II. Fanon: The Phenomenology of National Liberation

Like Black Skin, White Masks, first published in 1952,Footnote ⁵ Wretched of the Earth is an avowedly anti-theoretical tract with mammoth theoretical ambitions—a posture that Fanon himself ties to his repudiation of “European treatises on morals and political philosophy” and recognition that colonialism “is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties” (Fanon, pp. 61, 163). In this and other respects, the book bears a certain resemblance to C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, reissued two years after Wretched of the Earth’s original publication in French with an important appendix connecting the Haitian Revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines to later developments in the Caribbean, up to and including the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.Footnote ⁶ But while James’s narrative is just that, a narrative, Fanon’s text is eclectic, even polygonal. Leaning on psychoanalysis and existentialism in addition to Marxism, it traces, at the level of sensory experience no less than ideational frame, the phenomenological unfolding of the Algerian struggle for national liberation.

Fanon’s first chapter consists of a series of unqualified pronouncements he takes to be both apodictic in substance and universal in scope. Decolonization, we are told, “is always a violent phenomenon,” and it always involves, “[w]ithout any period of transition, … a total, complete, and absolute substitution” of “a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” (Fanon, p. 35). In the colonial context, “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched” to account for the co-constitution of race and class and the fact that the “economic substructure is also a superstructure” (Fanon, p. 40). Since the “colonial world is a Manichean world” pure and simple, “[n]o conciliation is possible” between “[t]he zone where the natives live” and “the zone inhabited by the settlers,” with the result that decolonization necessarily entails the latter’s abolition, “its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country,” and the attendant unification of the colonized people through “the radical decision to remove from it its heterogeneity” (Fanon, pp. 38–39, 41, 46). The “native intellectual” is at best a pedant who “over-stresses details,” bureaucratizing the revolution before it is realized, and at worst a “common opportunist,” a “vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal” (Fanon, pp. 46, 49–50). Colonial life is stultifyingly static, condemning the colonized subject to passive immobility, whereas anti-colonial struggle is destructively dynamic, emancipating this subject through the “cleansing force” of “violence” (Fanon, pp. 51–52, 94). Nationalist political parties restrict themselves to contesting elections, engaging in demonstrations and work stoppages, and issuing declarations on self-determination and human rights, being comprised of reformist “[p]acifists and legalists” interested in little more than higher salaries (Fanon, pp. 59–60, 66). By contrast, the peasantry is an impatient and instinctively revolutionary force that has “nothing to lose and everything to gain,” sensing that its liberation will be achieved only through “force” and that “life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler” (Fanon, pp. 61, 93).

Fanon unfolds his account of this “Manichean” struggle over the remainder of the book. A second chapter deepens the attack on nationalist parties, arguing that they are marked by “excessive legalism,” given to fetishizing questions of organization, dominated by urban elites formed through foreign trade, predisposed to seek accommodation with the colonial regime, and inclined to cater to “pampered” workers and civil servants rather than surrendering to the improvised movements of the rural peasantry, about whom they know little and whom they nearly always mistrust as lazy, illiterate, and mired in a feudalism they find embarrassing (Fanon, pp. 108, 125). Efforts by some party members to organize the countryside remain largely patronizing and lackadaisical, with the consequence that there is, at least initially, “no contamination of the rural movement by the urban movement,” each proceeding “according to its own dialectic” (Fanon, p. 116). Much the same may be said for trade unions in the colonies, which are modeled on or closely affiliated with unions in the metropoles; though capable at times of bringing economic activity to a standstill in the towns and cities, they have “lost all contact with the peasantry,” which they tend to regard as “a blind, inert tactical force: brute force, as it were” (Fanon, pp. 121, 123). The revolution gathers pace only after “illegalists” within these parties take to the hills, where they discover the “stony pride” of the peasants, “hear the true voice of the country,” and assume the mantle of revolutionaries waging guerrilla war, only then to return to the towns in order to mobilize the lumpenproletariat of the shanties, who provide the uprising with its “urban spearhead” (Fanon, pp. 125–27, 129). From this concatenation of rival groups and classes there arises a “spontaneous impetuosity,” a “strategy of immediacy which is both radical and totalitarian” (Fanon, pp. 132, 134). Speeches, programs, and resolutions fall by the wayside; the warrior’s “blood calls for the blood of the other”; the nature of the problem at hand becomes that much clearer: “the foreigners must go” (Fanon, pp. 131, 139).

