A Marxist and Arab nationalist in equal measure, Elias Murqos (1929 – 1991) was a prolific writer, critic, and translator whose work ranged from publishing books on contemporary revolutionary thought and political history to translating some of the key texts of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Lukács and Rodinson, among others into Arabic. Born in Lattakia, Syria, Murqos joined and was then shortly expelled from the Syrian Communist Party in 1956. A thoughtful critic of both Soviet and Arab communism, Murqos wrote about the need for an Arab Marxism that was democratic, secular, and pan-Arabist. He co-founded the Beirut-based publishing house, Dar Al-Hakika in 1970, co-founded and edited journals Al-Wehda and Al-Wake’, and regularly contributed to many of the well-known periodicals of that time such as Al-Adab. The degree to which he tied some of the main philosophical questions of Marx and Lenin to national liberation projects such as Algeria and Palestine portray an urgency to address “current moments” within his own work.
If his work has been largely overlooked within English language and, to a lesser extent, Arabic knowledge production on anticolonialism within the Arab left, then his slim 1959 book, The French Communist Party and the Algerian Cause, is even less known to readers, given that the book, initially published by Dar Al-Talia’a while Algeria’s war for independence was ongoing, is now out of print. Murqos’ undertaking with this book early on in his writing career stands in stark contrast to his later publications which were sweeping in their subject matter and analysis of Arab political thought and revolutionary praxis. As the title suggests, The French Communist Party and the Algerian Cause has a singular focus and the impetus behind writing on Algeria was partly driven by the Algerian cause’s centrality to decolonization movements in the Arab world.
The book is striking not only for its detailed chronology of how the French Communist Party (FCP) conspired over decades against Algerian national liberation but also because Murqos’ criticisms preceded the emergence of the New Left in 1968, which was dissatisfied with parties and movements like the FCP during the American war on Vietnam. By relying on party declarations, individual statements by French politicians (communists, socialists, and otherwise), party journal mouthpieces or newspapers (e.g., Cahiers du Communisme, L’Humanité) before, during, and after the Second World War, Murqos articulated a biting indictment of the French left’s attempts at repressing, attacking, undermining, belittling, patronizing, and domesticating the Algerian struggle for independence. His intervention was published at a time when the FCP specifically had begun to change its tone and position with respect to the liberation movement, but had not yet acknowledged Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) as representative of the Algerian people. In fact, it was not until 1961, after the USSR’s Khrushchev issued a statement on Algeria and a year before Algeria’s independence, that the FCP would call for Algeria’s right to be independent and for France to negotiate with the FLN. But when Murqos’ book was published in 1958, he viewed the growing FCP condemnations of French violence against the Algerian people solely as a continuation of the FCP’s commitment to upholding French nationalism, and thus colonialism, rather than Algerian independence. Murqos noticed and foresaw the FCP’s reluctantly changing positions towards Algeria by contextualizing them within the FCP’s overall history of recognising the state of Israel in 1948 and condoning the Tripartite Aggression against the Suez Canal in 1956. His work was published at a critical juncture in French history, when – after the government announced it was willing to negotiate with the FLN – French police and paratroopers in Algeria led a military coup that quickly moved to France and resulted in reinstating Charles De Gaulle to power. As such, the book is particularly important in drawing out the conclusions Murqos makes on the FCP’s role within the French empire as it pertains to Algeria.
“We Do Not Feel that We Are Guilty”
Murqos opened his book by citing an exchange between the FLN and the FCP in 1958. In response to the FLN accusing the FCP of not abiding by their own proclaimed Marxist-Leninist principles,1Despite the FCP voting to join the Third International which addressed anti-imperialism in 1920, the FCP did little besides engage in self-criticism on the colonial question and, since then, had been faced with considerable resistance from its own members in seriously addressing France’s colonial history. FCP statements on Algeria repeatedly quoted Marx and Lenin to legitimize their own positions, and Murqos, throughout his book, frequently attacks their misuse of both figures. the FCP wrote back: “We do not feel that we are guilty” , which in itself is an aggressive admission of the FCP’s attempts at thwarting independence.
In fact, their aggression against Algerians did not begin then. After the Popular Front won the elections in 1936, the French government initiated a series of reforms including the release of Algerian detainees and a process of assimilating Algerians into France. These reforms were vehemently opposed by the French right and Murqos described this conflict as one between “the extreme colonizers” (i.e., the French fascists) and “colonial reformists” (i.e., the French left, including the Popular Front), meaning that disagreements between both camps, and thus their resolution, resided solely within the colonial order. These reforms were also opposed by Algerians, particularly the Algerian People’s Party which was calling for independence. The FCP accused the latter of being “agents of fascism” , described Algeria as a “nation in formation”, thus incapable of independence (because of their “narrow national interests”) and in need of unity with France. The equivalence Murqos strikes between the French right and left earlier is not merely a rhetorical move. He described the period of 1936-1939, when the French left (not just the FCP)2The FCP was represented in government up until 1947 and a third of French votes went towards the FCP during elections up until 1957. were in government as setting the stage for France’s general opposition and repression of Algerian self-determination afterwards. It is these arguments that the FCP continued to use and reshape over the next twenty or so years until Algeria’s inevitable independence.
