To overcome the latest blows from the class enemy, we will need to reckon with the contradiction between the bourgeoisified and proletarian workers. This is my takeaway after seeing how so many leaders of the globe’s popular governments and struggles have failed to defend their people from Washington’s offensive. When corruptible officials betrayed Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, and when Bolivia’s strike reached a stalemate with the government due to failure at attaining a unified workers party, these defeats were an extension of a much deeper problem. A problem where the movements against imperialism find themselves split between the popular masses, and the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois elements who take control of these movements by default.
To rebuild the power the working-class movement lost during the 20th century, we will need to overcome this disconnect in priorities, and embody a true proletarian politics. When Frantz Fanon was describing the problems of the post-World War II decolonization struggles, he identified a series of contradictions that would prove to be one of the critical factors in the later revolutionary retreats. And these problems apply to the workers movements within the colonial countries as well, because everywhere has a rural-urban divide that can undermine popular struggle.
The great obstacle towards unity, and towards clarity about who the enemy is, came from how colonialism had concentrated its developmental projects within the metropolitan centers. From how not just the bourgeoisie within the cities, but also the urban workers, had come to enjoy the material benefits from the productive mode the imperialists had brought. The rural masses therefore existed in a different realm, both in relation to the intelligentsia and in relation to the metropole’s working class.
A movement that hadn’t reckoned with this contradiction could only produce nationalist parties which were bourgeois in nature, despite representing working people; because these workers had an experience that was distinct from the peasant experience, and therefore couldn’t produce a real proletarian politics on its own. A politics is proletarian when it’s capable of unifying the class allies in the struggle against the primary enemy, which in our era is imperialism; and without the rural masses, the force that takes over is the empire-aligned local capitalists.
The culprits for a failed revolution are not just the bourgeoisie themselves, but also the class traitors to the proletarian cause, who’ve willingly sided with opportunism. And what cultivates this opportunism is a separation from the masses outside the metropole. As long as this separation persists, we’ll see the masses have leaders who perpetuate the cynical cycle that Fanon described:
Any unrest aimed at winning improved living standards for the laborers and dock workers would not only be unpopular but might very well stir up the hostility of the disinherited rural population. The unions, banned from union activities, make no headway. This malaise conveys the objective need for a social program which, at long last, concerns the entire nation. The unions suddenly discover that the interior must also be enlightened and organized. But since they never bothered to establish working links between their organization and the peasantry, who represent the only spontaneously revolutionary force in the country, the unions prove to be ineffective and realize the anachronistic nature of their program.
The union leaders, immersed in worker-control politics, inevitably reach the preparatory stage for a coup d’état. But here again the interior is excluded. It is a showdown restricted to the national bourgeoisie and the unionized workers movement. The national bourgeoisie, appropriating the old traditions of colonialism, flexes its military and police muscle, whereas the unions organize meetings and mobilize tens of thousands of their members. The peasants shrug their shoulders as they muse over this national bourgeoisie and these workers who after all have enough to eat. The peasants shrug their shoulders for they realize that both parties treat them as a makeshift force. The unions, the parties and the government, in a kind of immoral Machiavellianism, use the peasant masses as a blind, inert force of intervention. As a kind of brute force.
The answer to this problem, concludes Fanon, is for the ranks of the established workers organizations to live the same struggle as the rural masses, making their experience intertwined with that of the most underdeveloped communities. The actors who sold out Venezuela while claiming to uphold the Bolivarian revolution, or who governed Bolivia in a reformist manner despite coming in with a mandate for socialism, came from the same element that’s detached from the masses in this way. The opportunist leaders can’t be changed, but their base of support can be shrunken through exposure to new fronts within the class war. This was what Fanon observed:
The nationalist militant who fled the town, revolted by the demagogic and reformist maneuvers of the leaders, and disillusioned by “politics,” discovers in the field a new political orientation which in no way resembles the old. This new politics is in the hands of cadres and leaders working with the tide of history who use their muscles and their brains to lead the struggle for liberation. It is national, revolutionary, and collective. This new reality, which the colonized are now exposed to, exists by action alone. By exploding the former colonial reality the struggle uncovers unknown facets, brings to light new meanings and underlines contradictions which were camouflaged by this reality. The people in arms, the people whose struggle enacts this new reality, the people who live it, march on, freed from colonialism and forewarned against any attempt at mystification or glorification of the nation.
Our task right now is to find this new mode of politics, where a movement operates based on real collective struggle and comes from the bottom-up. Fanon’s assessment was that the peasantry are the class which can truly make revolution; and this lesson can be applied to contexts outside the one in which he was speaking, if we know how to properly utilize such theories. We shouldn’t copy-paste Fanon’s analysis to our own conditions, but we need to reorient the socialist movement around the underdeveloped parts of civilization, or the same problems that undermined the anti-colonial movements will kill our own endeavors.
Fanon’s warning about ignoring the peasantry is relevant to the class struggle in any country today because though the old “peasantry” has largely been replaced with new class categories, the same old divides persist everywhere. The failure to reckon with these divides, and build a mass movement beyond the metropole, is a critical part of why the western left has long been stagnating. It’s also central to what’s holding back the Global South’s popular movements. To resolve this problem, we will need to create organizational foundations that start from real mass power; this means prioritizing the creation of local collectives, which are what’s needed to give sufficient integrity to a national workers party.
These collectives don’t need to all be within the rural or the intermediate “hinterland,” as obviously the city populations have great revolutionary potential; but by forming such geographically broad dual-power structures, we’ll be able to avoid an outcome where our strength gets overwhelmingly concentrated inside the big cities. A party can only build a solid foundation in so many places during its initial stages, and the cities are where they’ll often be inclined to consolidate their resources. This limitation can be overcome by building independent worker cooperatives, community aid structures, and popular coalitions in whichever communities we may live, whether or not the party already has a big presence.
This is the practical part of how we stop the urban-rural divide from ruining our progress in the class war. In the next part of Fanon’s conclusion, he said that “Without this struggle, without this praxis there is nothing but a carnival parade and a lot of hot air. All that is left is a slight readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag, and down at the bottom a shapeless, writhing mass, still mired in the Dark Ages.” We can see the parallels between these neo-colonial parades, and the empty performativeness of DSA “socialism.” This is a politics that’s only capable of or interested in winning the metropolitan centers, leaving the whole struggle behind. We’ve identified the source of the inertia; through multiplying our ground within the class war, we’ll bring the struggle to a new phase.
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