 Rhaid i ddim ychydig i'n ddweud? Mae'n rhaid i ddweud y ddweud? Rhaid i ddweud y ddweud? Rhaid i ddweud y ddweud? Rhaid i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud, gallwch am gweithio gweithio'r cyfnodd i'r rhaid i ddweud? Mae'r llei'r cyfrifol yn cyfnodd, mae'r llei'r llei'r llei i ddweud? Yn ychydig eich gweithio'r cyfrifol, yn ychydig i ddweud. Ono, felly dydau yn cael ei ddweud, mae'n gael y gwaith y Llywodraeth Gwyrdog, a phobl yn ddweud gyrain fod y Gwyrdog yma, yn ddweud yn y syfodol, yn 40 munud, ac yn gwybod hefyd ddefnyddio'n cymdeithasol â'r ddiwedd yn ddeithasol. Ddwy'n ddych chi'n meddwl ar hyn, ddwy'n ddweud. Ddwy'n ddwy'n ddwy'n meddwl ar hynny, ddwy'n ddwy'n meddwl ar hynny. Yes, this a nice addition of the book actually as I was coming in here, I was thinking, my god is a really lovely sunny day in London now those of you who are not British who don't know what that means. But what I am thinking Papyrus, is the right we can to be close in an indoors building discussing politics on megto annam so this means that ..y'r gweithio y gallwn gwneud ydym yn gweld ychydig... ..y'r gweithio ar wneud am gyflwyneid. Rwy'n yn i gael gwisiau y tu yn y sefyllfa... ..y'n yn credu y cys. Mae'n meddwl i'r gyfer y dyfodol... ..od yn ddweud y ddydd. Mae'n meddwl i'r ddaf yn ddweud... ..yna'r ddweud. Mae'n rhaid i'r ddweud... ..yna'r gweithio y dyfodol... ..yna'r ddweud... yn dgylchedd dimensional sydd yn i wneud i iddoedd iawn, sydd yn i ddim yn ei gweithio â gyda FFANON sydd yn digwydd i chi yw'r bwysig, â'i gael i'r llachau a'r llei. Fy enwr ein bod yw ffannon yw'r ysgrifenedydd yma, a gallwch eraill pwysoedd ac mae'n fally yn ymdian o un o'ch wneud unrhyw mwy uned ac yw'r gweithiau'r talon yma yw'r Ffanon yw'r chweithio. I will give you one example, you might be sceptical about what I am saying, but in the last few months in preparing for this little, I have read a lot of stuff by Fanon, which is what I would recommend with any author, but I have also read a little bit of what has been written about Fanon, and I recommend you to steer away, well away from anything that has been written about Fanon in recent times. I will just give you one example, this is a group of academics from some university in Canada who met in 2020, I think in 2022, something like this, and they had a seminar about Fanon, and they are writing about Fanon's geographies, whatever that means, and this is what they say, listen to this, and by the end of this quote, just a couple of sentences, if anyone understands what is meant in this quote, wins the price of a free t-shirt from whichever stall you want, now it says, across his texts Fanon is the arbiter of geographical knowledge, and his positionality provides him with a kind of cartographic precision that simultaneously holds on to and collapses coloniality, that's the first sentence, listen to this, simultaneously holds on to and collapses coloniality, now Fanon's geographies cannot be theorized as enclosed or contained, his writings can be shared and discussed and practiced collaboratively and this kind of capsiousness, a word I've never heard before, lands to an interdiscipline, and what's this, an open sense of place, now is anyone want to claim that t-shirt they promised at the beginning, I don't understand anything that's said in here, and in my opinion this has nothing to do with anything that Fanon ever said or did, but this is the kind of stuff that you will get if you go to university and try to talk about Fanon, a couple of warnings before we start, the title of this talk is Fanon's wretched of the earth, a Marxist critique, and this is what I'm going to be dealing with, I'm not going to be dealing about the whole of Fanon's work, all the books that he wrote like black skin, white masks, I'm not going to be dealing with that, I'm going to be dealing specifically with what he says in this book, it's a nice modern classic Penguin edition which is very useful and compact, but in order to understand what Fanon said in this book you need to understand the context of it, you cannot just read this book and try to understand what it's about, you need to understand the context of Fanon, where does he come from, how his political ideas and activism developed, and also you need to understand a little bit about the Algerian revolution in which he got himself involved, and you also need to understand the circumstances in which this book was written, which many people are not necessarily aware, how I would say right from the start that I think that this book is very powerful, anyone who's ready to be impressed by that is also a book that contains quite a few very interesting observations and insights and warnings, but it's also a book that contains a lot of theory and strategy, which I think is completely wrong and is not even born out by the experience of the Algerian revolution itself, but let's start from the beginning. Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, Martinique at that time was a French colony, Martinique today is still a French colony, is now called an overseas territory I think that's the official designation, but it's still a colony of France in the year 2023 if you can imagine such a thing, France still has a number of colonies around the world, it's a dwindling imperialist power, but at that time it was a very powerful imperialist power. Fanon was born in what you could describe as a middle class family, his father was a customs officer, a civil servant in the French Republic, and his mom was a store owner and had some white ancestry, so in the gradation of social classes and layers in colonial society they weren't right at the top, they weren't right at the bottom, but Fanon to get a proper education, he attended a private secondary school and he was educated in the values of the French Republic, freedom, equality and fraternity and he looked up to the French classics, to the French Enlightenment, to the French Revolution, this was his early ideas were coming from that background. Early on he linked up with MS Cesar, MS Cesar became a very prominent figure, he joined the Communist Party, he was a poet from Martinique, very good poet, very outstanding poet, and he joined the Communist Party like many figures amongst the black intellectuals in the colonies and in the metropolis, many of them were attracted by the ideas of communism in the 1920s, in the 1930s and so MS Cesar was a poet, was also a teacher and he became at one point a Communist Party, a Communist Party member of the French Parliament, Martinique was electing deputies to the French Parliament at that time and so that also had certain influence in his ideas, his upbringing and so on. Now in 1940 France capitulated to Nazi Germany and they installed the regime, the Vichy regime which was a regime of collaboration with the Nazis, so France was split in two, those who supported the Vichy regime and those who supported Free France and they were trying to fight against the Nazis. Now the Martinique had military governor and the military governor sided with the pro-Nazi Vichy regime so basically this was affecting obviously Fanon who lived in Martinique at that time. In 1943 at the age of 17 he then tried to join the forces of the Free France movement and he fled from Martinique to Dominique which was on the other side of the French divide but this attempt was failed, he had to return to Martinique and by June 1943 the Vichy regime had fallen. He still wanted to fight in the Second World War, he saw the Second World War as a struggle between democracy and fascism and he wanted to be a part of that, the liberation of France and all that. So in 1944 when he was 18, quite young, he joined a US ship that was crossing the Atlantic in order to join the war effort against the Nazis. He landed in Morocco and he joined the French forces in Morocco and then in Algeria and then in Algeria. But he very soon realized that he's an ideal view of the French Republic as the country of enlightenment and democracy was not as it was supposed to be. He could see even within the French army there was racism, there was discrimination, there was prejudice and soldiers in the French army were divided in different categories. At the top were the white French soldiers, a bit further down it was the black soldiers from the French colonies in the Caribbean, a bit further down and right at the bottom of it was the Arab soldiers from the French colonies in North Africa. And there is an incident, I'm not totally sure about this, some of his biographers mentioned this. He participated in one of the final battles of the French against the Nazi Germany in Alsace and then after the victory of the French forces, the Allied forces, a picture was taken. But before the picture was taken all those who were black soldiers were told to go to the back of the picture, not to be too prominent in the picture. I mean there's some incidents like this. He started to see that really French society was also a class divided society and where racial prejudice was very strong. And this started to inform his views. At the end of the war he returned to Martinique. In 1945 he campaigned for César as a French Communist Party deputy. He got elected so he was involved in that. More or less you could say he was close to communist ideas of that kind. In 1946 he went to France to finish his studies of psychiatry and this is where this book Black Skin White Masks comes in. That was his dissertation for his degree in psychiatry. It was rejected and then it was published as a separate work. But in reality many people read a lot into that book as if that was a book of political theory or anything like this. He's trying to analyse the psychological impact of a person who's subject to racism, the colonial subjects and all this. It's a very obscure psychiatric book which for that reason is very much loved by the postmodern academics who like anything that's very obscure and deals with the mind mainly. But to say that Fanon's idea for instance as some people say is that you must decolonise the mind as it's so popular to say these days. It's complete rubbish. In fact you read any of the other books by Fanon and he says the way to achieve liberation that people change through direct action. He says that only a violent uprising against colonialism can change the people who are colonial subjects. So his point of view is slightly different from the academics let's say who