From Louverture to Lenin: Aim Csaire and the Problem of the

Postcolonial State
Talk presented at conference Rethinking Csaire, University of California
Santa Barbara, May 30, 2014
Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University

In thinking about the legacy of Csaire today, about the reasons we return
to his writings repeatedly in the present conjuncture, Im compelled to make
explicit the over-riding theme unifying the work Ive been pursuing in recent
years, a theme I find most dramatically instantiated in Csaires writings. These
would include my books on the Haitian Revolution (Universal Emancipation) and
the history and articulation of a Caribbean critical tradition (Caribbean Critique),
as well as work Im currently pursuing on the political thought of CLR James,
where I am striving to bring together his writings on anticolonial revolution
(most famously The Black Jacobins) with his singular defense of a Marxist-
Leninist world revolution and anti-Stalinist critiques of actually existing
socialism, as what he termed state capitalism (World Revolution and State
Capitalism). On the theoretical side, Im trying to think through the problems and
contradictions of anti-colonial revolution and the postcolonial state undertaken
by figures such as Louverture, Csaire, and Fanon, via the work of Louis
Althusser, in particular surrounding the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the
publication of Lire le Capital in 1965.
While all of these works treat a wide range of themes and figures, it seems
to me that what unifies them is a defense of what I have called Black Jacobinism,
drawing on CLR James famous, if under-analyzed, invention of this concept in
2
the book of that name. In Caribbean Critique, I argued that 1789, Jacobinism, and
Robespierre stand as the decisive refutation of Michel-Rolph Trouillots famous
assertion that the events of the Haitian Revolution from 1791-1804 were
unthinkable. The book as whole begins with this critical reevaluation and
defense of Parisian Jacobinism and the figure of Robespierre in particular, to
analyze the militant Jacobin defense of the idea of undivided equality and the
ultimately unsuccessful struggle to implement a dictatorship of the masses in
defense of popular sovereignty against the various monarchic and oligarchic
forms counter-revolution. The aim of this was ultimately to investigate the ways
this defense of equality and popular sovereignty were displaced and
transformed, tropicalized and radicalized, by a series of figures whom I describe
as a francophone Black Jacobin radical anticolonial tradition: Toussaint
Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, CLR James, Csaire, Fanon.
The primaryfigures in this tradition are for me undoubtedly Louverture
and Csaire. My last two books focused on the materialist power of the Idea of
equality in its colonial iterations, the struggle and real power of such a concept in
its situated, historical iterations to overthrow the domination of the slavery
plantocracy in Saint-Domingue, and of colonial injustice in sites such as
Martinique (Csaire) and Algeria (Fanon). The point where that analysis leaves
off, however, and which serves as a fundamental site of contradictions with
which Louverture, Csaire and Fanon each struggle endlessly in their writings
and anticolonial militancy, is the problem of the state, a problem that became
overwhelmingly pressing around 1960 for James, Csaire, and Fanon alike, as
they witnessed and actively participated in the overthrow of French colonialism
3
and the witnessed the coming transformation of these former French colonies
into independent states.
While Fanon dramatically analyzed the many contradictions of postcolonial
independence in Damns de la terre, James Black Jacobins is remarkably lacking,
even in its 1963 re-edition, in any substantial theory of the postcolonial(ie,
Haitian) state. This is understandable, in a sense, given James focus on the rise
and fall of Toussaint, a narrative in which the Haitian defeat of the French and its
independence of 1804 form little more than an appendix. From 1793 at the latest
till his death in 1802, Louverture remained to varying degrees a subject of the
class struggle to destroy slavery in Saint-Domingue. And yet, like his followers
Dessalines and Christophe, he remained unable to conceptualize new social
structures implied by the stance of universal anti-slavery, instead reactivating
the plantation-based mode of production, ordering the former slaves back to this
hated labor and thus inaugurating the monstrously contradictory social
formation that was so incisively analyzed in Michel-Rolph Trouillots still
unsurpassed study Haiti: State Against Nation.
