How to Have a Revolution

Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon (1961)

Free PDF:Wretched of the Earth

Book Review

Wretched of the Earth is a sociopolitical analysis of how revolution happens, based on the author’s personal experience in Algeria and his study of nationalist revolutions in sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, Latin America and Cuba.

Many Marxist scholars consider Fanon’s work to be the first major expansion of Marxist theory after Lenin. His primary contribution is to delineate the potential revolutionary forces of third world countries. His chief disagreement with Marx concerns the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, the urban beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes and gang members who lack access to formal work. According to Fanon, the lumpenproletariat make up the majority of the population in third world countries (and increasingly, in 2017, the industrialized world)  thanks to first world colonizers who have driven them off their land.

Marx believed the lumpenproletariat were incapable of achieving class consciousness and thus of no use in the revolutionary struggle. In contrast, Fanon feels they help to instigate revolution owing to their high proportion of young people and their belief they had nothing to lose.

Unlike Marx, Fanon believes third world revolutionary struggles must originate with rural peasants (like the Chiapas uprising in Mexico), that city dwellers are too “colonized,” ie too invested in existing political and economic structures to want to dismantle them.

Wretched of the Earth also describes the phenomenon of economic colonialism, as manifested in Latin America (and later South Africa). In these cases, a country achieves political independence but continues to be economically (and militarily) oppressed by first world multinational corporations.

Fanon makes a number of recommendations for preventing this, including

1. immediate nationalization and decentralization (via the creation of wholesale and retail cooperatives) of the economy
2. mass political education aimed at enabling the masses to govern themselves,
3. rapid economic restructuring aimed at developing soil and other natural resources for national use (as opposed to first world benefit),
4. land reform to stem the migration of peasants to the city,
5. guarding against feudal traditions that view men as superior to women, and
6. avoiding the trap of political parties.

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 of mixed heritage in Martinique. He fought with the French resistance during World War II and received a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in France. In 1953, he was offered a hospital position in Algeria, where he joined the Algerian National Liberation Front. He died of leukemia in 1961, shortly after the publication of Wretched of the Earth.

 

The Economic Recolonization of Africa

Land Rush – Why Poverty?

Directed by Hugo Berkeley and Osvalde Lewat (2012)

Film Review

Land Rush is the story of the recolonization of Africa by foreign interests (US, Britain, China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia) and their collaboration with corrupt governments and tribal authorities to drive subsistence farmers and their families off their land. Their goal: to create massive for-profit industrial farms based on monoculture export crops.

Nearly 60% of remaining arable land is in Africa – the industrialized world has either paved theirs over or decimated their soils through factory farming.

The reason Africa is such an easy target is that only 10% of rural Africans own private title to the land they farm. The rest is traditionally viewed as a communally owned commons.

Lifting Africans Out of Poverty By Seizing Their Land

Land Rush specifically focuses on a US sugar baron seeking to create a giant sugar plantation and processing plant in rural Mali. His goal is to kick start industrialization in Mali and help “lift their people out of poverty.”

Prior to the 2008 economic downturn, the Mali government supported the food sovereignty movement and the right of rural farmers to access land to support their families. This has all changed now, with the government (illegally) selling off more than 30 million hectares of farmland to foreign investors in the last five years.

Farmers are told they must give up their land and either go to work for Sosumar (as sugar farmers) and accept a new plot of land elsewhere. The government’s violent mistreatment of farmers who refuse to leave their land makes them highly skeptical of these promises.

The Food Sovereignty Movement

The documentary also profiles a local organizer linked with the global food sovereignty movement. Informed by disastrous experiences elsewhere (Latin America, India and other parts of Asia) with the wholesale expulsion of subsistence farmers for corporate interests, Africa’s food sovereignty movement is growing by leaps and bounds.

The organizer explains that the constitution and laws of Mali recognize the basic right of food sovereignty, ie that countries have the right to produce their own food rather than depending on an unpredictable global market for their food needs. He maintains that Mali has strict guidelines about involuntary displacement – that the government’s contract with Sosumar is illegal, as was the prior handover of 30 million hectares to foreign corporations.

The film ends on a positive note, thanks to a March 2012 military coup that caused Sosumar to withdraw all their workers  from Mali and their CEO Mima Nedelcovych to target Nigeria as the new site for his sugar plantation.

Currency Wars: Zimbabwe Adopts the Chinese Yuan

According to the Guardian (and Al Jazeera, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the New Zealand Herald), the US dollar took another major hit this week after Zimbabwe has made the Chinese yuan legal tender. According to minister of finance Patrick Chinamasa, the move comes after President Xi Jinping cancelled $40 million of Zimbabwean debt that comes due in 2015.

Zimbabwe abandoned its own dollar in 2009 after hyperinflation, which peaked at around 500 billion percent, made it unusable.

Following the demise of the Zimbabwean dollar, the country did business in various foreign currencies, including the US dollar, the South African rand and eventually the yuan. However up until now, most business was conducted in US dollars, and the yuan wasn’t approved for public transactions.

China is Zimbabwe’s biggest trading partner following Zimbabwe’s isolation by its former western trading partners over the country’s poor human rights record.

Deliberate Censorship

This story has been widely reported outside the US, but seems to have been blacked out in the US media. Reporting bad news at this time of year is too likely to disrupt the mindless consumption and debt accumulation expected of Americans over the holiday season.

In the corridors of power, there are deep concerns about the continued stability of the US dollar in the face of America’s decrepit manufacturing base and soaring deficits. Over the past decade, the Obama administration has been particularly concerned about growing Chinese investment in Africa. According to the Financial Times, China is the largest investor in African infrastructure, representing an estimated $13.4 billion in 2013.

Analysts across the political spectrum increasingly view Obama’s misguided foreign policy (his threats against Russian and China, his deranged Middle East military policy and his desperate attempt to ram the Transpacific Partnership* through Congress) as a desperate attempt to shore up the dollar against massive Chinese economic gains.

True to form, the Obama administration has addressed these concerns with military force, involving US troops in a series of African wars that they’re trying to conceal from the American public. See The War in Africa the US Military Won’t Admit It’s Fighting

 

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*The Transpacific Partnership (TPP) is a so-called “trade agreement” seeking to isolate China from its Asian-Pacific trading partners – by deliberately excluding China from the treaty.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons