History has not treated Frantz Fanon well as of 2025, the 100th anniversary of his birth. The apostle of violent, no-holds-barred revolution, even terrorism against uninvolved civilians, as a necessity for true independence for Africa from the yoke of European colonialism has been belied by the fact that most former African colonies achieved independence by peaceful means. Nor did violent revolution spare the former African colonies from adverse outcomes, as his own Algeria proves.
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For Wallis, who sees capitalism in strictly Manichean terms, as an absolute evil, it’s revolution or nothing. Reforms are of no avail, will never ever go far enough, and he completely rejects social democracy for having nothing of a lasting nature to commend itself, writing acerbically that the “alternative [to not opposing capitalism totally] is to reinforce the basic assumptions of anticommunism, which, in their social democratic variant, call for the decomposition of any coherent vision of social transformation and its replacement by a hodgepodge of socialist proposals grafted onto a presumably indestructible capitalist framework”
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TERENCE RENAUD IS A LECTURER in Humanities and History at Yale, and his book New Lefts is an excellent intellectual and political history that is both universalistic yet grounded in its universalism in a deep and careful study of a particular political milieu, that of the New Beginnings socialist group in Germany from the 1920s to the emergence of the European New Left that culminated in the French student uprising of 1968.
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