will never think of any direct action and any collective action or any revolutionary action never mind. Now it is said that when he was a student in Lyon in France he was around the communist youth in the universities at that time but this is not very clear. He clearly never got a proper political education. He never read any of the Marxist classics but he was quite clearly someone who was worried about questions of anti-racism and anti-colonialism particularly. Since he finished his studies up until 1953 he worked in a hospital in Saint-Auban in France and this is another interesting episode because the director of this hospital was a man called a Catalan doctor, a Catalan psychiatrist called Tuskellias and Tuskellias had been a member of the poem during the Spanish War. He was an exile from the Spanish Civil War and he was implementing very advanced for this time psychiatric methods in which he said look this is not just a question of treating the patient in isolation, the chemical unbalances that might be in his brain and so on. You need to see the patient as a social person, his environment that's pushed him into his disease and stuff like that and you need to transform the environment as well as the patient. So anyway some interesting ideas and Fanon was growing up as a psychiatrist under this Tuskellias and he then in 1953 he took up a position as the director of a psychiatric hospital in Algeria. So he went to Algeria completely oblivious to the political situation in Algeria. Algeria was not a French colony at that time technically, it was a French colony but it was actually part of France, it was territory of France, you were born in Algeria, you were French, you were not Algerian or any other thing. And so therefore in applying for a position it was easier to get a position in a place like Algeria than to get a position of a hospital director in France itself so that's why he went in a place called Bleeder Joinville just outside of the capital Algiers and he took his position in 1953. Now it's interesting now here to mention something about Algeria and also something about the French left. This is quite important. In 1941 as the Soviet Union entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies the Communist Party of Algeria and the Communist Party of France dropped the traditional demand for Algerian independence. Why? Because that will have upset the French imperialists and the French imperialists were of course on the side of democracy against fascism and you couldn't advocate for the independence of the colonies. And this was the policy of communist party, trecherous Stalinist policy of communist parties all around the world. And this was really bad in relation to the Algerian revolution because it meant, this together with other facts that I'm going to tell you about, meant that the communist party and the communist ideas had almost no influence in the Algerian revolution because of the betrayal of the official communist party. In 1945, this is a very interesting incident, 1945 after the liberation of France on the 8th of May 1945 there was the capitulation of Nazi Germany and in Algeria as in many other places there were demonstrations to celebrate the liberation of France, the liberation of Algeria. In some of these demonstrations, Algerians who had fought in the war, they came with nationalist flags and they said, down with Naziism, down with colonialism, freedom for Missali Hatch. Missali Hatch was the traditional leader of the main nationalist party who was in jail at that time and some of them as I said had the Algerian nationalist flag. There was an incident in a town called Cetif in which one such demonstration was confronted by the police, police opened fire, people were killed and this led to a massacre over the period of a few weeks in a whole number of towns, Cetif, Guerra and some other towns in the constantine region. The white European settlers organized militias and they chased the Algerians. Then the army intervened to restore order but they intervened by bombing Algerian towns and villages with airplanes and they even used the navy, the navy fired cannon balls against some of the villages on the coast of the constantine region. It's not very clear to this day how many people were killed but the different estimates go between 6,000 and 20,000 Algerian people were killed in these events as they described in official French history, in this massacre of the Algerian people. Now this is bad enough because these people thought that the liberation from Nazi Germany meant also democracy for them, democracy for Algeria, i.e. independence or self-determination which was not the case clearly but worse than this is the role that the Communist Party played in these events. The Communist Party was in the French government that bombed the Algerian people in 1945, they were part of the government, not only this but the French Communist Party paper described these events as pro-Hidler provocations. The Algerian people raising the Algerian flag and celebrating the end of Nazi Germany was described as hidler provocations and some of the Communist Party leaders in Algeria in some of the towns were part of the white militias that were created in