Fanon’s third chapter, possibly his most incisive, concerns the contradictions of nationalism. In the “underdeveloped countries,” Fanon declares, the “national middle class” that assumes power after independence is itself “underdeveloped,” above all in the sense that it makes little effort to “put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities” (Fanon, pp. 149–50). Its formal education only compounds its “intellectual laziness,” its cheap “slogans of independence” cannot hide the fact that “not a single industry is set up,” and its preoccupation with nationalization stems from a desire to “transfer into native hands … those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period” (Fanon, pp. 149–52). As an intermediary between the newly independent post-colonial state and the newly established neo-colonial order, this class is “the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent,” mimicking its lifestyle and consumption patterns while clamoring for its continued investment (Fanon, pp. 152–53). Fanon links the national bourgeoisie’s satisfaction with this state of affairs, and its failure to “break through to the people as a whole, to enlighten them,” to the latter’s tendency to fall “back toward old tribal attitudes” and give free rein to regional and religious rivalries (Fanon, p. 158). He also links it to the fact that the “parliamentary game” is often “faked,” with a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” marked by “grandiose buildings” in the capital belying an impoverished and super-exploited hinterland seething with anger and increasingly reluctant to provide the obedience expected of it, even in the face of police and army repression (Fanon, pp. 164–65). What is to be done is clear: the revolutionary party of old must become the revolutionary party of the future, fed from below and not foisted from above; power and authority must be decentralized, dispersed from the capital through capillary channels feeding the people’s tribunals and local planning commissions of the interior; the people must be taught to think—enabled into emancipation—with speech that illuminates their own experiences and not in “a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics” (Fanon, pp. 181–189, 193, 197–202). “We Algerians,” Fanon proclaims, deserve nothing less (Fanon, pp. 189, 198).

A fourth chapter takes the book’s basic claims into the cultural realm, a “special battlefield” of its own (Fanon, p. 209). Since colonialism sought to smother existing customs and institutions and thereby foster “cultural estrangement,” affirming and reconstructing African culture was indispensable: revolutionary literature needed to distance itself from its “unqualified assimilation” of European literature, dispense once and for all with a “formalism which is more and more stereotyped,” and become “an awakener of the people” by recruiting “the past with the intention of opening the future” (Fanon, pp. 210, 222–23, 232, 236). The book’s fifth and final chapter, haunting in its combination of poetic lucidity and diagnostic acumen, consists of a series of detailed reports on some of the Algerian and French patients whom Fanon treated as a psychiatrist in the late 1950s.

Fanon writes with the confidence of a young man who has immersed himself in a struggle he has made his own. He is determined to extract universal truths from the war’s incursions, reversals, and pathologies, regularly enveloping his observations with the aura of absolute authenticity. As much as this endows his text—completed only weeks before his death at thirty-six from leukemia—with an extraordinary degree of lyrical fluidity, it also complicates some of the claims he makes along the way. Leaving aside the question of whether Fanon’s account of the Algerian struggle is always accurate, the simple fact of the matter is that this war was not illustrative of most other cases of decolonization. Processes of decolonization, as we know, have always played out in a wide range of different ways, from brutal cycles of insurgency and counter-insurgency replete with torture rooms and midnight massacres to “peaceful transitions” distinguished by little else but the pageantry with which one flag is lowered and another raised in its place. Beyond Algeria itself, Fanon’s evidence for the singularly emancipatory character of “violence” comes mainly from the (exceptionally bloody) Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, with passing references here and there to anti-colonial uprisings in Angola, Madagascar, and southeast Asia (Fanon, pp. 70–73, 78–79, 83, 92–93, 101, 114–15, 134, 137, 216, 235).Footnote ⁷ While these were hardly the only anti-colonial wars during the years of decolonization that followed 1945, few matched the Algerian conflict’s duration, magnitude, and sheer ferocity. Notably, this also happened to be a war pitting an Indigenous people against not only the state that occupied its land, claiming that it was an integral part of its own territory to boot, but the large mass of pieds-noirs settlers whose collective presence dated back to the 1830s. Not every colonialism involves settlement, much less on the level of “French Algeria,” where settlers numbered over one million prior to the territory’s independence.

