Jean-François Lyotard is best remembered today as a theorist of postmodernism. During the 1950s, Lyotard was actively involved in supporting Algeria’s freedom struggle, while realistically identifying the problems that would come after independence.
In 1945, France still had the world’s second-largest colonial empire, covering almost one-tenth of the Earth’s surface. Twenty years later, most of it was gone, after two bitter and bloody wars for national independence in Indochina and Algeria.
Many on the French left tried to grasp the significance of the momentous changes that were taking place. One contribution that still remains of interest today was that of Jean-François Lyotard, who combined his theoretical analysis of events in Algeria with dangerous clandestine work in support of its national independence movement.
Today Lyotard is remembered primarily as one of the main thinkers of “postmodernism,” a term that he helped popularize with his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition. Between 1956 and 1963, however, he wrote a series of perceptive articles about the Algerian struggle for independence, drawing on his own experience of the country.
Against All Imperialism
Born in 1924, Lyotard studied philosophy and was then sent to teach in a lycée (secondary school) in Algeria. A legal fiction declared Algeria to be not a colony but an integral part of French territory, though the vast majority of the indigenous Muslim population did not have rights of citizenship and many lived in abject poverty.
Lyotard was radicalized by his experience of colonial racism in Algeria, which he saw as “a whole people of high civilization which had been offended and humiliated.” He became friends with another French teacher, Pierre Souyri, one of whose students was Mohamed Harbi, later to be a leading figure in the Algerian independence movement, the FLN (National Liberation Front).
On their return to France, Lyotard and Souyri became socialist activists, joining the small revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism, abbreviated as SouB). The “social barbarians,” as they called themselves, had split from the French Trotskyist organization in 1948, arguing that bureaucracy dominated the world East and West, and that in the East it formed a new ruling class.
SouB was a tiny organization that never had more than a hundred members. However, it was one of the few far-left organizations to make a serious attempt to understand the changes taking place in the postwar world, especially in the journal of the same name that its members published.
Lyotard wrote a series of articles on the Algerian War, most of which were later translated in the 1993 collection Political Writings. They began with a total condemnation of French colonialism. Lyotard insisted that the struggle for independence by the FLN had profound revolutionary implications:
The winning of national “independence” will force the settlers to step back, to abandon the terrorist apparatus which was necessary for super-exploitation; it thus creates a revolutionary situation characterized by the sharing of power, economic to the settlers, political to the “nationalists”; and within this situation the question of property will eventually have to be posed.
Writing in the early months of 1956, in a situation where a government headed by the Socialist Party leader Guy Mollet was escalating the war and even the French Communist Party (PCF) was backing “special powers” to pursue it, he stressed the need for unconditional support for national independence:
Therefore in metropolitan France we cannot but support this struggle in all its extreme consequences. Contrary to the whole of the “left,” our concern is in no way to preserve the “French presence in the Maghreb.” We are unconditionally against all imperialism, including French imperialism. We are unconditionally opposed to the continuation of terror.
Critical Solidarity
However, Lyotard also identified complications in showing solidarity to the FLN. A small minority on the French left gave active support to the struggle for Algerian independence, some of them providing practical assistance to the FLN — these were the so-called “suitcase carriers,” who transported money and documents clandestinely.
Many of these activists believed that the FLN was fighting not just for national independence but also for the socialist transformation of Algeria. This attitude was encouraged by the fact that the FLN, knowing it was most likely to get practical support from the far left, tended to use socialist rhetoric when addressing leftists.
Such illusions were part of the “Third Worldism” that was widespread on the French left. The term “Third World” had been launched in 1952, by analogy with the Third Estate during the French Revolution. Many activists believed that the French working class had become passive and that the locus of revolutionary change had shifted from those countries in which capitalism was most highly developed to the territories of the underdeveloped world.
It was to combat these perspectives that Lyotard developed his critique of the FLN. He showed that the FLN leadership mainly derived from bourgeois elements in the Algerian population: “The present cadres of the FLN are for the most part elements from the middle classes, which means that the resistance is the point of convergence between the Jacobin bourgeoisie and the peasants.”
Building on this point, he analyzed the FLN leadership as a bureaucracy in the making: “The process going on within a revolutionary situation that is five years old is that of the formation of a new class, and all the factors which make up this situation mean that this class will necessarily be a bureaucracy.” This referred not simply to the way the FLN was conducting the war, but to the fact that it aspired to be the ruling elite in an independent Algeria.
