Andy Blunden. May 2008 An essay to mark the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Anti-Historicism and the Algerian War The Background to French Colonisation of Algeria In October 1954, five months after France’s disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the five ‘historic leaders’ of the various factions fighting for Algeria’s liberation from France came together to form the National Liberation Front (FLN). As a legacy of the Popular Front policies of the Comintern, the French Communist Party (PCF) still supported France’s claim that Algeria was part of France – a reactionary farce of course, as Muslims (the word used at the time for the majority Arab population of Algeria) enjoyed none of the benefits of modernity to which the Europeans were entitled. The PCA, Algerian section of the PCF, had opted to support the independence war as early as 1952. In August 1955, a FLN massacre at Philippeville left scores of French colons dead, and marked the beginning of full-scale war. In July 1956, the PCA dissolved its trade union section into the FLN union federation and its members formed fighting groups within the FLN. Vast numbers of French ‘paratroopers’ controlled all the cities and instituted a regime of terror against the civilian population, the like of which has never been seen before or since. Many French intellectuals of this period were Algerians: Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, François Lyotard, for example, were all Algerians, and Europeans were by no means immune from torture or assassination from either side. Algeria was not faraway Vietnam; the French had been trying to colonise Algeria since 1541, and Algerians had been French subjects since 1830 (after the slaughter of about a third of the entire population of the country). Algeria represented the last and closest of France’s colonial possessions, and for any French person, an Algeria which was not French was almost inconceivable. The French working class which formed the social base of the PCF was subject to racism, and the PCF felt under no pressure to follow the lead of its Algerian section and support self-determination for Algeria. 1960 marked the breach between the USSR and China which had been brewing ever since Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress in 1956. China was presenting itself as a rival on the left to Soviet leadership on the world scale and Mao Zedong promoted his policy of a revolution lead by the rural peasantry to lay a claim for leadership of the burgeoning national liberation movement toppling former European colonies one by one. (The Mugabe regime is an example of the kind of leadership Chinese patronage promoted.) The more radical elements of Communist Parties everywhere followed the Chinese lead, while Guevara and Castro’s victory in Cuba (1959), Lumumba’s victory in the Congo (1960), and many other such struggles fostered a vision of world revolution growing out of the ‘Third World’. On the other side politically, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution was widely condemned, but the PCF did not yet distance itself from the Soviet Union, while for many young people Stalinism was becoming discredited; after all, how could those who condoned ‘Soviet imperialism’ in Hungary object to French imperialism in Algeria? Although the Left supported the Algerians and were genuinely horrified by the depths of brutality to which the French military went in suppressing the revolution, the watchword was ‘reconciliation’ not ‘self-determination’. But as the violence escalated on both sides, reconciliation increasingly became an irrelevant pipe dream. Albert Camus had been the principal spokesperson for reconciliation, died on 4 January 1960, but for a time before receiving the Nobel Prize in December 1957, under fire from both sides and faced with an impossible choice between Algeria and France, he ceased speaking in public. Meanwhile, other French intellectuals were being murdered or tortured by one side or the other. The Immediate Context of the Publication of “The Savage Mind” In February 1958, PCA member Henri Alleg published the report of his torture at the hands of French paras, as it became clear that fascism threatened mainland France and the state itself. The Algerian crisis brought down the Fourth Republic and a new constitution was introduced in October 1958 under the leadership of General de Gaulle. The FLN’s war of independence culminated in victory on 5 July 1962 a few months after publication of “The Savage Mind.” Shortly before Lévi-Strauss had begun writing in June 1961, 2,400 armed insurgents tried to stage a coup in Paris and General de Gaulle called on conscripts to disobey orders and sabotage the actions of their commanders who had seized power in Algeria. As Lévi-Strauss began writing, sentences were handed down on the putschists and the fascist OAS renewed its terrorist attacks and assassinations. Lévi-Strauss completed the work on 16 October 1961 as 25,000 Muslims broke curfew to demonstrate peacefully through Paris: “Between August and October 1961 the FLN killed eleven policemen in France, and many more were wounded. During this same period the police mounted a mini dirty war against the Algerian community, with uncounted numbers of Algerians killed, ‘disappeared’, or found floating in the Seine. Police organizations called for drastic measures from the government, and Papon, in a speech at a policeman’s funeral, informed them: ‘For each blow received, we’ll respond with ten’. On October 5 he put in place a curfew covering all ‘French Muslims from Algeria’. “In response, the FLN decided to reply with a mass action. So on October 7 it called a halt to armed actions in France, and on October 10 issued instructions for a boycott of the curfew, a general strike, and demonstrations. The peaceful nature of the demonstrations was stressed, as was caution in face of the forces of repression. The Algerian community was warned as well of the need to be prepared for arrests. They had even gone so far as to prepare the slogans to be chanted in defense of any Algerians arrested during the demonstrations. “But the police were in an overheated state, and when the demonstrations finally occurred at various locations in Paris, the police went after the Algerians with a vengeance. Demonstrators were beaten and, as the events continued, the police began firing on the unarmed and peaceful demonstrators. Aside from the shooting and the beating, men were tossed into the Seine. For hours anyone who appeared to be Algerian was at risk of losing his or her life. “More than 10,000 Algerians were arrested and interned in several locations in Paris and its suburbs. There, too, the shooting continued, as did deaths from untreated wounds. In all, the number of dead varies from a low of 40, issued by a government commission in 1998, to almost 400.” [Mitch Abidor] Meanwhile, at very great personal risk, the members of Jeanson’s underground network supported draft dodgers and channeled support to the FLN, but in general, the Left failed to win public opinion to support of Algerian independence as France teetered on the brink of civil war. Not long after the massacre in Philippeville in August 1955, in his only previous public position on Algerian, Lévi-Strauss had broken ranks with the pro-reconciliation Comité d’Action formed by members