order to attack the Algerian people and that created a complete rift between the official Communist Party of France and the Algerian people. In fact Charles Tilon was the French Minister of Aviation, either one who ordered the aerial bombardment of the Algerian villages was a member of the Communist Party in 1945. In 1956 there was another crucial incident in this story which is when the French government voted for special powers in order to deal with the Algerian rebellion which had started in 1954 and the Communist Party also voted in favour. So that's the record of the Stalinist Communist Party in relation to Algeria. Now, the Algerian War of National Liberation started in 1954. There had been many movements before but the war that we're talking about started in 1954 with the creation of the National Liberation Front, an armed nationalist pro-independence organisation. Fanon joined the FLN in 1955, he had some friends in the hospital, some of his acquaintances becoming involved in the movement, he started to become interested. In 1955 he joined the movement and he also provided, at the beginning he provided for medical help for FLN fighters in the hospital that he was the director of and then the situation became completely untenable in January. In 1956 he resigned as a doctor and a director of the hospital and he went into exile in Tunisia where the basis of the FLN was located. He participated in the editorial board of El Mujahid, the newspaper of the FLN and he wrote or co-wrote many of the articles. He was appointed as the Ambassador of the Provisional Algerian Republican Government to Ghana, a newly independent country. In that capacity he travelled to many international conferences in Africa where he could get an idea of the independence movement around Africa and what had happened to many of these countries after independence. Very shortly afterwards in two or three years he was diagnosed with leukemia at the end of 1960 and in the end of 1961 he died in the United States where he had gone to get treatment. So now this is the context in which the wretched of the earth was written. He knew he was going to die, he had already been diagnosed and he wanted to leave some of his final thoughts about what he had seen around Africa, what he had seen in Algeria and whether any of these contained lessons for other similar movements. Now the book was not written. Some people don't realise this. The book was not written, was dictated. Fanon was incapable of typing and so he dictated these articles in his book. So the book, if you read the book it reads a bit like stream of consciousness, someone is delivering a speech or something like this. It doesn't contain many references. It doesn't contain any quotes or anything like this. It's just a raw speech of someone who's desperate, who's angry, who wants to leave something in writing about things that are really worrying him at that time. It's written in a very powerful language and it had an influence on many other people at the time when it was written. Now the title of the book, interestingly, is the wretched of the earth. And if you know French, this comes from a line in the French version of the international. So that's kind of the origin of the title of the book. But in reality it doesn't really come straight from the international. But it's taken from a poem by the Haishian poet, Jacques Roman, who was the founder of the Communist Party in Haiti. And he wrote a very powerful poem in which this line features. He refers to the international. So that's kind of the reference there. What I would say, the book also contains, I don't know if any of you are actually ready, contains a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher. Now this preface you can very easily skip. You won't miss anything. It's a long tradition of French intellectuals writing prefaces or comments about books by third world revolutionaries where they exaggerate the most negative aspects and distort some of the others. This, for instance, happened with Regis de Brea and Che Guevara and lots of other things. In fact, the widow of Fanon said that this, after a few years, said that this preface should be never again published together with the book. Because in 1967 Sartre, who had played, let's say, a courageous role in siding with the Algerians in France at that time. But then he sided with Israel in the Six Day War and he basically betrayed everything it said in this preface. So anyway you can skip the preface and you won't be missing much. At the beginning Fanon talks about violence and he's right on one thing. He basically says the violence of the oppressed cannot be compared with the violence of the oppressors. And therefore it's not our task to criticise the violence of the oppressed, but to understand where it comes from is the result of decades of oppression, of petty injuries and so on. In this he is correct, but he is wrong in relation to violence on two other things, I will say, where he basically says that he basically describes violence as a cathartic experience. If you go through violence you liberate yourself and this is the only way that you can liberate your consciousness and be able to defy colonialism. But also on another