As Lyotard wrote in 1957:
The Front was originally a military body; the subordination of all its activity to support for the ALN [National Liberation Army] and the guerrilla fighters implied the necessity for a single omnipotent leadership. For over two years this leadership has not been under the control of the masses; on the contrary, the masses are receiving the imprint of its propaganda and its action.
Now this single, centralized apparatus is driven by the logic of development to root itself more and more solidly in the countryside and the towns, and to control the whole of Muslim society more and more tightly. It is now tending to take the administration of the country into its hands. That means that the FLN is now already preparing itself for the role of being the managing stratum in Algerian society and that it is working objectively to blur the lines between present organization and the future state.
Moreover, Algerian independence had for Lyotard to be seen in an international context. The world was divided into two power blocs centred on Washington and Moscow, and an independent Algeria would be obliged to align itself with one bloc or the other. One reason why the French Communist Party was so lukewarm in its support of Algerian independence was because it feared that Algeria might align itself with the United States:
At present the possibilities for American imperialism in an “independent” North Africa are much greater than those of the Russian bureaucracy. By keeping the French bourgeoisie there, in one way or another, the PCF is keeping open the future action of Stalinist imperialism, of which we already have a prefiguration today in the Middle East.
After Independence
Lyotard always made these criticisms of the FLN, fundamental as they were, in the context of a total commitment to Algerian independence. As he revealed later, while writing these articles, he had been — unknown to his own comrades in SouB — active in the network of “suitcase carriers” headed by the Egyptian Communist Henri Curiel. Such a combination of lucid analysis and practical solidarity was very rare on the French left.
France was finally obliged to concede independence to Algeria in July 1962. After over five years in a French jail, the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella became president. At first, it seemed as though the promises of radical social reform would be implemented. There was much talk of Algerian socialism and especially of the development of workers’ democracy in the form of self-management (“autogestion”). Some of the leftists who had been most involved in solidarity with the FLN moved to Algeria to help with the construction of socialism there.
Lyotard was more pessimistic. In a long article for SouB published shortly after independence, he pointed to the limited prospects ahead for Algeria:
They expected a revolution; what they got was a country that had broken down. In the political vacuum that followed independence, the FLN leadership split into fragments. Joy that the war was over and the effervescence of liberation wilted, the masses became inactive. When they intervened, it was only to show the leaders that they had had enough of their quarrels.
The claims that workers’ control existed in Algeria were for Lyotard illusory:
The inability of the workers to create their own political organization and ideology shows that the problem confronting colonial Algeria was not that of socialism. The alternatives were not: proletarian or free — but colonial or independent Algeria. . . . The problem facing the country is not that of socialism. The word is used by the leaders, but the spirit of socialism does not move the masses, and it cannot, because the present crisis does not result from the inability of capitalism to assure the development of the country. . . . On the contrary, it results from the fact that capitalism itself, that is, a positive domination by man over his elementary needs — to work, to eat, not to die of cold or of disease — has not been developed.
The prospects for workers and peasants were very limited under these circumstances:
Algeria still does not belong to those who live there, and they still have the task of conquering it. It may be shaken by crises — famine, unemployment, poverty, despair will produce them. But none of them will be decisive, and give an answer to the crisis from which Algeria is suffering until one social class, or a strongly organized and rooted fraction of society, constructs and makes everyone accept a model of new relationships.
He proved to be right. Three years later, Ben Bella was overthrown in a coup by one of his own former comrades, Houari Boumédiène, who went on to rule Algeria until his death in 1978. There was no resistance from Algerian workers and peasants, who seemed unwilling to defend the alleged gains under Ben Bella.
French leftists who had gone to Algeria to support the new regime were imprisoned. Some, in a supreme irony, were even tortured by the security forces of the new state, just as the French had previously tortured FLN supporters. Algerians faced decades of military rule, repression, and ultimately civil war in the 1990s.
Lyotard’s analysis was thus shown to be valid. This was recognized by Mohamed Harbi, a leading activist in the FLN who later became a distinguished historian. Above all, Lyotard insisted on the fact that “development and socialism are not the same thing,” as he remarked in 1963. The struggle for genuine social emancipation still lay in the future.
There are no simple lessons for today. History does not repeat itself, although there are some parallels one could draw between the FLN and Hamas in modern-day Palestine — and between French attempts to murder FLN leaders and the Israeli regime’s targeting of the Palestinian resistance. Supporters and critics of Hamas have both widely quoted the FLN’s leading intellectual, Frantz Fanon.
But the basic thrust of Lyotard’s analysis remains true, irrespective of the distinctions we can make between one country or one historical period and another. Socialists unconditionally support the struggle against colonial rule, whatever form it may take, but the struggle for socialism must go far beyond it.