Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
for when faced with the saturation of emancipatory political thought and the exclusive offer of technical solutions in the form of ‘development’, people will think it better to have a bridge than none at all.
Fanon is thus fully aware of the collapse of a politics of popular affirmation into statist subjectivities, yet what he sees as the way out of this problem is limited precisely by his understanding of class politics and the representative role of parties. His difficulty is no more than that of the politics of the NLS mode. I outline some of the fundamental features of this mode of politics below; at this point it is only necessary to note that its categorial features are such as to locate it squarely within 20th-century ways of conceiving politics. Broadly speaking, this mode is one that followed the 20th-century’s conception of politics, which saw parties as the core term of such politics (in the 19th century it had been insurrection and movements). As I have already noted, the revolutionary party, though inaugurated by German social democracy and theorised by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, was seen by all shades of radical opinion throughout the century as ‘representing’ socio-economic classes and groupings in the political arena (Lazarus, 2001a, 2007). Parties were understood as the link between the social and the political domain structured around the state, and they recruited their members from throughout the population. Their class character was thus determined less by the social origins of their membership than by their ideological positions, which were said to ‘reflect’ class in political subjectivity. Mass parties of this type developed in Europe after, and often as a reaction to, the Paris Commune of 1871. For some social-democratic parties, it was a matter of organising the working class to avoid a similar disaster; for others, it was about drawing workers into their organisations so as to enable the control of bureaucracy and elites.9 Of course, the objective of the party is for its leadership to ‘capture’ state power. Radical Left-wing parties thus began with a contradictory character, one that exhibited a certain anti-state or mass revolutionary content along with an ambition to control the power of the state through which social programmes of various sorts could be technically enacted. Without exception they were founded on a politics of the representation of the social.
In Africa, similar contradictions characterised the party founded upon and ultimately leading the disparate organisations of interests making up the ‘national liberation movement’. In an African context, nationalist parties were recognised as the sole ‘genuine representatives’ of the nation often long before independence itself, as colonial regimes and nationalist movements battled for legitimacy. It was through the party that freedom was to be actualised both in the form of political independence and in the form of socio-economic development, which was to provide the much needed economic independence from the West to the benefit of all in the nation. In Kwame Nkrumah’s famous biblical aphorism: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee.’ Freedom in the NLS mode could only be attained through control of the state, as it was only the state that could drive the process of ‘catching up’ economically with the West – the only guarantee of full independence in the long term. From the nation being equated with the people, it came more or less rapidly to be equated with the state; given its social foundation, ‘national consciousness’ could therefore easily collapse from a pure affirmation into a state-legalised indigeneity. For Fanon, the party was a problematic but necessary form of organisation. Popular politics, like class politics, could only be realised through a party; the people or the class could only become a political subject through the medium of a party; and thus the nation could only become the agent of its own liberation through the state.
The party of nationalism, for Fanon, exhibited highly problematic features after independence, as it had gradually evolved from an organisation that enabled popular expression into an apparatus of control: ‘The party which used to call itself the servant of the people, which used to claim that it worked for the full expression of the people’s will, as soon as the colonial power puts the country into its control hastens to send the people back to their caves’ (1990: 147).10 It ‘controls the masses, not in order to make sure that they really participate in the business of governing the nation, but in order to remind them constantly that the government expects from them obedience and discipline’ (p. 146). In addition, the party itself becomes the vehicle for private enrichment, which itself is both cause and effect of the formation of a ‘national bourgeoisie’ that chooses the option of a one-party state. Thus Fanon notes, ‘the bourgeoisie chooses the solution that seems to it the easiest, that of the single party’ (p. 132), while ‘the party is becoming a means of private advancement’ (p. 138). The party gradually becomes a vehicle for representing the interests of this new bourgeoisie rather than those of the people.
On the other hand, Fanon proclaims the necessity of the party by adhering to the view that solutions to political problems are never thought outside the party conception of politics itself. Thus ‘the party should be the direct expression of the masses ... [and] the masses should know that the government and the party are at their service’ (1990: 151, 160). To actualise this situation and to curb the power of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ it is still a party form of politics that Fanon invokes: ‘the combined effort of the masses led by a party, and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles, ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful bourgeoisie’ (p. 140, translation modified).11 The notion of the party is at the core of the problem in Fanon’s thought, as is the notion of the masses or the people. Broadly speaking, Fanon’s politics conform to the prevalent view of the 20th century that ‘the people’ are to be understood as the subject of history and that they effectuate their agency by being represented in the political arena by a party. For him, the party in power must represent the people accurately, and after independence the state-party must have a humanist programme to enable a transformation of society in the people’s interests; it cannot be a simple vehicle for enrichment: ‘In fact there must be an idea of man and of the future of humanity; that is to say that no demagogic formula and no collusion with the former occupying power can take the place of a programme’ (p. 164). Nevertheless, Fanon remains well within a subjectivity of representation. Politics must accurately represent the social.
The problem with Fanon’s politics is its inability to transcend subjectively the limits of the party-state, despite his extremely accurate observations about its bureaucratic and controlling functions. As Lazarus (2001a) has observed, the party has the effect of fusing popular consciousness with that of the state, as party discourse maintains that popular consciousness can only be realised in practice through the party and its control of state power. In this way the party enables the fusion of the subjectivity of politics with the subjectivity of the state. What this means is that the liberation of the people is to take place through control of a set of institutions that cannot conceive of liberation/freedom, as their existence is premised on the reproduction of hierarchies of power and the social division of labour. It is this – the ideological fusing capacity of the party – that makes possible the transition from the nation as political affirmation to the nation as social category, which, in other words, makes possible the party-state and the nation-state, the latter being nothing but the final objective form of this subjective fusion. Whether there is one party or several is of little significance; nor is the replacement of ‘party’ by ‘movement’, as in either case these are said to represent the social. Rather, what is of importance is the subjective conception that maintains that politics can only be effectuated through the (party-)state.
Subjectively, then, state politics is a reaction to what Badiou (2009a) would call the ‘event’ of the popular emancipatory sequence. Fanon himself provides the best example of an individual who commits himself to forming part of a collective political subject and whose consistent fidelity to the event enables it to become a truth: ‘The true is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation’ (Fanon, 1990: 39, translation modified). On the other hand, the reactive subject embodied in the state’s political subjectivity is one which maintains that, although it enabled the formation of a newly independent state, the emancipatory sequence was little more than mindless violence. Yet this is not all. As we have seen, Badiou also refers to an ‘obscure subject’ also resulting from the same event. In the realm of politics, Badiou associates this conception with that of fascism, although in the context of neo-colonialism it more accurately refers to