question, he is very worried throughout the book about the role of the national bourgeoisie. And this is, I will say, one of the very few strong points of this book. He describes the national bourgeoisie as trecherous. He says you should never allow the national bourgeoisie in colonial countries to come to power because if you do then they will become basically the agents of imperialism. They just want to replace imperialism. They have none of the revolutionary characteristics that the bourgeois had historically in the western countries. And in all of this he is completely correct and he is correct because he could see this having happened in the independent African countries that he visited in Senegal, in Ghana and in Congo, in other countries that he visited. He could see that the former national liberation movements had become a bureaucracy, a bourgeoisie, the middle class had taken over and they were just, the situation had not changed at all. He says for 95% of the oppressed the situation has not changed with independence because they just replaced one ruling elite by another ruling elite and they are none the better. This is very sharp. I could give some quotes. I don't think I have much time but I'll give at least one maybe. But you can read it yourself he says. The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the western bourgeoisie's business agent and it will play its part without any complex. The incapability of the middle class to fulfil the historic role of the bourgeoisie, the dynamic pioneering aspect of the national bourgeoisies in Europe, are lamentably absent. The national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the western bourgeoisie. The national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the west. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, the will to succeed of the youth. The national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take the role of manager for western enterprise and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe. I think it's quite clear what he thought of the national bourgeoisie and in this he is completely correct. He didn't arrive at this conclusion through any theoretical investigation but he arrived at this conclusion through his own practical experience. I will say this was written in 1961 shortly before the triumph of the Algerian revolution and Algerian independence and I think that he was not just referring to other African countries, he was referring to what he could see in the FLN itself. The petty bourgeois middle class elements coming to the top of the movement already dividing the spoils between themselves and carrying nothing for the wretched of the earth who had carried out the struggle. So I think that's quite powerful but then he draws a wrong conclusion from this and he says, in all these other African countries the problem is that independence was achieved through peaceful means, through negotiation and diplomacy, independence was considered by the colonial power and therefore that's the reason why it went wrong. He says, if instead of that we use violence, revolutionary violence in order to overthrow and push the colonialists out, this will be ruled out, this will not happen, it will not have the same outcome and the people who have carried out the armed struggle will still have control of the movement. And this was not to be and Algeria proves this quite clearly. The Algerian revolution after independence in 1962 went through an initial very radical phase of factory occupations, land occupations, nationalisation of industries. But very soon this was completely reversed by the Boumedien coup in 1965 and establishment of a horrible bureaucratic capitalist regime in the benefit of the Algerian bourgeoisie, which is exactly what Fanon was trying to prevent or was warning against. So the fact that the Algerian revolution took place through revolutionary means, through violence did not prevent that same thing from happening and Fanon was proven wrong. There are some other big mistakes that Fanon makes in this book and the main one, I will say there are two more. One is also in relation to violence, I'll just mention this very quickly. He, in his capacity as an ambassador for the Algerian provisional government, he was dealing with different groups that were seeking help from the Algerians from Angola and there were two main groups. One was a group called UPA led by a man called Holden Roberto and another one was the MPLA, which became the main national liberation movement in Angola. And they were debating which group to support and instead of looking at their politics or the class content or anything like this, Fanon was just worried about one thing. Which one of the two groups was the one that wanted to start an armed struggle the sooner the better. And he, and this led him straight into choosing the wrong group because he chose to help the group of Holden Roberto can go into the details, but I don't have the time. But the group by Holden Roberto then later became a group that allied itself was part of UNITA, the guerrilla movement in Angola which was allied to apartheid South Africa funded by the CIA and supported incidentally by Maoist China against the