The Haitian state Louverture began to construct as early as 1796 was
meant to ensure one thing alone: the destruction of the domination of the slave-
holding planters class regime, and the replacement of this by the domination of
the masses of Saint-Domingue. To do so, Louverture immediately and from this
very initial moment began to set up a state apparatus independent from the class
struggle of the revolution still unfolding in those years. The military force that
Louverture controlled after 1796 strove to maintain not only the subordination
of the former slave-holding plantocracy, but also intervened repeatedly to
overcome divisions that would threaten the domination of the masses over the
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plantocracy. What neither Louverture nor his immediate successors Dessalines,
Christophe, nor even Ption ever managed to construct were novel modes of
production, political forms of organization, beyond the mere ideology of
universal anti-slavery and the negative imperative to resist its return to the
island. Instead, the reimplementation of the plantation mode of production
determined the limitations of the Haitian state. Louvertures contribution to this
process of state building was to organize the production of a legal power for anti-
slavery, as in his Constitution of 1801, maintain a dynamic excess of power that
would structure the deployment of state domination over and against every
social class, including, when that order was threatened, the Haitian masses
themselves (James sees this process as mere personal failure, isolation from
masses of Toussaint).
If the absence of a critique of the postcolonial Haitian state is glaring in
Black Jacobins, all the more so given James life-long struggle to critique the post-
revolutionary regimes of actually-existing socialism he called state capitalism,
the same cannot be said for Csaire. In his study of Toussaint Louverture and
Haitian Revolution, he focuses on what he sees as Louvertures prescient
invention of a postcolonial federalist association, a transnational association of
independent states that Csaire argues could address the real limitations and
failure of Departmentalization to bring substantial autonomy to Martinique. My
proposition is that the problem of the state, as the site of an actualized,
postcolonial freedom and autonomy, is the site of the dominant contradiction in
Csaires writings and politics circa 1960.
One way we could begin to articulate this contradiction is as a complex,
over-determined defense by Csaire of three contradictory political and state
5
structures: the actual French DOM, which as mayor of Fort-de-France and
Deputy in the French Assembly, he defended, second, his militant call for an
associated federal status for Martinique, and, third, Csaires principled and
continuous call for a radical, anticolonial and internationalist Marxist-Leninist
(and, I would add, Black Jacobinist) class struggle and, la Fanon, revolution
against the domination of the colonialist power structures.
It is this third, Marxist Csaire in particular that I believe needs to be
investigated and defended today. In the wake of the abandonment of
revolutionary politics after 1968, Csaire has himself been depoliticized, reduced
to the great poet that he was, while the power and scope of his place in twentieth
century radical politics is increasingly ignored. If Csaire himself abandoned and
sought to erase his Communist past in his various interviews and speeches after
1975, we should not let this late, revisionist (in every sense of the word) turn in
his work and thought obscure the political militancy that made him, from his
earliest writings in 1935 till at least 1975, one of the principle figures in the
global struggle against colonialism, a struggle that he repeatedly cast in Fanonian
and Leninist terms of the revolutionary overthrow of global colonialism.
Csaire, like all of the figures of the Jacobin and Black Jacobin tradition, is
not merely interesting historically; if I find myself returning again and again in
my work to this tradition, it is surely because Black Jacobinism constitutes a
fundamental alternative not only to the contemporary neo-liberal order that
continues to defend global forms of late and neocolonialism, but, on the left, to
the anarchist refusal of all forms of state composition in favor of merely local,
punctual intervention. In a contemporary context in which we witness the nullity
of aimless local political interventions such as Occupy Wall Street, interventions
6
that achieve nothing, we must pull the stick back the other way, as Lenin liked to
say, toward a defense of the possibility and interrogation of a radicalized social
order in which universal popular sovereignty dominates the order of capital.
