Can Nationalism Be Good?

The Wretched of the Earth, Chapter 3

Beaumont to Detroit: 1943
Langston Hughes

Looky here, America 
What you done done- 
Let things drift 
Until the riots come. 

Now your policemen 
Let your mobs run free. 
I reckon you don’t care 
Nothing about me. 

You tell me that hitler 
Is a mighty bad man. 
I guess he took lessons 
From the ku klux klan. 

You tell me mussolini’s 
Got an evil heart 
Well, it mus-a-been in Beaumont 
That he had his start- 

Cause everything that hitler 
And Mussolini do, 
Negroes get the same 
Treatment from you. 

You jim crowed me 
Before hitler rose to power-
And you’re STILL jim crowing me 
Right now, this very hour. 

Yet you say we’re fighting 
For democracy 
Then why don’t democracy 
Include me? 

I ask you this question 
Cause I want to know 
How long I got to fight 
BOTH HITLER – AND JIM CROW

---

Happy Black History Month! Now more than ever it’s important to share this history that far-right extremists wish to cover up. A serious examination of our shared past is the only way to avoid perpetuating the historical harms of slavery, racism, and colonialism and chart a path for a better future. I’ll start with a mini-review of the book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont, then a few article recommendations, and finally a synopsis and reflection on chapter three of Wretched of the Earth - The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness.

Half American

This book is an excellent corrective to the false or partial history most U.S. citizens are taught in school. While the focus on WWII keeps the scope narrow, I sense there are still many untold stories the author could have highlighted in this book.

Among the many things I learned from this book, it really hit home how important all of the support staff were in WWII and how, in spite of the fact that many black folks were kept out of "combat roles" those jobs were just as dangerous and often required braving the line of fire to bring supplies to the front lines. In fact, while Germans were working with a ratio of one support role to one combat role, the Allies had a ratio of about three to one, ensuring the military was well-stocked.

There were, of course, many brave black fighters who flew as fighter pilots and fought on the front lines as well. Oftentimes these fighters showed incredible bravery, but even when recommended for military honors the petitions were either stalled completely or reduced to a lower honor to try to maintain the lie that black people are inferior to white people.

As a final note, I am grateful to this book because, although I am a fan of Langston Hughes, I didn't know that he went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War as a political correspondent. This book led me to read some more of his poems about WWII and his work towards goal of Double V-Day, meaning victory abroad against the Nazis and victory at home against our own fascist segregation. Thus the poem above, but also Will V-Day be Me-Day Too? and Letter from Spain are worth reading.

Reading Recommendations

1. The 1% understand exactly how things work. By just speaking they can create or destroy “value". This has nothing to do with production or usefulness, it's just whether or not one person accumulates more undeserved power.

   "Everything I say leaks. And it sucks, right?,” Zuckerberg said...

   “There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I’m not going to talk about those. "

2. A good piece from Defector about the “precarity” of even highly-paid Hollywood stars if they don’t have generational wealth. This piece is a good examination of the abdication of a democratic government’s responsibility to provide healthcare and actually represent the will of the people, not only those with massive wealth. "That's not because there isn't money to be made in any of these industries... Some people are making very good money in these fields, and have been for a long time. They just aren't the people making the art—the product, if you want to think about it like that."

3. This post from Hamilton Nolan on the dire state of union organizing right now - “Corporate America is in the midst of a concerted legal effort to destroy the NLRA altogether and have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Trump has, in a blatantly illegal move, fired a Democratic NLRB member, denying the board a quorum. This effectively allows employers to escape labor law enforcement indefinitely.”

The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness

This is the fourth post in my series on The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. Each piece should stand alone, but if you’re interested in reading the other ones you can find my thoughts on the introduction here, chapter 1 On Violence here, and chapter 2 Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity here. This post covers chapter 3, entitled The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness. This chapter is chock full of ideas and political analysis that are just as relevant now as when they were written. Let’s dive in.

If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end (p. 144).

The above quotation comes from the end of the chapter. Throughout the book, Fanon assumes that nationalism is a necessary response to colonization and that without a national consciousness, people cannot practice the necessary solidarity to free themselves from the colonial regime. As I noted in my last post:

every time I read a “radical” book, I am struck by the rationality, nuance, and reason with which the arguments are supported. It is my experience that those who decry “extremism” are those who are unable to recognize the merit of different perspectives and who, whether through ignorance or malice, refuse to recognize the extreme harms of existing institutions.

Despite being a clear advocate of nationalism, Fanon takes care to present the clear historical context in which he deems it necessary. His description, as in other chapters, starts with a broad depiction of how post-colonial governments work and the many pitfalls that national parties can fall into before moving into specific examples of the Algerian people and their experiences. He notes that national consciousness is fragile and can easily revert to tribal affiliations which break down national unity and weaken a new, postcolonial nation’s ability to make meaningful changes to the economic and political structures installed by the colonizer.

Fanon identifies the national bourgeoisie as the main barrier to a national consciousness and a truly democratic nation. Because this class of people developed during the colonial regime, they never develop the skills necessary to grow industry, or even work in finance. The only skills they learned were as middlemen and schemers, getting wealthy by inserting themselves into the colonial institutions. As Fanon notes on page 99, the nationalist parties “don’t have a clue” about the national economy. “This economy has always developed outside their control.” For this and many other reasons:

Independence does not bring a change of direction… The traffic of commodities goes unchanged… We continue to ship raw materials, we continue to grow produce for Europe and pass for specialists of unfinished products (p. 100).

