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/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

"The anons of the past have only shitposted on the Internet about the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
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Not reporting is bourgeois


File: 1753776673641.png (501.57 KB, 692x654, algerie-5juillet.png)

 

Breadpill me on Algeria.

The Algerian independence struggle was exceptionally bloody. During that time, the entire global left stood in solidarity with the FLN and its goals. It was the anti-colonial struggle to end all anti-colonial struggles. However, what really became of it?

Algeria never became communist. It's largest trading partner post-independence was France, its former colonizers. Of course the Soviets provided them with support but the Algerian government joined the Non-Aligned Movement instead of becoming part of the Soviet sphere of influence. The most the USSR did for Algeria was supply them with guns.

So why didn't the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria result in socialism? Why does Algeria today have barely any relevance to the global left? The most we hear about that country is how much it beefs with Morocco over territorial lines or some shit. It's one of the largest countries in the world with mountains and a big ass desert but no vital resources? Plus every Algerian with money or an education has migrated to France or Quebec.

What went wrong, when this country had such a promising future 60 years ago?

>Algeria never became communist. It's largest trading partner post-independence was France, its former colonizers. Of course the Soviets provided them with support but the Algerian government joined the Non-Aligned Movement instead of becoming part of the Soviet sphere of influence.
I think Algeria is an interesting case study on the limitations of non-communist anti-imperialism. As you point out OP, during the war for independence it was a focal point for the global left, and I'd say for good reason. It was part of a global trend of decolonization that was empowering revolutionaries world wide and threatening to destabilize the entire global capitalist system. But of course nationalist socdems of the type that led a lot of the post-WW2 anti-colonial struggles aren't going to carry out a genuine revolutionary transformation of their countries. If they were then they would be communists. They can disrupt the imperialist (and by extension capitalist) system but this has proven time and time again to only be temporary. The very nature of the national bourgeoisie is such that their antagonism with imperialism is not intractable, and they can be brought back into the fold and transformed into compradors if they get a big enough cut of the profits being extracted from their country. The examples of this are too numerous to list, and honestly seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

On a tangential note, I always found it perplexing the extent to which some people (especially third worldists) drag the PCF for their position on Algeria, even though it was basically identical to Lenin's position on the colonial holdings of the Russian Empire. I think these attacks betray a tendency to over-fixate on anti-imperialism as something that will necessarily move the world closer to socialism, but this is clearly not the case. Talking to some of these people they seem to think Algerian independence was automatically preferable even when both countries remain capitalist. I don't think it's so absurd to say that it would have been better for Algeria to remain in the French Union if both could be made socialist as the PCF proposed (which of course entails ending the colonial relationship between France and Algeria even if the two remain a single state).

It's all anectodic but I got some family from Algeria and their take is that the FLN top guys kinda replaced the colonial rulers with the most opportunist of them purging everyone else to solidify their grip instead of building a new society. They tried to implement a socdem welfare state early on but got broke and stopped that. Keep it mind it has been a country with a low intensity civil war for most of its existence mostly because of the aforementioned power struggles and opportunism of the ruling class and military.

>>2407500
Given that the PCF was more into breaking strikes and didn't actually want to take power while sperging about muh national unity and giving full power to nazis like Papon to kill brown people until order was back it is safe to say that they were colonialist lickspittles and nit like lenin

>natlib thread about a country that has been an independent bourgeois nation state for half a century

a thread died for this


The most arrested developpement country on earth.
No wonder all these uyghas want to go to France, there's nothing to do in Algeria beside eating cheap dattes all day in your ugly not-finished appartment because finishing it would un-islamic or wathever. I would rather be deported to Congo.(Reactionary)

>>2407537
>because finishing it
means you pay more taxes


so fanons Wretched of the Earth is wildly, often willfully, misunderstood when its read at all, but the latter half of that book is exactly about how he fully expected anticolonial struggles to be followed by a consolidation of the national bourgeois as a stillborn capitalist class that serves only as middlemen for international capital

3 pics directly related to this point, and pdf for further reference

it is endlessly frustrating to me that advocates of fanon and critics of fanon BOTH seem to completely disregard half of his work in favor of pigeonholing him as a simple advocate of 2-dimensional "post-colonialism" instead of someone who was, in addition to committing his life to militant anti-colonial revolution, highly critical of the tendencies of anti-colonial nationalism to devolve into collaboration with capital and empire. (just as he was highly critical of the pathologies the colonized develop, and people prefer to cast his work in that area as """blame whitey""" either as praise or disparagement)

>>2407681
And it’s not just Algeria, every Egyptian I’ve known keeps one bedroom or one bathroom “under construction” for the exact same reason

>>2407842
The collaboration with capital is a necessity. You can't build communism and socialism off of mud huts and fucking farmland. You need foreign capital to develop the productive forces before you can seize it. Fucking purity testing idiots always thinking they can jump straight to full communism in a single 5 year plan smh.