main liberation movement, the MPLA, which was backed by the Soviet Union. So this shows you that if you take violence as your only criteria, then you are lost because there might be many people who are in favour of violence for all the wrong reasons or have the wrong perspective or have the wrong politics. And then you end up supporting a group which two years down the line is a group that is also supported by the CIA and by apartheid South Africa. So that just gives you an idea of how this method was wrong, but the main point in which he was wrong I will say is the question of the analysis of the different class forces that we're going to bring Algerian independence. And he makes very serious errors. He says, first of all, says Marx's theory does not fully apply to colonial countries. Specific word he says is that it needs to be stretched slightly, but instead of stretching it slightly, he then turns it upside down. And he says that the only revolutionary force in a colonial country like Algeria is the peasantry with the help of the lumpen proletariat. And in fact he theorizes, he says specifically in this book, that the working class in a colonial country like Algeria is in fact bourgeois, plays the role of the bourgeois, is a privileged layer, and it's a layer without which colonial society couldn't work. But from this, which is to a certain extent true, he draws the conclusion that therefore they are wedded and they have a self interest in maintaining colonial society and they cannot be trusted or relied upon for the liberation struggle. I'll just give you a quote, so you don't have to take my word for it, he says. He says, the workers, primary school teachers, artisans and small shopkeepers who have begun to profit from the colonial setup have special interests at heart. I think it's a bit clearer somewhere else, what he says, it is 86, he says. In the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been the most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position. In capitalist countries the working class has nothing to lose, it is they who in the long run have everything to gain. In the colonial countries the working class has everything to lose. In reality it represents that fraction of the colonized nation which is necessary and irreplaceable if the colonial machine is to run smoothly. And then he enumerates them, it includes tram conductors, taxi drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, nurses and so on. It is these elements who constitute the most faithful followers of the nationalist parties, which he is criticizing, who because the privileged place which they hold in the colonial system constitute also the bourgeois fraction of the colonized people. And he completely disregards the role of the working class in the movement. And then he says, the peasantry systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties, but it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary. I mean his ideas are very clear and I will say his ideas are also very wrong. And even in the context of the Algerian revolution this is the case. The Algerian working class was small at that time, but was the Russian working class in 1917 also not a small proportion of the total population. But the Algerian working class had very long standing traditions, communist traditions and very militant traditions. I'll just give you a couple of examples. In 1950, IE, only ten years before Fanon is writing this, three years before Fanon moved to Algeria, in 1950 there was a French docker's strike against the shipment of weapons for the colonial war in Vietnam that the French imperialists were conducting. And this strike was very powerful, lasted for a very long time. It's an example and inspiration for today, but in the port of Oran in Algeria this movement was extremely powerful. 2000 dockers completely paralysed the harbour, prevented any shipment of weapons for the Vietnam War to pass through the harbour. And because of police repression this led to an all out general strike in the whole of the town, a movement which lasted for weeks and couldn't be put down for a very long period of time. This was one example, a small group of workers having a very powerful position in a capitalist society and also bringing behind them the whole of the population of Oran in a very powerful strike revolutionary movement. And this is the layer that Fanon says is the bourgeois fraction of the colonised people. It makes no sense, it flies in the face of practical experience. Even during the Algerian National Liberation War there were a number of strikes for instance in July 1956 the FLN called a national general strike not only in Algeria but amongst the Algerian workers in France. And the strike had a massive following not only from the workers but it also involved a shutdown of shops, small shopkeepers, middle class layers and so on, students also participated. But more important than this in 1957 after the defeat of the Algerian uprising which is described in the Battle of Algiers famous film the FLN called for an eight day strike, eight day national strike which was followed throughout Algeria and paralysed the whole country. The strike was led primarily by working