thoroughly rotten.)  Does that mean we EVER stop searching for forces to
ally with that represent working class revolution?  No, of course not.  But
if the US wins, regardless of who they beat, it will be bad for the Afghani
people and it will be bad for US workers, whose national chauvinism and
nationalist pride will only increase.

As for the notion of Empire, it does not speak to this at all.  In what
realistic sense is the Afghani bourgeoisie an 'equal' with the US
bourgeoisie?  In what phantasia?  And someone apparently forgot to tell
Pakistan and India that they were all part of the same universal ruling
class solving their problems over a cup of (darjeeling?) tea.

> Not a wholly satisfactory answer. That would require far
> more. But none the less, I hope I answered some of your
> objections, at least.

Well, not really, but I like the dialogue and I appreciate the seriousness.
Cheers.

Chris



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