Significantly, Fanon is not clear on what precisely makes Algeria’s national bourgeoisie a class. On the one hand, he informs his readers that this class is “above all the direct product of precise economic conditions” and not some sort of “bourgeois spirit,” as a Weberian might have it (Fanon, p. 178). On the other hand, he contends that “[i]t has practically no economic power,” being composed of professionals, local merchants, small landowners, public employees, and others with no direct stake in large-scale production (Fanon, p. 149). What this class lacks is in fact the hallmark of every bourgeoisie: large sums of money. It is something akin to a “bourgeoisie of the civil service,” even a “dictatorship of civil servants,” in that its power flows mainly from its control of the state administration (Fanon, pp. 179–80). This confusion about class is related to Fanon’s bald assertion that a Marxism which has not been “stretched” cannot explain the role of race and racism under colonial conditions—a claim that flies in the face of the fact that Marx engages closely with both colonialism and the racist structures that accompany it, providing a far more comprehensive explanation of the politico-economic forces that generate colonial projects than what we find in Fanon’s psychologically inflected reflections about nationhood and subject-formation.Footnote ⁸

Notably, Fanon also makes certain concessions, some of the most important of which have to do with the international plane on which decolonization struggles are also waged. At one point, he observes that “the native is not alone against the oppressor, for indeed there is also the political and diplomatic support of progressive countries and peoples,” a condition departing from the “fundamentally different international situation” that earlier generations had faced (Fanon, pp. 65–66, 207). At another, he lauds the “aggressive and violent” manner in which representatives of newly independent states “carried things to extremes” in the UN General Assembly, with the “radicalism” of their diplomacy, “no longer an affair of nuances,” having “showed up the inadmissible nature of the veto and of the dialogue between the great powers, and above all the tiny role reserved for the Third World” (Fanon, pp. 77–78). Foreshadowing debates in the UN Conference on Trade and Development in the late 1960s and the push for a New International Economic Order during the 1970s, he notes that the independence of colonial countries “unveils their true economic state and makes it seem even more unendurable,” clarifying that “[w]hat counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth” (Fanon, p. 98). Any adequate response to this question would need to be a coordinated effort, he admits, and “the indispensable help of the European peoples” will be needed to carry out the “huge task … of reintroducing mankind into the world” (Fanon, p. 106). In passages like these, Fanon seems to gesture toward a broader, more capacious conception of the “force” and “violence” that he regards as the royal road to collective unity, dignity, and self-reclamation. This is a conception which is alive to different forms of “force” and varieties of “violence,” and which recognizes that liberation struggles are never won, let alone secured, solely on the battlefield. While “in Algeria the test of force was inevitable,” it could not, after all, be denied that “other countries through political action and through the work of clarification undertaken by a party have led their people to the same results” (Fanon, p. 193).

Although Fanon lays the rhetoric of “spontaneity” on thick, here too he admits of certain limits. Once the revolution is underway, he writes, the same nationalist militants who had abandoned the towns and parties begin to “realize that the various groups must be enlightened” and “come to see that even very large-scale peasant risings need to be controlled and directed into certain channels” (Fanon, p. 135). True victory, they now realize, is unattainable without “clear objectives,” a “definite methodology,” an “army and a central authority,” and a rigorous program of political education to “raise the standard of consciousness of the rank-and-file” (Fanon, pp. 135–36). The people’s growing “maturity” brings with it an understanding that “[c]ertain natives continue to profiteer and exploit the war” and that “[m]any members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much, much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation,” with the result that “barriers of blood and race-prejudice are broken down on both sides” (Fanon, pp. 144–46).Footnote ⁹ All this complicates Fanon’s otherwise “Manichean” account of an unalloyed binary between two peoples hermetically closed from each other, with one leaping “spontaneously” to uproot and expel the other, and draws him closer to the kind of class analysis one would expect of a Marxist seeking to explain the national question under colonial conditions.