>>2407849
Yeah but you have to do what China does and keep capital under the thumb of the political party without having them take over, they can’t be allowed to shmooze with the western elite or send their kids to Cambridge or Harvard.

>>2407849
Yeah without the capitalists (pbuh) constructing stuff we workers would live in mud huts, thank our masters for the giving us all of the fruits of their labor.

>>2407856
Xi himself studied in America and so did several of his advisors like Wang Huning. All you need is a strong counter intelligence and surveillance apparatus to ferret out traitors. Nothing wrong with people going to the West. If anything Western tourism should be encouraged as the West continues to sink into stagnation and fascism so that their propaganda stops working as people realize what a shithole capitalism creates.
>>2407857
Fuck off retard if you think a post-revolution society is going to have all the blueprints for manufacturing cars, medicines, robots, etc. lying around all waiting to be taken because the bourgeoisie were nice enough to leave everything perfectly as is rather than blowing up every factory and production facility that they can on the way out while fleeing the country, you're part of the problem and contributing to an unprepared and totally un-serious socialist movement.

>>2407849
>Fucking purity testing idiots always thinking they can jump straight to full communism in a single 5 year plan smh.

???

i said absolutely nothing about that. it has nothing to do with purity of socialism or whatever, it is about the class dynamics of colonies and how an alliance against the metropole in the period of colonial revolution tends towards being replaced with the rule of a half-formed national bourgeouis that cynically use nationalism and formal sovereignty against the proletariat and peasantry. that is what fanon argues happens, he sees the comprador regimes of latin america as a historical example of the same tendency he was witnessing in real time as africans gained formal independence through anticolonial struggle

im very confused by your objection, it wouldnt even be particularly difficult to argue that china in some way or another provides a way out of this. a big part of what he's observing is that the middle-manager/enforcer position of the post-colonial bourgeois precludes them exercising the dynamic & productive role they performed historically in europe, so that the "national" bourgeoisie do not develop "the nation" and instead act as a subsidiary outpost of extraction and a last-stop market for offloading overproduction.

you could EASILY say that china has succeeded at motivating its own national bourgeois to actually serve their historical role and develop the productive forces. i dont necessarily AGREE with that analysis, as im a bit iffy on the orthodox marxist story of the necessarily emergent historical role of the bourgeoisie (see Ellen Miekins Wood Origin of Capitalism for great critique & alternate argument). but its incredibly to reconcile fanons explicit writing with the orthodox marxist analysis, and with the post-deng PRC's arguments of continuity with that orthodoxy

>>2407842
Must…not…mention…that…Fanon…glowed…
>>2407849
How dare you insult our glorious saviour Comrade Sary

>>2407974
Proof Fanon was CIA?

Q: why doesn’t Algeria have a swim team?

A: because everyone who could swim is in France.

>>2407974
>died in the US after recieving treatment at the behest of his family and friends despite his many protestations to not die in a "nation of lynchers"
>had very passive contact with CIA once or twice in the 50s postwar period where the US was opportunistically assisting anticolonial movements against france & britian to consolidate their own post-war imperialist bloc

if you havent, you need to look into post-WW2 policy towards european colonial empires, especially in the 50s. the US was largely ambivalent towards the algerian revolution, and publicly urged france towards a more "liberal" policy. the fact that fanon had some passing, non-hostile association with members of the CIA is only evidence of fanons own relevance within and the US's ambivalent attitude towards the algerian revolution.

i mention the above not to derail into arguing over fanon but because it is relevant to the thread topic. but if anything, the screencapped passages show that fanon was not as naive as many of his contemporaries regarding the realities of a post-colonial order. he correctly saw US domination of post-colonial latin america as a precedent that predicted the way post-colonial africa would be dominated.

>>2407976
see >>2408064

the tl;dr is the CIA in this period, especially in the case of colonial revolutions, wanted to keep a line open to major socialist or otherwise revolutionary figures that hadnt openly aligned with the USSR, to gauge their activities, goals, and intentions. the hope was to bring them into the US sphere of influence upon independence, or at the very least keep them neutral/have prior knowledge of their sympathies with the soviets. the CIA providing fanon with medical treatment was part of their effort to keep figures like him in their own camp. there is absolutely no indication that fanon was a real asset, let alone actually worked for, the CIA

>>2408069
>Fanon got medical treatment by the CIA while Americans still have to go bankrupt from medical bills.
Holy fuck he is a glowie 100% confirmed time to throw his work into the trash.

