Gary McFarlance (top left) giving his speech on Franz Fanon and resisting colonialism. Michelle (bottom right) chaired the meeting. [Photographed by: Masato Shibayama]
In the late evening of Thursday, 25 January 2024, the Islington branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party held their weekly meetings at 84 Mayton Street to discuss their latest concerns and solutions to the ongoing crisis regarding Israel and Palestine.
Thursday’s meeting was hosted by Gary McFarlane, the Head of English Language News for Click Out Media and a journalist for Jane’s Defense Weekly, who connected the Palestinian liberation movement in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and throughout the United Kingdom to the life and literary works of Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist, author, and anti-colonialist activist from Martinique. Using Fanon’s literary works and theories, Mr McFarlane spoke to an audience of 23 people for about 40 minutes regarding the history of racial discrimination and colonialism from the 1950s to present day, as well as possible solutions to combat the colonial forces that still exist today.
At the beginning of his speech, Mr McFarlane encouraged the audience to read some of Fanon’s most popular literary works, such as The Wretched of the Earth, as well as works by some of Fanon’s political and philosophical influences, including Georg Hegel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin, to realise that violence is a necessary force to end colonial oppression in modern and postmodern societies. Mr McFarlane continued with his argument on violence by highlighting that the use of violence is not a moral question; asserting depending on nonviolence alone as a means to fight against a more violent, potentially armed faction of a conflict is itself an act of violence.
Mr McFarlane continued by summarising Fanon’s early life: his upbringings in a Martinique that was occupied by the French Empire and, later, by the Nazi-influenced government Vichy France in the early 1940s. According to Mr McFarlane, both governments were guilty of racially mistreating the black citizens of Martinique, but the coming of Vichy France pushed Fanon to emigrate from his home country to Algeria where he joined the Free French Army to fight the Nazis during the Second World War.
It was Fanon’s military experience in North Africa and France that opened his eyes to the wider culture of racism and racial discrimination throughout the world. For instance, Mr McFarlane recounted how Fanon observed that French women would refuse to dance with black men, but would not hesitate to dance with white men who were openly supportive of fascism in the 1940s. In addition to that, Mr McFarlane also narrated how Fanon was once arrested by white French police officers for publicly socialising with his romantic partner of European origin. According to Mr McFarlane, the police officers in question assumed that Fanon was a sex trafficker due to his African identity. Moreover, Mr McFarlane outlined how Fanon’s military experience also exposed him to the colonial system of racial discrimination: a system where, according to Mr McFarlane, European colonial authorities would create a culture of racial hatred amongst their colonies’ inhabitants. In the context of North Africa, the French were taught to hate the Jews, the Jews were taught to hate the Arabs, and the Arabs were taught to hate black Africans. Arguably, this culture of racism was established to maintain the dominance of the European colonists ruling over African or Middle Eastern territories during the modern era. This theory was supported by Mr McFarlane himself who reminded the audience that all European colonial powers throughout history were motivated by a will to ‘civilise’ the societies and cultures they deemed as ‘uncivilised’ by their standards. In the case of French Algeria, Mr McFarlane described how French colonists habitually removed the headscarves of Algerian Muslim women in public to demonstrate the European definition of ‘modernity’ and ‘civility’ to the colonised peoples, as well as their authority over them.
According to Mr McFarlane, Fanon was a Marxist revolutionary. Therefore, Mr McFarlane emphasised how Fanon was not interested in making compromises and wanted to eradicate racism and colonialism completely during his lifetime. According to Mr McFarlane, Fanon was not afraid to advocate for the use of violence to achieve this; emphasising a difference between “the violence of the oppressed” and “the violence of the oppressor”. As such, Mr McFarlane returned to his previous argument supporting violence in the struggle against colonialism by providing the audience with some examples of how violence succeeded in ending the rule of colonial powers in the past. For example, he narrated the successes of the Vietnamese when the Viet Minh victoriously kicked out French troops and, subsequently, the French colonial authorities in Vietnam from their territories after the French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In later discussions, the audience brought forward the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), an event described by one leading member of the Islington SWP as a “beacon of light” for all black rights and anti-colonist activists to take inspiration from as black Haitians rose up in a violent revolution against their former French slave masters and successfully overthrew French rule in Haiti and fought against invaders from Spain and Britain.
In a brief moment, Mr McFarlane referenced one of Fanon’s influences, Georg Hegel, and his theory of the Master-Slave Dialectic which details how slave masters and the enslaved depend on one another throughout human history in order to survive. According to Mr McFarlane, Fanon used this theory to explain the relationship between European colonists and colonised peoples in the early half of the 20th century. Hence, Mr McFarlane stated that the way to “smash colonial regimes” is by organising mass strikes in the industrial and commercial hubs of a society. According to Mr McFarlane, this method would cut the streams of wealth in a society and, consequently, cause a major disruption in a society’s economic operations and threaten the power and pockets of colonial authorities and their allies.
Returning to the current crisis in Gaza, Mr McFarlane stressed how important it is to support what he called the “resistance in Palestine”. During the meeting, Hamas was frequently praised by Mr McFarlane himself and members of the audience for their armed campaigns against Israel since 7 October 2023, including the chairperson of Thursday’s meeting, who grinned at the news of the bombing attacks against Israeli military facilities, as well as by a former primary school teacher from Scotland who described Hamas as being more liberal than the National Liberation Front, the Algerian revolutionary nationalist party which fought the French during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). During the discussions after Mr McFarlane’s speech, Jan Nielsen-another leading member of the Islington SWP-recounted how an increasing number of black and Irish people in Britain have begun supporting the Palestinians in their struggle for independence at public rallies due to them and their ancestors sharing a similar experience of colonialism and racial discrimination with the Palestinian people. This growing movement of intersectionalist solidarity prompted Mr McFarlane, a black man, to claim his solidarity for transgender people against “bigots” who would not let them be whoever they want to be.
Near the end of the meeting, Mr McFarlane warned the audience of the rise in “Nazism” in Europe and gave two examples of this growing phenomenon, including the fascist demonstration outside the headquarters of the Italian Social Movement on New Year’s Day 2024 in Rome and the increasing popularity of the “British jobs for British people” slogan used by far-right British politicians since the 1930s. Hence, Mr McFarlane emphasised the need to increase SWP membership in order to make the SWP more powerful and to efficiently combat the growing power and popularity of the political right in Europe.