In contrast to this neoliberal order, the Jacobin and Black Jacobin tradition
maintained that the state can become the proper site for the creation of popular
sovereignty and justice as equality, when the domination of the masses and their
interests (whether the sans-culottes in Franceor the former slaves of Saint-
Domingue) replaces the dictatorship of the monarchists, plantation slave owners,
and capitalists. Black Jacobinism, like French Jacobinism, has repeatedly named a
political alliance between leftist, radical enlightenment intellectuals (whether
lawyers like Robespierre, devotees of Raynal/Diderot like Louverture, poet-
intellectuals like Csaire, or a priest such as Aristide) and a mass population (of
sans culottes, former slaves, Haitians casting off the Duvalier regime after 1986)
struggling for popular sovereignty. The Black Jacobin tradition refuses all
anarchist defense of a utopian stateless egalitarianism to insist that the state
itself, once it has reinvented itself upon the bedrock of popular sovereignty (as
the absolute, non-negotiable freedom of all Haitians from slavery) constitutes the
proper guarantor of this freedom in the face of a world seeking to reinstitute by
all means available slavery and colonialist violence.
We must recover Csaires career-long fidelity to a non-aligned or generic form
of communism, a fidelity that clearly persisted decades after his celebrated official
resignation from the Parti Communiste Franais in 1956. In his open letter to his
constituency published in the PCF forum Justice (June 25, 1945), the neophyte
Communist deputy from Martinique asserted the principled basis and revolutionary
heritage of his anti-colonial militancy: Lordre que je vous demande de respecter et
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de faire respecter cest cet ordre rvolutionnaire qui subsititue le rgne de la loi au
rgne du favoritisme, mettra la raison linsolence jusquici impunie des ennemis du
Peuple. What is clear in Csaires writings, but which one would never know in
reading the literature on Csaire that focuses almost exclusively on either his poetry
or the racial politics of Negritude, in the decades following his 1956 resignation from
the PCF, Csaire very clearly remainedby conviction if not party affiliationa
militant defender of tier-mondiste communism.
By the 1950s, Csaire had abandoned his struggle to force the French
government to fully implement the promise of equality inherent in the notion of
Departmentalization. Instead, he began to militate instead againstthe discretionary
implementation of the actual law, insofar as this law created what he called
dpartements dexception. The language of this militancy clearly places Csaire in
line with revolutionary thinkers from Robespierre and Louverture to Lenin. Csaire
deliberately and conscientiously refashioned Toussaint Louvertures historic call to
the French state for a federalist reconstruction of the French nation-state, one that
would mediate between the actual, continued inequality of Martinican citizens since
1945 and full independence, which Csaire steadfastly refused to endorse. The
specificity of Csaires intiative at the moment of foundation of the Fifth Republic
and its new constitutionbecomes apparent in his call for a federation of Caribbean and
African regions subject to French colonialism, with a Regional Counsel possessing
legislative powers and an executive body: Ladhsion lide fdrale nous donnera
plus de force en nous installant sur le meme terrain de revendication et de combat que
nos frres dAfrique et que les hommes de progress en France.
We can read Csaires proposal of federalism as a unique mode of
decolonization without national independence as his explicit reaffirmation of an
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essential dimension of (black) Jacobinism. Jacobinismfrom Robespierre and
Louverture to the Lenin of State and Revolution and the Fanon of Damns de la
terrehas always affirmed the right to defend a revolutionary government, by
violence if necessary, against reactive forces. In a fascinating article from Le
Progressiste of August 2, 1958, Csaire offered a close reading of what is
undoubtedly Lenins central theoretical text. Two years after Csaires resignation
from the PCF, two elements in particular of the argument of State and Revolution
continued to interest him. Lenins critique of not only the state in general, but of
parliamentary, republican democracy in particular, offered Csaire une mise au point
[] prcieuse. Csaire deploys the Bolshevick analysis of the eventual and necessary
withering of the state under communism to forecast such a communist society as the
eventual and natural outcome of federalist autonomy. Rather than the creation of an
independent Martinican state, Lnine montre que dans certains cas particuliers et
dans certaines conditions particulires, la Rpublique federative constitute un pas en
avant. Furthermore, two decades after his resignation from the PCF and his supposed
abandonment of Marxism, Csaires fidelity to a generic form of tier-mondiste
communism rings forth in the closing lines of his telegram of support to the
Vietnamese government on the occasion of its 1975 independence: Au grand jour de
la liberation totale du Vit-nam hroque, le Parti progressiste Martiniquais exprime
ses vives felicitations et sa joie fraternelle au grand peuple vietnamien dont le long
combat courageux a permis et permettra la decolonization definitive de tous les
opprims du monde. Vive linternationalisme proltarien.