>>2408069
>>2408064
also its not even clear if he recieved proper treatment, they may have just kept him in isolation until he died. maybe they even rushed him along. in the absence of good evidence either way i just choose to argue against the idea that him recieving treatment would somehow conclusively mean that he worked for the CIA, which is ludicrous bullshit that is usually a "gotcha" dropped by people who read it on a memepage somewhere and want a convenient excuse to not actually read it. before the "fanon is CIA" meme spread around, people just said he was an idpol nationalist who just hated whitey or whatever, but i guess that was too easily disproven by actually reading him so the CIA angle is better to muddy the water

File: 1753816125175.webp (3.29 KB, 146x150, thumb.webp)

>>2407867
>without your master you couldn't pick cotton! think about yout treats, back to the wage cage to build socialism!!

>>2407500
Really makes me lose any hope for Palestine.

>>2408147
East Timor beat Indonesia, Qassam will win

>>2407495
Just another case of liberal nationalism.

>>2408172
Liberal nationalism is progressive compared to feudalism and colonialism

>>2408147
>>2408163
Palestine is over. They barely have any military capabilities anymore. They lost their Syrian allies and Iran is about to destabilize.

>>2408185
evidence for this claim?

i like algeria because all the pied-noirs left. shame they didn't blow up all the christcuck churches like notre dame d'afrique though

>>2408187
Realistically, how can they win? It seems like all the pro-Pallies are putting their eggs in one basket with the idea Israel will collapse and magically become Palestine again.

>>2408024
They only began mass-migrating in the late 80s when their socialist system was becoming undone.

>>2408193
Jesus was a socialist and Christianity’s main message is communism. Read the Book of Acts.

>>2408203
Found the colonizer.

>>2408185
No guerilla war has ever been won by the occupying force

>>2407842
Damn it's almost like Fanon was a principled communist and 100% /ourguy/.

>>2408283
They’ve been waging a guerrilla war for 77 years and still nothing.

>>2408283
LOL
>>2408298
They haven't been waging guerilla war for 77 years. The West Bank has essentially been a population without any hope, just tolerating the daily abuses of the IDF with nihilism, for the past several decades.

>>2408064
>if you havent, you need to look into post-WW2 policy towards european colonial empires, especially in the 50s
Reminder that there were a few major incidents relating to decolonization in which the US was actually on the same side as the USSR against the old colonial powers. The Suez Crisis is the most prominent example, but its also worth nothing that the Americans were already grilling the British about decolonization during WW2. Obviously this wasn't out of any sense of benevolence or a desire to see the colonized people of the world as free and equal to Europeans, but American capital generally regarded formal colonialism as an inefficient and outdated method for producing profits. Their experience with Latin America had showed them that they could dominate their hemisphere and maintain a colonial relationship more easily with formally independent states than with actual colonies. This also explains why they were more ambivalent about anti-colonial struggles that were led by non-communists, since they knew that these new states had a high chance of being brought into the imperialist fold even after independence. It's why they shrugged about Algeria but backed the French to the bitter end in Indochina. The Viet Minh were communists and the FLN were not.

File: 1753827164174-0.jpg (57.18 KB, 639x615, hum.jpg)

File: 1753827164174-1.png (5.03 KB, 202x249, ClipboardImage.png)

>>2408283
Anon, you know that Cuba was a net exporter of revolution in the 60s showing in practice that foquism is retarded no?
Plus Oman, the Malay insurrection, etc.

>>2407504
>low intensity civil war for most of its existence mostly because of the aforementioned power struggles
not an expert by any mean, but from what I know it was not only a power struggle, there was also a big ideological component of the fights, between the islamists, the nationalists and the communists

>>2408302
So Gaza is completely ruined and the West Bank has little to no resistance. Where does that leave us?

>>2408069
>the tl;dr is the CIA in this period, especially in the case of colonial revolutions, wanted to keep a line open to major socialist or otherwise revolutionary figures that hadnt openly aligned with the USSR, to gauge their activities, goals, and intentions. the hope was to bring them into the US sphere of influence upon independence, or at the very least keep them neutral/have prior knowledge of their sympathies with the soviets.
It might blow maybe somebody's mind out there that the CIA also had contacts with Mao in the 1940s during the war with Japan and for similar reasons, and the communists would return downed U.S. pilots rescued by communist forces.