of the French intelligentsia, and put his name to a call for self-determination for Algeria. In 1993 however, Lévi-Strauss admitted to James Le Sueur that “he regretted taking some of the positions he had during the French-Algerian war because, as he said, the civil war during the 1990s had made it painfully clear to him that the Algerians were not ready for self-rule.” He expressed similar sentiments in a 1980 interview: Certainly, I was ardently for decolonisation, and the independence of the peoples whom ethnologists study. But today, I am no longer certain that I was right, at least from all points of view ... Because the people in whom the ethnologists interest themselves, that is the ethnic minorities, are today – in societies which, no doubt, have recovered their national sovereignty – in a situation often more tragic than that which was theirs in the colonial epoch. Think of the Montagnards of Vietnam. It is frequently overlooked however that it was the attack on Jean-Paul Sartre in “The Savage Mind” that was Lévi-Strauss’s principal political statement on the question of the Algerian War and national self-determination in general, and it is this statement, in the last chapter of the book, which has been profoundly influential. Is it conceivable that a major book by a leading French intellectual published at such a seminal moment in French history, including a withering attack on the most prominent public supporter of the FLN was ‘non-political’? Jean-Paul Sartre was easily the most well-known and prominent intellectual in France at the time. Whereas Camus and others had held back from giving unconditional or practical support to the FLN, Sartre gave unambiguous support to the leaders of the Algerian independence struggle. His close supporter, Francis Jeanson, had organised an underground movement to support the FLN and assist draft resisters, and Frantz Fanon, the French-educated Caribbean intellectual who had become the FLN’s official spokesperson and philosophical voice. Sartre saw Mao’s conception of a world revolution led by the poor peasantry as the key to the Algerian revolution. Sartre was not a member of the PCF, but recognising the fact of Marxism, through the agency of the Communist Party being the leadership of the organised working class, he developed an independent Marxist position. He combined Marxism with his earlier existentialist philosophy and a Kojèvean reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. In 1960, he published Critique of Dialectical Reason, a huge unstructured tome, the drift of which was to create a non-metaphysical Hegel by basing a conception of spirit on the dynamics of human groups. This book included a refutation of the reactionary Comintern policy on Algeria and a critique of Stalinism and the degeneration of the Soviet Union, and used as its theme an analysis of the French Revolution. Critique was a slap in the face for the PCF and staked Sartre’s claim for recognition as the leading theorist of revolutionary Marxism. Although not prominent in Critique, along with de Beauvoir and Fanon, Sartre had also adopted Kojève’s trope of the master-slave dialectic to theorise the struggle for recognition and national independence. This trope elevates Hegel’s remarks about the struggle for recognition entailing a fight to the death into a dogma that national identity can only be created in and through cathartic violence. This provided a philosophical cover for not only supporting the counter-violence of the FLN as a necessary evil incurred in the fight against French military repression, but in its own right, as a necessary rite of passage for the Algerian people. Socialist Historicism and “Cultural Evolutionism” Kant understood himself to be expressing the ethos of his epoch, but for him the Enlightenment represented humanity’s coming of age; having emerged from its childhood, human beings now had the benefit of Pure Reason which was itself timeless. It was Hegel who first introduced an explicitly and thoroughly historical conception of truth. Hegel’s view of the place history in science is complex and we will limit ourselves here to his observation in his Philosophy of Right: “The science of right is a part of philosophy. Hence it must develop the idea, which is the reason of an object, out of the conception. It is the same thing to say that it must regard the peculiar internal development of the thing itself. Since it is a part [of philosophy], it has a definite beginning, which is the result and truth of what goes before, and this, that goes before, constitutes its so-called proof. Hence the origin of the conception of right falls outside of the science of right.” [Introduction to the Philosophy of Right] While the foregoing quote shows that Hegel’s conception of historicity is somewhat more nuanced than might have been supposed, there is no doubt that his conception of ‘formations of consciousness’ and his conception of world history, along with other theories of the early nineteenth century, such as the sociology of Auguste Comte, Darwin and Lamarck’s theory of biological evolution, and the speculations of the political economists, formed the philosophical justification for what Lévi-Strauss referred to as ‘cultural evolutionism’. Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, historicism of one kind or another was ubiquitous in social philosophy. But in relation to the decolonisation of Algeria and the events of that time, it is historicism of the French working class and socialist intelligentsia which is at issue, not the theories of nineteenth century philosophers. But a number of different ideas are closely intertwined here. The first thing to take note of is that it was not Marx or any other philosopher who introduced historicism into the workers’ movement; Marx joined a workers’ movement which was already thoroughly committed to what I will call ‘socialist historicism’. The workers movement saw their struggle for self-emancipation in terms of advance towards the socialist ideal and inscribed that ideal on its union banners with rising suns, rainbows, lighthouses and optimistic slogans emblazoned in gold type. This historical optimism which was mobilised by the socialist movement of which Marx became a leading theorist embraced a conception of social progress, directed at their own social conditions, and aimed at overcoming deprivation, ignorance and inequality by helping history forward, so to speak, to a superior form of society. It is in fact hardly conceivable that any movement which aims to deal with the ills of its own society by means of the overthrow of all existing social conditions should believe anything other than that it shall bring about a intellectually higher and morally superior form of society. And in fact, Claude Lévi-Strauss himself would not deny this. To believe that instituting this or that change in one’s own existing social arrangements would bring about a superior state of affairs is so fundamental to participation in social life in any but the most hide-bound conservative society that it is simply impossible to imagine otherwise. At this point it is necessary to look at what Lévi-Strauss claimed in the famous final chapter of The Savage Mind, “History and Dialectic.” http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/levi-strauss.htm _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
