Rousseau and Revolution

48 Rousseau and Revolution
This congenital problem was due largely to their intellectual laziness,
‘spiritual penury’ and ‘profoundly cosmopolitan mind set’ (ibid., 149).
Fanon writes,
Now, precisely, it would seem that the historical vocation of an authentic
middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own nature
in so far it as it is bourgeois, that is to say in so far as it is the tool of capitalism,
and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital
which is the people. In an underdeveloped country an authentic national
middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling
fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in
other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical
capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities.
(Ibid., 150)
Instead of this heroic and fruitful path, the national bourgeoisie retreated
into a cynically bourgeois existence. Ignorant of the local economy and of
its mineral, soil, or mines, they would instead talk cultishly of small-scale
artisanry and about the groundnut harvest, cocoa crop and olive yield. They
were, Fanon lamented, satisfi ed to continue as Europe’s farmers, generating
unfi nished products in ways that would not shift the global division of
labor inaugurated by colonization and black and brown enslavement. They
said nothing of creating factories that could generate wealth for the nation
and themselves; they made no outcry about the absence of industry. They
thoroughly lacked the entrepreneurial, pioneering aspects of the early
European bourgeoisie, Fanon balks; beginning at the end, they are ‘already
senile before [they have] come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or
the will to succeed of youth’ (ibid., 153).
The national bourgeoisie, once concerned about the dignity of the country,
moved into and maintained formerly colonial homes and business
offi ces. Uninterested in recasting rural and urban divisions or the global
map, they simply settled into a world whose terms were determined from
outside. African unity, an idea that brought immense pressure against colonialism,
required the cultivation of political-economic conditions for its
possibility. In the absence of these, it disintegrated. Nationalism quickly collapsed
into chauvinistic thinking and language that fueled religious and
ethnic rivalries now mobilized as grounds for economic leverage under
conditions of scarcity. The national bourgeoisie remained content with
what Rousseau referred to as the will of all, here really of some, reinforced
by the so-called right of the strongest.