As I noted in my very first blog post, this trend Fanon identified at the start of decolonization continues today, though it may be even more insidious now as underdeveloped nations now do more skilled labor and production than developed nations but continue to be paid less and have energy, natural resources, and labor extracted from them by their former colonizers. This chapter describes in detail the many ways the national bourgeoisie maintains the control of the former colonialist states. They recognize that their position and power comes from the colonial trade arrangements, so as long as they are allowed to make economic and political decisions, they keep those arrangements in place. They may pay lip-service to demands of the people like nationalization of key industries, but it is only to maintain their own power and profits so that they basically just replace the former European settlers without the changes people need.

There are many other potential ills that come from allowing this small elite to rule the nation post-colonialism. They will refuse to return the land that colonizers took from the peasants, taking control of it themselves. However, they will also refuse to take major business risks like investing in new factories, mechanization of agriculture, and other advances, leading the developing nation into stagnation and decay as they take their profits and invest them in European markets where they believe the returns are safer than investing in their own country.

Fanon also describes the ease with which a nation can switch “from nationalism to ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism” (p. 103). This can lead workers and artisans to direct their anger at the poor economic situation toward those of other nationalities living alongside them, rather than the elites actually responsible for continuing the harmful economic policies of colonialism. Since the colonizers were only focused on the areas from which they could extract the most wealth, infrastructure and development is very unevenly distributed in nations post-colonization and leads to resentment when there is no policy to reverse this inequality.

On page 109, Fanon blames “narrow-minded nationalism” on the “inadequacies of the bourgeoisie.” In his telling they mimic the Europeans and avoid a national program of political education. Therefore, the masses only learn from the example of their leaders and turn to narrow-minded nationalism that divides the people, playing directly into the hands of the colonizers who want to maintain their economic dominance in the region. Here is one of the few areas I disagree with Fanon. To answer the question posed in the title of this post, I believe that nationalism can be good in the context of bringing a people together to end their oppression by a colonizer. But after reading Fanon’s defense of nationalism and its many pitfalls, I believe that nationalism is always too narrow-minded. I agree that it must be immediately “explained, enriched, and deepened” (p. 144), but to the point that it is no longer nationalism. As the colonial exploits and the invention of race by Europeans to justify slavery show, a universal humanism cannot exist alongside an ideology like nationalism that divides people into categories granted rights and not. I will concede that maybe nationalism is necessary as a stepping stone to a broader solidarity - first solidarity with my people, then with all people - but it cannot be the stopping point.

So what does Fanon suggest we do about all of these challenges? Here we get to some very interesting ideas. His writing at this point could almost come from The Federalist Papers and other founding documents of the U.S. He describes how the national parties must be a representation of the will and power of the people, not a top-down mandate of policy from the elites to the masses. That the only way to have a useful party is to maintain constant communication between the masses and party leaders and for the power of the party only to be derived from the will of the people. This recalls George Washington’s warning of the danger of parties:

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

He suggests, along with a massive campaign of political education and job programs for young people, that a true nationalization of industries in which they are run cooperatively with the input of the workers would lead to a more democratic society. He also decries the creation of capital cities as a colonial project which concentrates wealth in one area while maintaining the marginalization of rural areas. His idea is to decentralize the national parties and government as completely as possible to avoid these concentrations of power. And of course, colonized countries must avoid allowing the bourgeoisie to take power at all costs. All of this helps to avoid the descent into authoritarianism that so many claim is necessary “for the good of the people.”

Returning to the idea of political education, it is clear that Fanon believes deeply in the people and their ability to understand their situation and decide what is best for them. However, these abilities require regular use and practice and with the wrong political structures, people fall out of practice and let a small elite make decisions for them, leading to poor outcomes. “Instead of delving into their diagrams and statistics, indigenous civil servants and technicians should delve into the body of the population” (p. 129).

An isolated individual can resist understanding an issue, but the group, the village, grasps it with disconcerting speed. Of course if we choose to use a language comprehensible only to law and economics graduates it will be easy to prove that the masses need to have their life run for them. [emphasis mine] (pp. 130-131)

Using real examples of price-gouging at grocery stores (something we see today with grocery monopolies in the U.S.) during the transition from the colonial administration, Fanon points out how easy it is for anyone to understand abuses of economic power and the need for people to maintain democratic control of the basic necessities. As with many things, politics is a realm of self-fulfilling prophecies. Those who claim that people are too stupid to make the best decisions for themselves actively work against the political education of people to prove themselves right and maintain a less-democratic form of government.

I’ve got about four more pages of unused quotations and thoughts about this chapter, but I think I’ve written enough for now. I’ll close with Fanon’s closing on the final page of the chapter (144), a clear call-out to the U.S. and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

If the national government wants to be national it must govern by the people and for the people, for the disinherited and by the disinherited.

With his explicit references to Christianity and to Western speeches and ideas, Fanon is challenging us to live up to the ideals expressed by those who never stopped fighting to expand democratic government. Will we listen?

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