III. Frank: The Political Economy of Dependence

Like most of Frank’s other books in the 1960s and 1970s, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America was published by Monthly Review Press, closely affiliated with Marxist political economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, whose theories of imperialism and monopoly capitalism would influence Frank and many of his contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁰ Also like many of his other books, it is a product of a peripatetic life and career that saw Frank—a German Jew who fled Nazism and spent time hitchhiking and working odd jobs throughout the United States before receiving graduate training in economics at Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago—engaged in a seemingly endless assortment of travels, political activities, and teaching appointments in the Americas and Europe.Footnote ¹¹

At root, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America seeks to explain how production and circulation of commodities for the purpose of generating and accumulating capital assumes the form of a worldwide system in which imperialist powers extract resources and surplus value from peripheral satellites. These national satellites then extract resources and surplus value from large landowners and merchants, who are themselves in the business of extracting resources and surplus value from peasants and small tenant farmers. Frank argues that the politico-economic structures of metropolitan-satellite relations in the world capitalist system generally foreclose the possibility of autonomous industrial development in subordinate territories and limit the accumulation of capital to those class fractions that enjoy commercial ties to metropolitan capital or whose interests are served by primary commodity exports. Central to this theory is Frank’s insistence that the capitalist mode of production has long since absorbed social relations on every continent, that no region of the world may justifiably be described as purely feudal or beyond the reach of surplus appropriation, and that the polarization generated by the capitalist world system’s contradictory development is hardwired into its very structure and reproduced despite otherwise significant expansions and transformations. Exploitation under conditions of dependence, Frank writes, extends “from the macrometropolitan center of the world capitalist system ‘down’ to the most supposedly isolated agricultural workers, who, through this chain of interlinked metropolitan-satellite relationships, are tied to the central world metropolis and thereby incorporated into the world capitalist system as a whole” (Frank, p. 16). Far from resulting from incomplete or inadequate integration into the modern world economy, what has come to be called “underdevelopment” is, like “development” itself, a “product of a single, but dialectically contradictory, economic structure and process of capitalism” (Frank, p. 9). The problem, then, is not that peripheral states are too closed or insufficiently incorporated into the world economy—a view that Frank ascribes to some members of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, famous as a kind of laboratory for Raúl Prebisch and other neo-Keynesian political economists (Frank, p. 5).Footnote ¹² Instead, the problem is precisely that they are too “open,” too tightly integrated into the world economy—and integrated along subservient and essentially exploitative lines.

Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, a composite work incorporating and revising previously published essays, substantiates this thesis with economic histories of Brazil and Chile, as well as a brief discussion of Indigenous peoples in Latin America and a final chapter on foreign investment in the continent. The book’s first chapter argues that capitalist circuits of exchange began to take hold in the lands comprising contemporary Chile shortly after its conquest in the mercantilist sixteenth century. The consolidation and augmentation of this crisis-ridden, deeply contradictory system has resulted in capitalist development in the world economy’s core and capitalist underdevelopment in its peripheries, the two being “opposite faces of the same coin … in that each is structurally different from, yet caused by its relation with, the other” (Frank, p. 9). Far from being closed, autarchical, or feudal in the sense of lacking a bourgeoisie or being oriented solely toward subsistence, Chile developed an export economy very early in its colonial history, with Santiago and its port of Valparaíso growing as centers for the mining, mercantile, and agricultural interests that would facilitate the territory’s incorporation into the world capitalist system. Even when foreign commercial interests did not own or directly control Chilean lands, mines, and export-related facilities like storage and transport installations, they typically collaborated with Chilean interests and enjoyed monopolistic power over Chilean exports. And since the structure of metropolitan-satellite dependence was firmly implanted in Chile itself from an early date, with large landowners, import-export merchants, and urban administrators extracting value from hinterland producers, no program of capitalist development on a national scale, such as the kind of state-led industrialization associated with nineteenth-century German protectionist Friedrich List, was ever capable of facilitating sustained and genuinely independent development.Footnote ¹³