>>2408076
>before the "fanon is CIA" meme spread around, people just said he was an idpol nationalist who just hated whitey or whatever, but i guess that was too easily disproven by actually reading him so the CIA angle is better to muddy the water
Yes it's this.


>>2408466
this guy has been saying the same shit for 2 years now

>>2408468
Qatar, Saudi, and Egypt are all calling for Hamas to disarm.

It's going to be… interesting, to say the least.

>>2408283
Palestine and Algeria are like chalk and cheese.

The FLN won mostly because they were able to strategically use Algeria's terrain to their advantage. Algeria is huge geographically. When the FLN would attack a colonial outpost they would flee into the mountains.

Meanwhile, Palestine is tiny by comparison. The PLO tried doing the FLN strategy where they would attack Israel and then retreat first into Jordan and then into Lebanon after Jordan kicked them out. Now, nearly all the resistance to Israel is happening inside of Gaza, where AT LEAST 80% of the infrastructure has been utterly destroyed since Oct. 7th. I'm amazed Hamas is still able to put up something of a fight but at this point it's like watching a mother mouse fight off a gigantic snake.

Plus, the Pied-Noirs were only a million and a half people. They never saw themselves as anything but French and knew full well they were invaders/colonials. When shit got too hot the vast majority of them fled back to France. Compare that with 7.3 million Israeli Jews who feel like they have no other identity aside from "Israeli Jew" and no place they can "go back" to. The psychology is very different and that's not something you can ignore. Plus, most Israelis are ex-military and will become vicious killers at any moment.

>>2408177
Agreed but not in any way or form socialist.

>>2408283
Sri Lanka vs LTTE 2009

>>2407495
>So why didn't the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria result in socialism?
The anti-colonial struggle didn’t result in socialism anywhere, some governments were honest about this, others were not or were unaware

>>2407849
>And remember guys, the first step to doing socialism is running a capitalist economy, socialism is when you want to do socialism but cannot so you do the opposite of socialism while never forgetting your goal 🤡

At least there are still honest MLs out there ❤️

>>2410070
No one is saying all Israelis need to be expelled. Strawman.

>>2410070
> They never saw themselves as anything but French and knew full well they were invaders/colonials.
not really true. they thought of themselves as the REAL algerians and algeria as a fundamental part of france

>>2410835
Yeah this dude got a lot of stuff wrong.
Another thing is the terrain argument: a lot of internet generals usually overestimate geography when it comes to military conflict, think how the ziggies were calculating a swift Russian victory since Ukraine is a bunch of plains.
In actuality two things make a comparatively much weaker participant win a conflict: cost of the war for the opponent and low public opinion among the adversary's populace. That was the case with this war as the French government - even though it continually had the upper hand militarily - spent so many lives and so much money doing atrocities it saw massive protests in Paris and even collapsed. It's not unlike what happened in Vietnam in many ways.

I will spitball a little but I'll theorize that the main reasons Palestine has been incapable of "winning" against Israel is that Israel is propped up by US which makes the cost of fighting the insurgency a non issue and in turn keeps the public opinion high. Cracks are appearing in the US public opinion though partly thanks to the relentless work of pro Palestinian orgs and activists, and proles protesting for them, which means there is hope still.

>>2410884
The most that’s going to happen is a two-state solution on the ‘67 border. That’s the “Palestine” that’s being recognized. I don’t see how anyone can expel over 7 million Israeli Jews. I don’t even think most Palestinians want them expelled.

>>2410835
Proof of this?

>>2411021
>I don’t see how anyone can expel over 7 million Israeli Jews.
A civil war would erupt if this was ever attempted.

>>2410884
>I will spitball a little but I'll theorize that the main reasons Palestine has been incapable of "winning" against Israel is that Israel is propped up by US which makes the cost of fighting the insurgency a non issue and in turn keeps the public opinion high.
More than that, its that the Israelis don't see themselves as invaders or colonists and don't feel as if they have anywhere else to go. They consider themselves the indigenous people of the country and the Palestinians as invaders. A lot of Pieds Noirs probably felt this way too, but it was primarily the French Army that was doing the fighting so it mattered less how they felt. In Israel it's the IDF that is doing the fighting, America just provides the materiel.

>>2411403
Palestine is already in civil war though?

>>2411485
Hamas isn’t fighting the PA at the moment

>>2411487
No. I meant the Palestinians have been in a de facto civil war against Zionist settlers for over 77 years.


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