Left Parties and Trade Unions in West Asia and North Africa Mark May Day

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.

​​“The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm… and our people stopped dead… it was the master… I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season… I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.” —Aimé Césaire

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of one of the greatest thinkers to have emerged from the ranks of the oppressed, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961).

Fanon’s contributions are timeless. As long as white supremacy and neocolonialism remain in the driver’s seat of human relations, Fanon’s thought will continue to arm the colonized in the Battle of Ideas.

The Radicalization of Fanon

Born and raised in what is still France’s Caribbean island colony of Martinique, Fanon was exposed to and shaped by the everyday class and race relations that characterized the island in the early 20th century. Forced to join a segregated column of Black troops, he fought in World War II. Upon continuing his studies in post-war France, he came face to face with the racism that dominates the European world. In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon reflects ​​on coming of age in a world, where, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” At the time of publication, Fanon had just turned 27.

In 1953, the Martiniquais psychiatrist was assigned to Algeria, where he treated patients who were severely traumatized by the violence French colonialism had spun into motion. He met Dr. Pierre Chaulet, a French doctor who secretly treated members of the guerrilla resistance, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who had survived torture and captivity. “Viscerally close to his patients whom he regarded as primarily victims of the system he was fighting,” Fanon immediately became a cadre of the Algerian Revolution.¹

By 1956, Fanon’s consciousness no longer allowed him to oversee operations at Blida Hospital in Algeria. In an influential resignation letter that moved many on the left, he wrote:

“There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. The ruling intentions of personal existence are not in accord with the permanent assaults on the most commonplace values. For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And the conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.”

The Wretched of the Earth

Fanon produced a prodigious amount of intellectual work. Toward the African Revolution is a compilation of his writings on forging African and Third World unity with the Algerian Revolution at the vanguard of this process.² A Dying Colonialism explores how the Algerian people threw off their internalized inferiority complex by turning away from the colonizer’s cultural practices and embracing their own traditions.³

He dedicated his last days to dictating the final ideas of his most moving work to his wife, Josie. Six decades after it first hit the streets of Paris, The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World is as accurate and explosive as ever. The title comes from the line “Arise, ye wretched of the earth” from “The Internationale,” the Second Communist International’s official anthem, and from Haitian communist intellectual Jacques Romain’s poem, “Sales négres:”

too late it will be too late

on the cotton plantations of Louisiana

in the sugar cane fields of the Antilles

to halt the harvest of vengeance

of the negroes

the niggers

the filthy negroes

it will be too late I tell you

for even the tom-toms will have learned the language

of the Internationale

for we will have chosen our day

day of the filthy negroes

filthy Indians

filthy Hindus

filthy Indo-Chinese

filthy Arabs

filthy Malays

filthy Jews

filthy proletarians.

And here we are arisen

All the wretched of the earth

all the upholders of justice

marching to attack your barracks

your banks

like a forest of funeral torches

to be done

once

and

for

all

with this world

of negroes

niggers

filthy negroes.⁴

How many revolutionaries the world over became enraptured in his eloquent portrayal of the “Manichaean” differences between the neighborhoods of the rich white colonizer in Algiers and the casbah (ghettoes) of the colonized?

Here within this classic, that all revolutionaries have a duty to study, reside some of the most poignant prose on how the oppressed internalize violence and project it onto themselves:

“Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident. While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native, for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother.” 

Based on his treatment of patients in the Blida Hospital, which today bears his name, Fanon’s final chapter, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” examines the “ineffaceable wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people.”⁵

The fundamental pillar of the book, however, was ​​Fanon’s conviction that the colonized could only shed their fear and shame through a baptism of revolutionary violence. Fanon’s former high school teacher and mentor, Aimé Césaire, had a profound influence on him. Césaire’s words cited at the beginning of this article from his epic poem on slave liberation, “And the Dogs were Silent,” set the tone for the Fanonian worldview. Despite a chorus of liberal complaints from the West that Fanon was “too violent,” Fanon concluded:

“As you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs, there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being.”

‘You Can Kill a Revolutionary, But You Can Never Kill the Revolution’

Though Fanon died of leukemia when he was only 36, revolutionaries the world over have picked up his fallen weapons, his ideas, and applied them to their own particular national liberation struggles. Fanon’s observations and thesis continue to mold the thinking of awakening generations in life-and-death struggles from Johannesburg to Gaza to Harlem.

As political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, the Black Panthers were Fanonists. His audio essay and tribute to Fanon discuss what the psychiatrist’s anti-colonial perspicacity meant to a 15-year-old Mumia, who has spent 40 years in prison. In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale talks about the influence of Fanon on the young Panthers and how Huey P. Newton read the book seven times.⁶

Malcolm X, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Nelson Mandela all traveled to independent Algeria, which emerged as an epicenter of Pan-Africanism and internationalism. Paulo Freire stated that he had to rewrite Pedagogy of the Oppressed after reading The Wretched of the Earth. Hamza Hamouchene, president of the London-based Algerian Solidarity Campaign, discusses in CounterPunch what he deems Fanon’s unique contributions to understanding nationalism, the national bourgeoisie, political education and universalism, among other themes. 