Frank’s third and fourth chapters perform much the same work in the case of Brazil. As against traditional clichés of the “two Brazils,” one being closed and feudal and the other open and capitalist, he maintains that Portugal’s conquest and colonization of what came to be Brazil in the sixteenth century initiated a process whereby different portions of its coast were incorporated unevenly into the world capitalist system. The extraction of gold and other minerals and the cultivation of sugar and other crops, often with Indigenous and African labor, drove the “primary accumulation of capital,” with merchants and owners of land and sugar mills thereby acquiring and concentrating significant quantities of capital (Frank, p. 152).Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, while even some radical economists wanted to “[a]ccelerate and complete the capitalization of agriculture,” the historical and social realities of the country simply did not bear out claims to the effect that “economic development and underdevelopment are … caused independently of each other by capitalism and feudalism respectively,” not least because production for subsistence purposes and market-oriented specialized production could “be found intermixed in all parts of Brazil” (Frank, pp. 221, 224, 233).Footnote ¹⁵

Interestingly, the book’s second chapter, which pertains to Indigenous peoples in Latin America, has its roots in a larger study that Frank had previously prepared for a report to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, the same commission whose views he criticized (Frank, p. xii). Frank’s main concern here is to establish that Indigenous peoples in Latin America are “super-exploited victims of capitalist internal imperialism”—that is, that their economic and social conditions follow from their incorporation into the global capitalist system, not their failure to integrate into the “national life” of the settler state (Frank, p. xii). Europeans had decimated Indigenous societies through a combination of imperialist warfare, the importation of European diseases, and the imposition of various forms of tribute—but for Frank, the key to their ongoing plight was that they had been (and continued to be) dispossessed, particularly by being deprived of ownership and control of their ancestral land (Frank, pp. 135–36). What was often characterized in casually racist terms as the “Indian problem” did not, then, result from “any lack of cultural or economic integration,” but precisely from “integration into the structure and development of the capitalist system which produces underdevelopment in general” (Frank, p. 142 (emphasis in original)).

Frank added a fifth chapter, this one on foreign investment and underdevelopment, to the book’s revised 1969 edition. The aim of this chapter, which examines the whole of Latin America after the independence movements of the nineteenth century, is to show the foundational importance of the intense competition between industrialists and others in the continent’s interior, who espoused nationalist policies and agitated for economic sovereignty and internal development, and agricultural, mining, and commercial enterprises, which were keen to promote exports and therefore benefited from “free trade” policies.Footnote ¹⁶ Unlike the United States, where the manufacturing interests of the northern states prevailed over the agricultural interests of the south, Latin American industrialists never enjoyed more than limited and episodic political power. This made it that much easier for imperialist powers to extract resources and surplus value from the continent, often through direct ownership and control of land, mines, ports, and railroads. Latin America thus came to be “converted into a primary mono-product export economy, with its latifundium and expropriated rural proletariat or even lumpen-proletariat exploited by a satellized bourgeoisie acting through the corrupt state of a non-country” (Frank, p. 295).

According to Frank, all this has important implications for political strategy in and beyond Latin America. “If,” he observes in the case of Brazil, “no part of the economy is feudal and all of it is fully integrated into a single capitalist system, then the view that capitalism must still penetrate most of the countryside is scientifically unacceptable and the associated political strategy—of supporting the bourgeoisie in its supposed attempt to extend capitalism and to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution—is politically disastrous” (Frank, pp. xiii–xiv). Capitalism is far too intensive and extensive to allow for the persistence of non-capitalist zones and there is “no longer … any room for classical national or modern state-capitalist development independent of imperialism,” leaving “[t]he political task of reversing the development of Latin American underdevelopment … to the people themselves,” who would ultimately need to undertake “armed revolution leading to socialist development” (Frank, pp. xvi, 314, 318). Like most countries in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, Latin American states had been incorporated into the world capitalist system long ago, as part of a centuries-long process reaching back to their “discovery” by Europeans, with all this entailed for Indigenous peoples, and accelerated through mercantilism, the transatlantic slave trade, and both direct and indirect control of Asian markets.Footnote ¹⁷ Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century proposals for economic development in Latin America and elsewhere sought to attenuate such dependence upon raw material exports. Many satellite regions had also experienced significant development when metropolitan states were busy with war, beleaguered by depression, themselves transformed into satellites (e.g. Portugal’s political and economic subordination to Britain from the early eighteenth century onward), or prepared to bracket “free trade” for specific conjunctural reasons (Frank, pp. 13, 28, 36–37, 51, 148–49, 161, 284, 297–98).Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the fact remained that only those states which “like the Soviet Union ha[d] broken out of the world capitalist system by socialist revolution” had been able to pursue an independent course of coordinated production (Frank, p. 56).