class elements but affected the whole of the people, the urban poor, the small shopkeepers and other layers of Algerian society behind the power of the working class. And this revealed the enormous strength one of the working class and second of the national liberation movement. The problem with this was a different one. The problem was the FLN conceived the activity of the workers in this general strike for instance as a way of gaining leverage in negotiations at the United Nations. You know to prove the international powers that the FLN was the legitimate representative had massive support instead of conceiving the general strike as a step towards a mass armed uprising, dual power which existed during part of the Algerian war and the taking of power by workers with the support of the majority of the population. So that's a different matter, the strategy of the FLN was wrong. But in fact the working class did play a very important role in the Algerian revolution. There's another element, there were about 300,000 Algerian workers in France and they worked in the big factories in the Renault Billion Côte factory. There were 2,000 Algerian workers in the lower paid grades. They represented about 60% in the foundry and so on. And they went on strike regularly. They played a big role in funding and financing the FLN. They played a big role in the 17th of October 1960 demonstration in Paris and there were many instances of this, the working class. Even in a country like Algeria where it represents only a small minority of the population plays a key role in any revolutionary struggle because of two things, one because of the way that the working class is able to develop a collective consciousness being all exploited by the same boss having more or less the same conditions and number two because the working class in any capitalist society has the power to stop society from working which is a power that the peasantry doesn't have, that the lumpen proletariat doesn't have. These other elements can play an auxiliary role in any revolutionary movement particularly in a country like Algeria where the peasantry represented the majority of society. But the working class must play a leading role in a revolutionary movement and Fanon was mistaken about this question and this had also bad consequences. For instance, the Black Panther Party in the United States drew a lot of inspiration from this book. Stokey Carmichael in his book Black Power says at the beginning, every brother in Harlem had read the wretched of the earth. Unfortunately I would add because then that meant that the idea that the Black Panthers drew from this was that the revolutionary party had to be based not in the peasantry which didn't exist much in the United States but on the lumpen proletariat, criminal elements, pimps, cart dealers and stuff like that and this led to many problems for the Black Panther Party amongst them the problem that these layers are very easily infiltrated by the police. Incidentally this is not to say that even some of these elements can play a role in the revolution. For instance, if you have seen the Battle of Algiers, a famous film by Giló Ponte Corvo, you will see that Ali Lapuand, who is the leader of the Algerian uprising in the cities, he is a former car-trisk trickster who comes from the lumpen proletariat. But that doesn't mean that you can draw general conclusions about the role of car-trisk tricksters or lumpen proletarians in a revolutionary movement. And finally I will say, there's many other things I'd like to say but I don't have much time. So I'll just finish with this point, Fanon is also extremely confused about another point which is the question of the character of the society that the Algerian revolution wants to create. Is it capitalism, is it socialism? And he says different things in the book. He contradicts himself in the same book. At one point he says, we want to build a society without exploitation, socialism is the way forward. But then in another point he says, and this is important, I think, to mention, he says, the fundamental jewel which seemed to be that between capitalism and socialism is already losing some of its importance. What counts today the question which is looming on the horizon is the need for a redistribution of wealth? How can you have a redistribution of wealth if you avoid the question of capitalism or socialism? Then he says something in favour of a socialist regime. He says, on the contrary, the underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them. The concrete problem we find ourselves up against is not that of choice between socialism and capitalism as they have been defined by men of other continents and other ages. Of course, we know that capitalism's regime cannot leave us free to perform our work, blah, blah, blah. Then he says good things about socialism. He says basically that this debate is a debate that has been posed by men of other continents and other ages and therefore is not relevant for today. So what was his alternative to socialism and communism? His alternative was the non-aligned movement. In 1955, the Bandung Conference took place of the non-aligned movement. This was at a time when there was a big struggle between Stalinist Russia and imperialism in the United States and a number of third world countries tried to balance between the two of them to strike a more or less independent autonomous path forward. And they met at this Bandung Conference. But this Bandung Conference was not a conference for national liberation. It had no progressive content at all. And it involves all sorts of different countries. Algeria was represented, but listen to this. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was represented. Kuwait was a founding member. The Kingdom of Morocco soon joined. So there are all sorts of regimes, some more progressive, some completely reactionary feudal monarchies. And this was supposed to be the alternative to socialism or communism. Of course, you have to understand that there were limitations in Fanon which were given to him by Stalinism as well. The Stalinist Party had completely betrayed the Algerian Revolution. Stalinist countries didn't seem to be a very attractive prospect and they were looking for a third way. But there is no third way. And Stalinism is not socialism. So he was also wrong on that question. And this led him to say some hair-raising stuff. For instance, he says in a part of this book he then talks about the way forward is for the colonial countries to liberate themselves through armed revolution and then convince the bourgeois and the capitalist in the West that he is in their best interest to help and aid the development of these countries. I'm kidding you not. This is what he says. First of all, the underdeveloped peoples will decide to continue the evolution inside a collective autarchy, cutting themselves off from the former colonial powers economically. Thus the western industries will quickly be deprived of the overseas markets. The machines will pile up. A merciless struggle will ensure between different groups in Europe. The closing of factories and unemployment will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. That's good, but not necessarily as a result of what he's saying. And then the monopolies will realise that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries and stinted aid with not too many conditions. We ought to emphasise and explain to the capitalist country that the fundamental problem of our time is not the struggle between the socialist regime and them, and that they should help the third world develop. Now, if you want a utopian position on this question, this is what he is saying basically. So, in summary, in summary we can say that there is at least two strong points in this book. One, the criticism and the warning against the national bourgeois. And second, the fact that Fanon, who was a middle class, educated person from Martinica in the Caribbean far away from Algeria, decided to throw his lot with the struggle of the oppressed people in the country where he was based. And therefore he was advocating, he was defending the right of these people to use violence, attacking the violence of the oppressors quite rightly so. But these are just about the two strong points of this book in terms of this book being a model or blueprint for revolutionary strategy in third world countries. I think it's completely wrong. And you should judge it not only or purely from the point of view of Marxist theory. Fanon was not a Marxist, he never said he was a Marxist. He can't be judged by that standard. But from the standard of the practice of the Algerian revolution and the practical consequences of what he says in this book he was completely wrong. It's not by chance that academics today, decolonial academics and so on they rely so heavily on Fanon, which, as I said at the beginning, they also distort because at least Fanon was in favour of struggle, revolutionary struggle, not just changing people's minds or decolonising your mind or reading different books. He actually demanded from the FLN that he be allowed to take up weapons and write in the armed struggle. They said this is not a very good idea. A black man in an Arab country will stick out like a sore thumb and it wouldn't be very safe and you can play a better role in other capacities. But I mean, you can at least say that for Fanon. He was a revolutionary. Most of these academics are just time wasters who dedicate their whole time to writing obscure writings that lead nowhere in contemplation and they shouldn't use the words of Fanon in vain but Fanon himself as a revolutionary strategist was completely mistaken on the question of the class forces involved in the revolution on the question of the role of violence, glorifying, exaggerating the role of violence as such and on the question of the future for third world countries whether it had to be socialism or capitalism. I would say, I would recommend comrades to study Trotsky's permanent revolution which is the strategy was then adopted by the communist international in the thesis on the colonial and national questions in the second congress in 1920 and this is the strategy that works for colonial countries. This is the original strategy of the French Communist Party adopted in the 1920s in Algeria, Indonesia and in Morocco quite effectively. So yeah, that's my opinion on this book.