It is important to highlight that Fanon was more than just a doctor and writer.

At his graveside, Vice-president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) Krim Belkacem emphasized Fanon’s diverse roles in the FLN’s total war. Beginning in 1954, Fanon worked as a writer, editor and propagandist for FLN periodicals Résistance algérienne and El Moudjahid. He also was a researcher; lecturer; a FLN representative in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Guinea and Congo; as well as a clandestine militant.

Looking at the work of Karl Marx, Steve Biko, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter and other examples of revolutionaries/intellectuals, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research wrote a tribute to Fanon because of how he embodied the praxis of a radical or organic intellectual: “The world will only be shaped by the most valuable insights of philosophical striving when philosophy itself becomes worldly via participation in struggle.”

Fanon survived an assassination attempt, exile in Tunis and was staring down a crippling disease that he refused to talk about but that ultimately claimed his life. Aware he was dying, he pledged, “I will not cease my activities while Algeria still continues the struggle and I will go on with my task until my dying day.”⁷

Today, it is more necessary than ever to study Fanon to understand the psychological, emotional and spiritual damage wrought by neo-colonialism on the peoples of Africa, the Americas, Asia and what the Black Panthers referred to as the United States’ internal colonies. Fanon’s conclusion in The Wretched of the Earth on African and human liberation begs the same questions six decades later:

“Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe [U.S.A.] where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of everyone of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.” 

Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.

Notes
¹ Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. 1964. 
² Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. 1964. 
³ Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. 1965. 
⁴ Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012. 
⁵ Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012. 
⁶ Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Random House: 1970.
⁷ Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012.

Armenia, a landlocked Caucasus nation-state of around 3 million people appears in a hopeless position. Following defeat in the 44-day war against Azerbaijan last autumn, the country remains stuck in the Russian geopolitical orbit, and has been forced to make painful concessions to its arch enemy, Azerbaijan.

On June 20, Armenia held parliamentary elections that led to the victory of the Civil Contract Party, whose leader is Acting Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Although he is seen by many Armenians as a traitor, given he failed to preserve Armenian control over Nagorno-Karabakh—a mountainous territory in Azerbaijan that ethnic Armenians have controlled since 1994—Pashinyan’s party won 54 percent of the vote. The opposition Armenia Alliance, led by former President Robert Kocharyan, garnered a distant second with 21 percent. Why did Armenians vote for the person who signed the de facto capitulation to Azerbaijan on November 10?

 

Choosing Between Traitor and Old Guard

From the perspective of an average Armenian voter, the choice they had was either “traitor” Pashinyan, who came to power in 2018 following the so-called “Velvet Revolution,” or Kocharyan, who represents the overthrown corrupted old guard. 

According to Armenian analyst David Arutyunov, the opposition did not offer any practical alternative for resolving the issues of demarcation, a burning question in the country. Indeed, in May, Armenian authorities accused Azerbaijan’s army of advancing more than 3 kilometres (2 miles) into southern Armenia. They claimed the Azeri state was trying to lay siege on Lake Sev Lich (Black Lake), shared by the two countries. In other words, Armenia had lost control not only over most of Nagorno-Karabakh, but also over certain parts of the Republic of Armenia.

As Arutyunov points out, Azerbaijan likely will keep pressuring Armenia until the end in order to get as many concessions as possible in the process of resolving the border demarcation.

Some Armenian officials have announced Russian border guards will be deployed to those areas where Azerbaijani units allegedly advanced. At this point, however, it is highly uncertain how the border will be protected after demarcation—will the Russian troops permanently stay there, or will Armenia and Azerbaijan continue to guard borders on their own? As a result of the 44-day war, some 2,000 Russian peacekeeping troops were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh to protect the region’s capital, Stepanakert, and the surrounding area, which is the only portion of the territory that is still de facto under Armenian control. From the Armenian perspective, Russian peacekeepers are seen as the only guardian of the remaining Armenian population in the region. Moreover, Armenia has become so dependent on Moscow, it expects the Kremlin to protect not just ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the borders of the Republic of Armenia, too.

 

Russia’s Responsibility

Russia, on the other hand, is obligated to defend Armenia. The Caucasus country is a member of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is often described as a Russian version of NATO, having come into being after the former Soviet Union came apart. Other CSTO members include Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. However, during the war, Russia refused to provide help to its nominal ally, Armenia. According to Key Article 4 of the Treaty, “If one of the State Parties is subjected to aggression by any state or group of states, this will be considered aggression against all States Parties to this Treaty.” The problem for Armenia is that in 2020, Azerbaijan did not attack Armenia itself, but Armenian-backed forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. That is why Moscow hesitated to directly intervene. But in May 2021, following the border incidents, Pashinyan wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking for military assistance. To this day, however, no such aid has been provided.