This is the point at which Frank brings his analysis to a close and my own reservations surface. As compelling as I have always found Frank’s framework for explaining the complex relations of production, distribution, and consumption that tie the capitalist world system’s peripheries to its cores, I have doubts about the degree to which it is possible for any given state, or set of states, to “break out” of that system, at least so long as that system itself does not come apart and cease to function as such. Like Samir Amin and some other political economists of his generation, Frank was sympathetic to the idea of “delinking” from the world economy, though he tended to view it as possible on no more than a temporary basis.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet, at various points in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, he contends that the Soviet Union’s capacity to build up heavy industries as rapidly as it did was made possible only by its “abandoning the imperialist and capitalist system altogether and going over to socialism,” that this revolutionary disengagement was part of a wider “withdrawal of the socialist countries from the capitalist system,” and that all of the world’s states are enveloped in a “single mercantilist-capitalist system embracing (the socialist countries today excepted) the world as a whole” (Frank, pp. 120, 211, 240 (emphasis added)). At one point, he even muses that “[i]f the socialist countries have managed to escape from this system, then there are now two worlds—but in no case are there three” (Frank, p. 147).

All this begs the question of whether societies and states subscribing to one or another variant of socialism could ever justifiably be said to have “abandoned,” “withdrawn from,” or “managed to escape” the capitalist world system. Inasmuch as Frank is committed to the view that capitalism is a global, all-encompassing totality that fosters development on one side of the planet and underdevelopment on the other, no actually or nominally socialist state—not even Enver Hoxha’s Albania, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, or Kim Il Sung’s North Korea—could ever have “broken out” of it, at least not fully. The early Soviet Union, like post-revolutionary Cuba and the People’s Republic of China under Mao, pursued its own developmental path, among other things by nationalizing foreign assets, planning domestic production, and moving to establish self-sufficiency whenever and wherever possible. But no such state ever wielded enough agency to operate free and clear of the structural constraints imposed upon it by a mode of production that had long since swallowed the world whole. This does not mean that states subscribing to one or another form of socialism have always been “capitalist” in the same sense as, say, the United States (or, in my own case, Canada). What it does mean, though, is that the inevitably interconnected character of our polarized and polarizing world must be taken seriously if we are to understand the “international.” It is this focus on the politico-economic architecture of global capitalism that makes Frank’s work useful, for the purposes of understanding today’s world just as much as the one that initially gave rise to his reflections. For all our currently fashionable talk of “multipolarity,” we continue to inhabit a world that is structured by relations between cores and peripheries.

IV. Shivji: The Promise of Revolutionary Rights

A legal scholar and educator who has written extensively about class struggles and constitutional debates in his native Tanzania,Footnote ²⁰ as well as questions of socialism and democracy in Africa more broadly,Footnote ²¹ Shivji is among the most eminent African jurists to use an explicitly Marxist framework in his writings on law, class, and the state. The Concept of Human Rights in Africa, one of his most celebrated works, is a characteristically sharp contribution to legal theory and a unique study of African approaches to international law. Written over a sabbatical at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare and published by the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa,Footnote ²² the book has garnered a reputation as a classic of Marxist legal scholarship and is arguably the best introduction to the remarkably lucid perspective that Shivji has developed over decades of political engagement and pedagogical experience, its slim 110 pages addressing first-order questions of jurisprudence and democratic theory with admirable forthrightness (Shivji, p. vi).

Shivji commences his study with a brief preface devoted to a general observation: discourses and practices of human rights evince two broad tendencies, a “dominant tendency” in which they serve as “the main elements in the ideological armoury of imperialism,” and a “revolutionary tendency” stemming from the fact that “from the point of view of the African people, human rights struggles constitute the stuff of their daily lives” (Shivji, pp. vii–viii). To do justice to the latter without falling prey to the former requires a sharp and unequivocal break with all forms of liberalism, including “petty bourgeois radicalism” (Shivji, p. vii).

