Frantz Fanon and the Peasantry As the Centre of Revolution

Chapter 8 Frantz Fanon and the Peasantry as the Centre of Revolution

Timothy Kerswell

Frantz Fanon is probably better known for his work on decolonization and race, but it would be remiss to ignore his contribution to the debate about social classes and their roles as revolutionary subjects. In this respect, Fanon argued for a position that was part of an influential thought current which saw the peasant at the center of world revolutionary struggles. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that “It is clear that in the co- lonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays.”1 This statement suggests not only that the peasant would play an important part in liberation and revolutionary struggles, but that they would be the sole revolutionary subjects in forthcoming change. Fanon’s attempt to place the peasant at the center was part of a wider current of thought. This can be seen in the statement of Lin Biao, one of the fore- most thinkers of Maoism who argued, “It must be emphasized that Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of the establishment of rural revolutionary base areas and the encirclement of the cities from the countryside is of outstanding and universal practical importance for the present revolutionary struggles of all the oppressed nations and peoples, and particularly for the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America against imperialism and its lackeys.”2 It was this theorization that “turn[ed] the image of the peasantry upside down,”3 especially from Marx’s previous assessment that peasants constituted a “sack of potatoes”4 in terms of their revolutionary class-consciousness. The

1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 48. 2 Lin Biao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War, (1965). https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/lin-biao/1965/09/peoples_war/ch07.htm. 3 B Perinbam, “Fanon and the Revolutionary Peasantry – The Algerian Case,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 11, no 3 (1973): 432. 4 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1937). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/18-brum/ch07.htm.

Frantz Fanon and the Peasantry as the Centre of Revolution 153 peasant had seemingly traversed from a sack of potatoes, to temporary allies, to the central driver of the revolutionary movement.5 Che Guevara placed the peasant at the center of his theory of guerrilla warfare suggesting that, “The guerrilla is supported by the peasant and worker masses of the region and of the whole territory in which it acts. Without these prerequisites, guerrilla warfare is not possible.”6 It is this very possibility that will be considered by this chapter; to what extent is it true that the peasant, Fanon’s revolutionary subject and the focus of many other political perspectives, constitutes a viable revolutionary force in an urbanizing world? Peasant guerilla strategies reached their zenith in the mid-twentieth century. There are a number of successful examples: China 1949, Vietnam 1954 and 1973, Cuba 1959, and Algeria 1962. However, there were also a number of un- successful examples: Colombia 2018, India 1967, Philippines 1969, Peru 1980, Turkey 1972, Iran 1982, Nepal 1998. While it is possible to argue that subjective decisions contributed to the success of the former and the failure of the latter, the central argument presented in this paper is that changing material condi- tions offer a better explanation. Since the defeat of US imperialism in Vietnam, those leftist movements that have achieved success have deployed a combination of urban insurrections and popular front politics (e.g. Sandinistas in Nicaragua, United Socialist Party of Venezuela (psuv), Movement for Socialism (mas) in Bolivia). By contrast, movements which remained committed to a peasant guerilla focus have ex- perienced marginalization and defeat or decline. In this chapter, I argue the root of this decline is in a failure to understand key interrelated demographic changes in the global South (Urbanization), in terms of developments in the Productive Forces (the end of semi-feudalism and the rise of capitalist agricul- ture), and in terms of Depeasantization through rural-urban migration. Marks and Rich note that “There are few classic peasantries left in the modern global system as were present in China and Vietnam,” which suggest these examples are far from representative and should instead be considered as ex- ceptions.7 Research on the role of previously rural peoples who have migrated to urban space is significant, and this appears as a global trend.8 In addition to

5 Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 21–26. 6 Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 143. 7 Thomas Marks and Paul Rich, “Back to the Future–People’s War in the 21st Century,” in Small Wars & Insurgencies, 28:3, 409–425. (2017), 422. 8 See for example: Franz Fahri, States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua. Cham- paign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990.