Political change does not really lead to any fundamental change for most of the people, indeed because politics (even if it calls itself democratic) is elitist and barred to most people, so it is necessary to look to new movements outside of "politics."
Violence is the first means and the last resort to pacify a people, and thus is something we need to continue to consider after the gunfire has ended.
Counter-violence against the colonial regime is liberatory because it is an act, and by acting, the absolute power of colonialism, internalized by the colonized, is shaken.
Many of the democratization projects are a real threat to real democracy.
There is an arc of spontaneous revolts, beautiful in their creative beginnings, which traverses boundaries and borders and creates new solidarities and imaginations but which under the whip of the forces of order and strategies to buy-off sectors of the revolt becomes fragmented.
The grand schemes of liberation, however indistinct and amorphous, can quickly be compromised, consumed by petty disputes and local hatreds.
What is interesting about the revolts is that they show that there is never anything purely spontaneous, and there is always some thinking and discussion, and thus some kind of organization involved in it.
Organization has to come from an agreement about principles, rather than just the need to coordinate: so as much as we must all act today in a concerted manner, that should not be the ground of an organization.
Manicheanism is like a vacuum, it is an either or situation that curtails or destroys the development of liberatory thought.
The military defeat of an oppressive regime is important, but it does not answer our problems. It is where our problems begin, since social change cannot be reduced to a military solution.
The revolts themselves open up something very new. One has to be aware, or listen, or open one's mind to what are the new beginnings.
Fifty years is the long time to think about a thinker's relevance or to think of the relevance of their work to a contemporary period.
The Syrian people do not recognize themselves in the elite politics of the Muslim Brotherhood or the left, each of which is looking for an external power rather than the people's own self-activity.
The colonial regime makes sure, often with the help of surrogates, that radical leaders and those honest principled intellectuals and activists who refuse to compromise their principles of independence are eliminated, so that the postcolonial regime (and especially its resources) remains accessible. The result has been a disaster for the (post)colonial world.
The colonial power tended to be France or Britain, and the Soviets were proclaimed as anti-imperialists. So, if you align yourself with the Soviets, it fits nicely with that kind of rhetorical division, but in reality it does not get you anywhere.
For Fanon, becoming actional is connected to his idea of a new humanism, which is explicitly critical of European humanism so intimately connected with colonialism. So, it is not simply about finding new concepts from anywhere, but being both critical and self-critical and also being very open to what is happening on the ground.
Spaces of liberation are, in a certain way, some kind of social spaces where people can not only get together and think about something else, but also act together. If you are thinking about an elemental solidarity, you are thinking about people acting together and taking decisions together, and thereby beginning to think about what sort of society they want to create. So, there is a need for liberated spaces; that is really difficult.
Fanon calls his ideology a new humanism, not only in contrast to the elite humanism of the West, but also on the axiom that the wretched of the earth, understood socially, think and thus must be a basis of a new politics. This, of course, is not achieved immediately, but it must become an explicit element of the struggle for liberation.
The only way that we can prove the relevance of Fanon in a certain way outside of some academic circles is to ask, do people involved in social struggles engage with Fanonian concepts and find something relevant for them, even if they have never heard of Fanon because Fanon is implicitly in the struggles?
Violence is used to suppress a people in a most blatantly crude way. We can historicize and contextualize it. We can analyze the Algerian situation, its history and so forth, and question whether that is anything like the situation we face today. But, this is only one way to understand why violence becomes so important.
The problem in Syria, I think, is that when there is so much violence, there is not only very little chance to create spaces for liberation, but also all talk is quickly swallowed up by it. People are trying to keep their heads down because they are being bombarded all the time.
If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.