The book’s four substantive chapters unfold this argument concisely. A first chapter surveys what Shivji calls “the dominant human rights discourse,” which he presents as a central component of late twentieth-century imperialism (Shivji, p. 3). This claim is itself important as the book appeared in 1989, the year that sounded the death knell of state socialism in eastern Europe and marked the inception of a decade of liberal triumphalism in which human rights would be elevated to the status of a global shibboleth, a means of demarcating the new international order’s “civilized” from its various “barbarians.” For Shivji, this explosion of interest in all things human rights-related, particularly among Western intellectuals for whom “a little sprinkling of peripheral literature” expresses the “liberal tradition of token tolerance,” is bogged down by debates about cultural relativism, the relation between human rights and basic needs, the question of whether non-Western societies may be said to have distinct legal traditions of their own, and competing frameworks for classifying and ranking different types and “generations” of international rights (Shivji, pp. 9–29). More innovative, and therefore less integrated into mainstream human rights discourse, is the idea of an international right to development, as elaborated by African jurists like Senegalese judge Kéba M’Baye and enshrined in instruments like the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (or “Banjul Charter”) and the General Assembly’s 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development (Shivji, pp. 29–33).Footnote ²³

But Shivji’s aim here is simply to lay the groundwork for his own critique, which he deploys in his second and third chapters. Finding the prevailing human rights discourse on Africa to be reflective of an “idealist philosophical world outlook” that is “abstracted from social history” and according to which human rights are “both eternal in historical time and universal in social space,” Shivji sketches how human rights can be reconstructed as an ideology of mass mobilization and popular resistance if they are conceived not as eternal and absolute normative imperatives but rather as “part of the process of struggle for transformation” (Shivji, pp. 43–44). Just as the natural rights theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were “the rallying cry of the rising bourgeoisie against feudalism,” and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legal positivism served as “the ideology of the triumphant bourgeoisie,” many of the debates which have occupied Anglo-American jurisprudes since World War II have been outgrowths of specific historical and social circumstances in affluent and industrialized capitalist states: John Rawls repackaged social contract theory along neo-Kantian lines for a Cold War West that was keen on “promulgating welfarism at home and practising imperialism abroad,” while Lon Fuller’s “internal morality of law” was “nothing but an ideologised version of the various procedural rules against arbitrariness found and observed in Anglo-American jurisdictions” (Shivji, pp. 47–49). For Shivji, it is clear that human rights has never been universal, in the sense of encompassing the whole of humanity, just as it is clear that Africans’ engagement with human rights can and should be “thoroughly anti-imperialist, thoroughly democratic and unreservedly in the interest of the ‘people’,” a stance that makes it necessary to dispense with the “metaphysics of natural law as well as the logical formalism and legalism of positive law” (Shivji, pp. 70–71). Crucially, Shivji argues that human rights must be rooted in class struggles, which entails a focus on collectives rather than individuals, an understanding of rights not as static absolutes diffused from above but as claims around which people rally from below, and a politics of real solidarity with the exploited rather than passive sympathy with the victimized (Shivji, p. 71).

At the core of Shivji’s “revolutionary” account of human rights lies the international right to self-determination. Elaborated by Lenin and developed through anti-colonialist movements, the right to self-determination, understood authentically, is an anti-imperialist claim to freedom from colonialism and neo-colonialism (on the international plane) as well as a democratic claim to freedom from oppression at the hands of a privileged class or group (on the domestic plane) (Shivji, pp. 72–81 et seq.). The “‘trade union’ demands for the so-called New International Economic Order,” launched by the General Assembly in 1974,Footnote ²⁴ harnessed the first claim while ignoring the second, resulting in a “truncated form of anti-imperialism … maintained by compradorial alliances which find concrete expression in authoritarian, undemocratic states” (Shivji, pp. 79–80).Footnote ²⁵ The international right to development, which underwent rapid incorporation into positive international law over the course of the 1980s, is tethered to a conception of “development” so expansive as to be meaningless, save only for whatever meaning it has been given by the elites who devise and implement the policies they clothe with its depoliticized, technocratic rhetoric (Shivji, pp. 81–83). Far more useful, in Shivji’s view, is the right to organize, including but not limited to the right to form trade unions and undertake strike action. Indeed, like the right to self-determination, the right to organize involves “the right to make a revolution where the people find that their interests are not served by a particular social, economic and political order” (Shivji, p. 86).