Meanwhile, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have signed a protocol of alliance in a bid to further strengthen their ties. “In the event of a third state’s threat to the independence or territorial integrity of any of the parties, the parties will provide necessary assistance to each other,” the protocol stipulates.

 

Turkey’s Role

Even before the two countries became formal allies, Turkey supplied Azerbaijan with modern, sophisticated weapons, including the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones that proved to be a game changer in the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Russia promises to arm Armenia, although it remains unclear what prevented the Kremlin from selling modern weapons to its ally before the war broke out. Over the years, Russia aimed to preserve good relations with both Azerbaijan and Armenia and at the same time to keep playing the role of the regional arbiter. However, indications suggest the Kremlin prioritized lucrative business and energy ties with Azerbaijan than its nominal alliance with Armenia.

Although the Armenian leadership may have felt because of Moscow’s unwillingness, it hardly has a choice but to keep playing the Russian card. The country depends on Russia economically, politically and militarily.

According to the Moscow-brokered peace deal, signed in November between Pashinyan and Aliyev, Azerbaijan will be able to cross to its exclave Nakhchivan—bordering Armenia, Turkey and Iran—through Armenian territory, and the Russian Federal Security Service will secure roads. Such an action could undermine remnants of Armenia’s sovereignty in the south, primarily in the area bordering Iran.

Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has insisted on the construction of the Nakhchivan corridor, also known as Zangezur Corridor, which would effectively connect the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic with mainland Azerbaijan. Given that Azerbaijan, as the clear victor, has an upper hand to the defeated Armenia, sooner or later Armenia will have to agree to the Azeri terms and conditions regarding this transregional project. Thus, it is not surprising that Pashinyan, celebrating his election victory, said, “All agreements will be fulfilled.” His room for political maneuvers vis-à-vis Azerbaijan is rather limited.

In the short term—at least until 2025, when the 5-year mandate of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh expires—Russia will remain the dominant regional actor. In the mid and long term, Turkey is expected to improve its positions in the Caucasus, and possibly build a military base not far from the Russian border. Azerbaijan already benefited from its military ties with Turkey, while Armenia proved to be collateral damage in a wider geopolitical game played by Russia and Turkey. 

And the game is far from over.

Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Global Wonks.

This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.

Sixty years ago, on May 25, Ghana’s first prime minister and president, the anti-colonial revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah stood before 31 other heads of African states in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa and declared, “[T]he struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence.”

“Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our own economic and social affairs…unhampered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist controls and interference.”

“We must unite or perish,” Nkrumah had emphasized, recognizing that while countries across the African continent were “throwing off the yoke of colonialism,” these successes were “equally matched by an intense effort on the part of imperialism to continue the exploitation of our resources by creating divisions among us.”

Nkrumah was speaking at the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, striving, alongside other leaders, to build a Pan-Africanist vision of a continent united under a common currency, monetary zone, and central bank, and a united government and joint defense under an African High Command.

That these conditions did not materialize speaks to imperialism’s “intense effort” to suppress this vision. The coming decades would see African leaders assassinated and overthrown in coups backed by colonial powers for daring to envision a life of dignity for their people. Meanwhile, international financial institutions, dominated by these very forces, implemented brutal regimes of structural adjustment, sinking African countries further into debt and exploitation.

While the OAU eventually became the African Union (AU) and the African Liberation Day became Africa Day, May 25 still serves as a crucial day for progressive forces to connect the struggles for national liberation and Pan-Africanism of the 20th century to the present struggles against imperialism.

On this theme, Pan African Television hosted a discussion titled, “African Liberation Day: The State of the Struggle for Freedom” on May 25.

Recovering the History of Collective Liberation

The general secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG), Kwesi Pratt Jnr. added, “The national liberation struggle is not over…even if that struggle was over… what about the ownership and exploitation of our resources for the sole purpose of enriching the bank accounts of the multinational corporations in the colonial metropolis?”

“The radical nature of this celebration [of African Liberation Day] is saying that we as African people came together to end exploitation…end colonialism…to continue to strive for stopping neocolonialism from taking its root on the African continent. That struggle is still ongoing,” said Kambale Musavuli, a leading activist and an analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa.

“In some parts of the African continent, people still do not have independence…The people of Western Sahara are still under colonialism by Morocco. We have to make sure that they are liberated.”

African Liberation Day also recognizes that people across Africa threw off the yoke of imperialism through collective struggles. Dr. Vashna Jagarnath, a labor activist and director of Pan Africa Today, commented. “We all know the struggles we face 60 years later, we have been recolonized in different ways, through the debt crisis, through foreign policy, through military bases being allowed to be built on our continent and determining to us who it is we can have relationships with, that determine our local policy…”

“Our continent is in a crisis. So we need to recall our history of us liberating ourselves.”