1

Finally, in a little-known 1972 text, Csaire explicitly affirms a quasi-Fanonian
vision of the necessity and justice of anticolonial violence. This may come as a shock

1
Le Progressiste, May 3, 1975, cited in Hale 483.
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to those who, like Confiant, consider Csaire a proponent of assimilationist
revisionism (Departmentalization as the selling-out of the decolonization process). In
his Preface to Guy Faus volume Labolition de lesclavage, Csaire reproduced his
1948 speech celebrating the 1848 abolition and, in particular Victor Schoelcher. In
this reproduction, Csaire suppressed a number of passages from the earlier version of
the text. He replaced passages that had drawn implicit parallels for his Sorbonne
audience of 1948 between the 1848 abolition and the Departmentalization act from
two years before with passages that announced his ringing call for the emancipation
of the Martinican nation as what Schoelcher himself envisioned as an independent
nation (1972: 15).
2
More astonishing are the concluding lines of this now-obscure
text, in which Csaire upholds the absolute necessity of anticolonial violence itself:
the Martinican overthrow of slavery months in advance of the 1848 abolition was,
according to Csaire, a victory for violence. Csaire here explicitly aligns himself
with the views of the two great twentieth century theorists of the justice of anti-
imperial and anticolonial violence. He states that the events of May 23 1848 were the
illustration and confirmation in advance of the views of Lenin and Fanonin a story
in which there is no place, despite the wishes of all pure souls [curs pures], neither
for idyll nor pious sentiments [les baisers de Lamourette].
3
It was in fact Schoelcher

2
This difficult to find 1972 publication is rarely cited because it was the original
1948 speech that was retained for Csaires Oeuvres compltes in 1978.
3
The phrase baisers Lamourette refers to the famous scene in the French
Assembly in June, 1792 when the Lyon representative Lamourettes sentimental
exclamation caused a momentary reconciliation between the Gironde and the
Jacobins, the inconsequentiality of which was revealed the next day when the
factions immediately resumed their conflict.
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himself, Csaire insists, who asserted the central function of violence in the process of
emancipation. He actually quotes Schoelcher in order to make this point: Since men
have come together the oppressed have never obtained a thing from their oppressors
except by force, and if each step in the path of freedom in the world is marked by
blood, this fact is a necessity one must recognize, but the blame for which can only
fall on powerlessness or the wickedness of providence (18).
Csaire articulated in the context of the global struggle for decolonization
an over-determined fidelity to contradictory imperatives. His defense of
Departmentalization was comprised from the beginning as a limited demand for
citizenship within the formal parameters of the Fourth Republic; after the
electoral defeat of the PCF in 1948, however, and the return of the right to power
in France, even that formal equality was sidelined in the interests of the
dominant French class and its colonial interests. Csaires subsequent demand
for regional federal status, in turn, never took the crucial step, as Fanon would in
Algeria, of following the example of the Lenin Csaire so admired, to demand the
revolutionary overthrow of the colonial order, and its replacement by a state
dominated by the interests of the oppressed, the wretched of the earth. Instead,
Csaires Communism, while continuing to structure his political thought into the
1970s, remained purely Idealist, never taking the step of an actual materialist
call for the class struggle, by all means necessary, against the violence of French
colonial and neocolonial domination in Martinique. If this violence never
achieved in Csaires Martinique the extremes that drove Fanon to affirm the
absolute necessity in the Algeria of the Stif massacre, we should nonetheless
continue to bear witness to the struggle for social justice and equality that
Csaire, like all the figures of the Black Jacobin tradition, devoted his active life to
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combating via a dedication not to an ultra-left anarchism of stateless
individualism, but through his constant engagement with not only poetry, but
the state as well,as the proper venue for the actualization of the radical promise
of human freedom, a dialectical destruction of the inhumanism of the actual
world and its recreation as the flourishing of a new humanity.