In Shivji’s eyes, the cultivation of a “revolutionary” form of human rights is not an exercise in intellectual reclamation or reconstruction, but an attempt to render in theoretical form—and thereby do justice to—the basic lessons of decades of anti-colonial and democratic struggles, in Africa and beyond (Shivji, pp. 3–4). Moreover, Shivji contends, the gap between the “dominant” human rights perspective and the kind of anti-imperialist approach to human rights he himself favors is already reflected to some degree in existing international legal instruments. Shivji’s principal illustrations here are the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the 1976 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (or “Algiers Declaration”).Footnote ²⁶ On his reading, the former grew out of the Organization of African Unity’s (OAU’s) desire to respond to the Carter administration’s human rights offensive in the late 1970s, with many African leaders seeking to regain credibility after the atrocious human rights records amassed by post-independence rulers like Uganda’s Idi Amin, Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macías Nguema, and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa (Shivji, pp. 93–94). The latter, on the other hand, was the product of intensive deliberation on the part of academics, political parties, trade union representatives, and delegates from liberation movements, brought together in Algiers by the Lelio Basso Foundation, a non-profit founded in 1973 by the Italian lawyer and politician who had been a member of the first Russell Tribunal and who would go on to establish the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (Shivji, pp. 93–95). According to Shivji, despite being the OAU’s main human rights treaty, the Banjul Charter, like the OAU Charter itself, is a thoroughly statist enterprise, underscoring territorial integrity, making no room for secession, and functioning as “a kind of mutual pact on the part of the African Heads of State and Government to leave one another as free as possible to do what they want to within their own jurisdictions” (Shivji, p. 98). By contrast, the Algiers Declaration is a strictly non-governmental venture, providing, among other things, for robust minority rights, repudiating unequal treaties and similarly coercive instruments, stressing that every people is entitled to “a fair evaluation of its labour and to equal and just terms in international trade,” and according every such people a right to “make use of the common heritage of mankind, such as the high seas, the sea-bed, and outer space.”Footnote ²⁷ For Shivji, the critique of prevailing approaches to human rights requires that African lawyers dispense with their “formalistic positivism,” ignore the “American academics in African universities” who think it best to continue spreading the good news of “‘law and development’ theology,” and focus on developing national and continental human rights organizations that engage in serious grassroots work rather than mere “[f]und-hunting” (Shivji, p. 110).

When all is said and done, I find myself in agreement with much of what Shivji writes, particularly in connection with the profound inadequacies of liberal legal theory, both past and present. However, I cannot help but depart from the argument set out in The Concept of Human Rights in Africa on what is perhaps its most significant point: unlike Shivji, I see no reason or evidence to believe that people’s tribunals and non-governmental declarations, even in great number and with widespread support, can yield anything more than limited results, even for the purposes of political education, mass mobilization, or social “consciousness-raising.” Human and other rights have often been articulated, defended, and transfigured through “non-state” actions, from revolts and protests to mutual aid societies and civil society efforts. But they have seldom reached the point of effecting sustained and substantial social change, let alone anything like revolutionary change, as long as those who act and speak in their name do not take hold of the state, wield its political power and juridical authority, and begin the long, protracted, and always thorny process of transforming both it and the society over which it sits as a superordinate governing entity. If anything, 1989 and its aftermath taught many—including most members of my own generation—to be rather skeptical of appeals to human rights, however “revolutionary” their packaging and presentation may be. More often than not, they have proven to be expressions of and legitimating tools for economically and politically strong states (and not only states), and their targets have nearly always turned out to be economically and politically weak states (and not only states). The Algiers Declaration—concluded in 1976 in the “Mecca of revolution”Footnote ²⁸—remains a signature illustration of how human rights may be harnessed for the purpose of furthering projects of collective emancipation, including in potentially anti-capitalist directions. But if there is one thing that the modern history of human rights has shown rather conclusively, it is that instruments of this kind typically achieve little of substance, still less so when, as is the case with the Algiers Declaration, they are legally non-binding and essentially hortatory. Whether human rights have a “revolutionary” future is by no means certain. What is certain is that Shivji’s hope that such a future might be forged has been frustrated time and again.