Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

The twentieth century was the century of national liberation, when most of humanity threw off direct colonial rule. This lens gathers the voices of that struggle, Fanon, Cabral, Nkrumah, Sankara, Che, Ho Chi Minh, and the Bandung project of non-alignment, and sets them against the hard questions the struggle left open: whether national liberation was enough, whether a poor country can be free inside a system it did not leave, and whether the nation is a vehicle of freedom or a trap. An anarchist dissent is included on purpose, so the argument stays live.

Anchor questions

• What does national liberation mean, and is it enough?
• Can one country be free while the system that surrounds it is not?
• Delink from the world market or transform it: which points toward freedom?
• What did the great decolonization struggles win, and where did they get stuck?
• What would internationalism look like if it were real?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.

National liberation and its theory

• Frantz Fanon (1925 to 1961), The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The central text on colonial violence, the pitfalls of national consciousness, and the psychology of liberation. Shared with Race and Racial Capitalism. Free: libcom.org
• Amílcar Cabral (1924 to 1973), The Weapon of Theory (1966). Cabral’s address to the Tricontinental grounding liberation in the level of productive forces, a direct entry into the debate over class and nation. Free: marxists.org
• Amílcar Cabral, National Liberation and Culture (1970). Argues that culture is both a site of colonial domination and a weapon of resistance, delivered as a tribute to the assassinated Eduardo Mondlane. Free: marxists.org
• Kwame Nkrumah (1909 to 1972), I Speak of Freedom (1961). A statement of the pan-African case for continental political union rather than a patchwork of weak states, from the man who led the first sub-Saharan colony to independence. Free: marxists.org

Speeches and declarations

• Thomas Sankara (1949 to 1987), A United Front Against Debt (1987). His speech to the Organization of African Unity calling on African states to refuse debt repayment collectively, given months before his assassination. Short, electric, and prophetic. Free: marxists.org
• Che Guevara (1928 to 1967), Message to the Tricontinental (1967). The call for “many Vietnams” and for revolutionary internationalism across three continents against United States imperialism. Free: marxists.org
• Ho Chi Minh (1890 to 1969), Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945). Turns the language of the American and French revolutions against French and Japanese colonialism to proclaim Vietnamese sovereignty. Free: marxists.org
• Asian-African Conference, Final Communiqué of the Bandung Conference (1955). The founding document of non-alignment and Afro-Asian solidarity, setting out anti-colonial and economic-cooperation principles. The charter of the Third World project. Free: worldjpn.net

Asian anticolonialism

Most of the voices above are African or Latin American, and Ho Chi Minh was carrying Asia alone. These are the arguments the same century produced from India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and they are not the same arguments: the drain, the split between communism and nationalism, and the colonization of the mind.

• Sukarno (1901 to 1970), Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference (1955). Eight pages that open the meeting he called the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind. The founding voice of non-alignment, and the companion to the Final Communiqué above. Free: cvce.eu
• M.N. Roy (1887 to 1954) and V.I. Lenin, Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Questions (1920). At the Second Congress, Roy told Lenin he was conceding too much to bourgeois nationalists in the colonies, and won enough of the argument that both sets of theses were adopted together. Read them side by side: this is the moment the colonial question split the communist movement, and the split has never closed. Free: redsails.org
• Bhagat Singh (1907 to 1931), To Young Political Workers (1931). Written weeks before the British hanged him at 23: swapping British rulers for Indian ones changes nothing without a social revolution, and a movement needs a programme rather than heroics. The Indian revolutionary left’s answer to nationalism as an end in itself, and it belongs beside the Anarchist Federation’s dissent below. Free: marxists.org
• Tan Malaka (1897 to 1949), Communism and Pan-Islamism (1922). The Indonesian communist telling the Comintern to its face that it had misread pan-Islamism, which in the colonies meant not clerical reaction but colonized Muslims fighting empire. Free: marxists.org
• Renato Constantino (1919 to 1999), The Miseducation of the Filipino (1970). American colonial schooling produced Filipinos trained to admire the colonizer and to find their own history embarrassing, a conquest Constantino thought more durable than the military one. Twelve pages, and the bridge to Critical Pedagogy and the Practice of Liberation. Free: eaop.ucsd.edu
• Vo Nguyen Giap (1911 to 2013), People’s War, People’s Army (1961). The general who beat France and then the United States, explaining how a peasant country wins by refusing to fight the war the empire came to fight. He wrote it as a manual for others to copy, and they did. Free: marxists.org
• Amado Guerrero (Jose Maria Sison, 1939 to 2022), Philippine Society and Revolution (1970). The founding analysis of the Communist Party of the Philippines: the country as semi-colonial and semi-feudal, and protracted people’s war as the answer. Committed Maoist, written by the party’s founder under a pen name, and the standpoint is the argument rather than a caveat to it. Free: marxists.org

Debates and disagreements

The school holds the disagreements open. National liberation is not one program, and not everyone thinks the nation is the road to freedom.

• Anarchist Federation, Against Nationalism (2009). Included deliberately as a dissenting voice. It argues from a proletarian-internationalist position that national liberation is class collaboration and that workers gain nothing from trading one ruling class for another under a new flag. Free: libcom.org
• Read Against Nationalism directly against Fanon, Cabral, and Sankara. They agree that empire must be defeated and disagree about whether the nation-state is a weapon of liberation or a new cage. Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations (in the historical lens) is a useful map of where the national-liberation project delivered and where it stalled.

Video

• “Decolonization and Nationalism Triumphant: Crash Course World History #40” (CrashCourse, John Green, 2012). Roughly 13 minutes, about 4.25 million views. An overview of postwar national liberation movements, accessible and mainstream, to complicate with the readings. youtube.com/watch?v=T_sGTspaF4Y
• “What is Pan-Africanism?” (Andrewism, 2021). Roughly 26 minutes, about 157,000 views. An accessible Black anarchist history of pan-African thought and its future, which adds an anarchist voice to the national-liberation debate. youtube.com/watch?v=48Y5pBtRHqk
• “Thomas Sankara’s ‘Against Debt’ Speech, 1987” (CheSankara, 2010). Roughly 6 minutes, about 29,000 views, a niche pick. A subtitled excerpt of Sankara at the OAU calling for a united front against debt. Play it alongside the text of the speech. youtube.com/watch?v=9VZEkURD9oI

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• The Red Nation, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Liberation (reading list). A reading list putting Indigenous liberation at the center of the anti-imperialist argument, which this lens otherwise approaches mainly through African and Latin American national liberation. Committed Indigenous-left political education, not a neutral survey. Free: therednation.org

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially contemporary internationalisms beyond the nation-state, and anticolonial voices from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean, which this lens still does not carry. What the socialist and non-aligned experiments built and where they failed is now covered at length in Socialism and National Liberation.