The Addis Ababa meeting of 1963 had been decades in the making, preceded by the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, UK, in 1945 and the All-African People’s Conference in Ghana in 1958. However, these initiatives were also built on hundreds of years of struggle by the African people for freedom, “a part of the long march” from the days of the transatlantic slave trade, Pratt stressed.

This long history of liberation struggles and their collectivist orientation is not widely known by young people across Africa today, Musavuli said, calling this an “erasure of history.”

In reality, collectivism had closely informed the period of the struggle for independence for the DRC, and this took various forms—including the support provided by other African countries like the Central African Republic to the DRC. We must remember the fact that Pan-African activist T. Ras Makonnen had helped to get Patrice Lumumba to Ghana in 1958 and how the Mau Mau had gone from village to village in the country and screened films in 1960, Musavuli highlighted.

“The independence of Congo was not a national affair, it was a continental affair…We cannot talk about June 30 as Congolese independence, it was a Pan Africanist independence,” he said, reiterating the need for unity and a “Pan Africanism of the people.”

Internationalist Oppression, Internationalist Resistance

Speaking to the historic erasure of these links in the context of South African exceptionalism, Jagarnath said, “You are taught about the South African economy as if it is divorced from the rest of Africa, as if South Africa, which is a resource-rich country, is rich on its own, as if it was not migrant labor workers from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi working in our mines, without getting any compensation, to enrich the elites of our country.”

Even today, “for the South African capitalists who are exploiting and benefiting from Ghana… Why must they worry about the liberation of Ghanaians? They don’t need to tell Africans the role of Ghana in the history of our liberation… That is a dangerous story that will affect their profits.”

At a time when African Liberation Day is barely celebrated on the continent, including in Nkrumah’s own country of Ghana, Jagarnath noted that the reason was because the “political project had changed”.

“We as people give up our power to those in power and we let them dictate to us, and they change, and the changes that come into place are economic and political…they do not want us to be liberatory because if we have liberatory policies…if we remember the liberatory aspects of our history we will try to liberate ourselves from them, and this is not convenient because they are now making deals with each other to continue to exploit this continent.”

“So we have two sets of exploitation: the classical imperial exploitation that still comes from the imperial nations, but we also have our internal systems.”

It is this very nature of exploitation that determines that the form of struggle must be internationalist: “The struggle for national liberation in Africa has always been an internationalist effort,” Pratt said. He elaborated that this was due to the fact that the very division of Africa had been an internationalist effort, namely the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, when colonial powers partitioned the African continent among themselves for the purposes of extraction and exploitation.

“Our enemies are united, and we have no chance of succeeding against that united force if we [ourselves] refuse to unite,” he said. There is a rich history of this internationalist unity, not just within the continent. Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara set up a camp in Ghana to train fighters who were engaged in parts of Eastern Africa and South Africa. The internationalist unity was also reflected in Cuba’s armed support in the fight against apartheid and the consolidation of the independence of Angola and Namibia, Pratt added.

We can also see this in the connected struggles for Black liberation in the United States and the liberation against imperialist oppressors on the African continent, stated panelist Makayla Marie, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the United States.

Internationalism remains a necessity today, the panel discussion emphasized, “You cannot support the independence of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic without supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people for national independence against apartheid colonial occupation,” Pratt added.

“What we are fighting is the scourge of capitalism in its worst forms, at this imperialist stage, and we need to unite as African people…as socialists…as revolutionaries to achieve victory, which is inevitable.”

This was also underscored by Musavuli in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where “it is not just imperialists but also other African countries, who are exploiting the country … They are only able to do it because they see the DRC as separate. They do not see us united in the struggle.”

These issues inevitably lead to a key issue that the panelists addressed—that of a general crisis of political legitimacy of current governments and of the use of divisive politics which worked to obscure the common reality “that we are all oppressed by the same oppressor,” as Marie said.

“People, be it in the U.S. or the African continent, have a difficulty right now choosing their leaders, and they must unite and challenge the forces that be,” Musavuli stated. This necessitates the need for mass-based and mass-led collective struggles for a “true independence,” the panelists reiterated.

“These Western countries after colonizing us, enslaving us, and stealing our resources, are now coming back to us and telling us that if we want to develop, we have to be like them and follow the capitalist path to development. That path started from slavery, passed through classical colonialism, and has today arrived at neocolonialism,” Pratt said.

“We have arrived at a situation in history where the only viable option available to us is the self-reliant path to development, the ownership of our resources for our own development… and that option inevitably leads us to the path of socialism.”

“Socialism is the only path to liberation from exploitation, from oppression, from poverty.”