The Second World War and the massacre of May 8, 19453The date also marks the end of WWII. constituted another phase of FCP’s complicity with colonialism. Following France’s defeat in 1940 and “the expansion of fascism” to North Africa, the FCP unequivocally supported Georges Catroux, a “moderate colonizer” whose term as Algeria’s governor started off with a massacre in 1943 followed by initiating a series of reforms such as granting all Algerians the right to vote and those with a college education the right to receive French citizenship.4This decision affected between 50 to 60 thousand Algerians at the time of its decree. This was met with contempt from Algeria’s national leaders who found the reforms insufficient at a time when they had quickly and forcefully begun to call for Algeria’s independence, especially towards the end of the war. The FCP’s outright support of Catroux (i.e., for reforms rather than independence), and their silence on the American occupation of North Africa in November 1943,5Many of the FCP’s leaders moved from their exile in Moscow to Algeria after the American troops occupied Algeria (and the rest of French North Africa) and De Gaulle became Algeria’s governor in 1944. was attributed to an intentional de-prioritisation of the colonial question in order to fight Europe’s fascism. This, however, slightly changed with the May 8 massacre of 1945 when the French army, police, and pieds-noirs murdered 45,000 Algerians demonstrating for independence throughout the country. The level of violence inflicted was impossible to ignore, even when French newspapers minimized the death toll to around 15,000 Algerian civilians. However, the FCP denounced both the protest and the massacre. L’Humanité, a newspaper run by the FCP, blamed “Hitlerite” Algerians for instigating “poor Algerians” to demonstrate for independence without having any clear political demands (independence being a lofty demand) while also condemning the massacres that happened, thus providing another layer to their complicity with colonialism.
Peace and Equality, Not Freedom
As the violence inflicted by the French colonial forces increased and became more visible to the French public, the FCP’s positions, as on the May 8 massacre, continued to balance between outright aggression against any demand or action for independence, while also calling for peace and equality between Algerians and the French.
On November 8, 1954, days after the Algerian War for Independence had begun, the FCP released a statement condemning “individual” Algerians’ armed violence, the brutal “repression” of such actions by the French, while also calling for a “democratic solution” through dialogue with key political parties and figures (key here is the erasure of Algeria’s Liberation Front from the suggested talks). The FCP’s errors, according to Murqos, were fundamental and integral to maintaining the colonial order. Far from seeing the FCP’s statements as a welcome change in supporting Algerians, Murqos criticized the FCP for not recognizing that the Algerian revolution was an organized revolution and was composed of individual acts of rebellion. This denial of the revolution which is a denial of reality robs the violence of the oppressed from its political charge and intent. By viewing the revolution solely from the prism of individual acts, by warning against the continuation of future violence rather than acknowledging the revolution as a then-current reality, the FCP could then call for equality instead of self-determination, peace rather than liberation.6The FCP’s rhetoric on peace closely resembled the World Peace Movement’s, which was spearheaded by the Soviet Union and which the FCP participated in. In this regard, the FCP closely followed the USSR’s peace rhetoric in arguing for France’s own national interests. In reality, these calls couldn’t be translated into meaningful acts of solidarity. In fact, the FCP’s contempt for the Algerian revolution materialized, to cite two instances, in their refusal to support dock workers in Marseille who refused to send arm shipments to the French colonial authorities in Algeria and their condemnation of young men in Grenoble who refused to carry arms against Algerians as “extreme leftists”. Moreover, the FCP’s paternalistic attitudes towards the revolution served to maintain the link between Algeria and France. By emphasizing the need for equality, the FCP could then focus on the relational potential between Algeria and France. Transforming the relation between Algeria and France from one of explicit coloniality and subservience to one slightly more symbiotic ensures that the relation still exists, at a time when the Algerian revolution wanted to sever it entirely.
Independence as Imperialism
Another argument the FCP weaponized against supporting Algeria’s independence was the fear of strengthening American imperialism. Here, the FCP can be seen to have moved to using the language of the oppressed to undermine Algeria’s own struggle. Whenever the United States (US) was evoked in statements regarding Algeria, the FCP implicitly admitted that the colonization of Algeria weakened the country’s social and economic structures. Thus, the risk of Algeria’s independence would be forming stronger relations to the US than France, resulting in further colonization rather than independence.
To qualify their opposition to self-determination, the FCP doubled down on their nation-in-formation argument. France’s violence, at this point, could no longer be denied or ignored, and so the FCP could only warn against US imperialism, which to the FCP was far more sinister given France’s rivalry with the US post-WWII, to maintain the current order of affairs. The FCP maintained that France’s colonization of Algeria, described as a unique relationship, served to protect Algeria from an uncertain future, a future which Algerians could not decide for themselves. They constantly criticized and doubted the revolution’s leadership in stewarding a nation-state independent from France and could not support the Algerian revolution while still feeding into France’s image of paternalistic grandiosity or maintaining France’s geopolitical power.
Contemporary Relevance
Murqos is meticulous throughout the book, and his methodological rigor goes beyond wanting to maintain an honest record of history. Ultimately, his critique of the FCP’s rhetoric and actions reflects an intimate understanding of how colonialism constantly manoeuvres to undermine independence, even while using the language of equality , peace, and anti-imperialism. This form of doublespeak, however vile, is not surprising and it speaks mainly to the FCP’s attempt at both appeasing an electorate becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the violence the French were inflicting on Algerians while also maintaining and growing their power within France’s political establishment – a colonial project so resenting of its waning influence compared to the US that the FCP was incapable of denouncing or detaching itself from French colonial violence against Algeria until the late 1950s.
Given this history, Murqos did not seem interested in understanding why the FCP aligned themselves with French national interests, but rather was invested in using the FCP as an example for how the French left within the colonial core never did and never could translate into meaningful solidarity with the Algerian people. The FCP could never align itself with Algerian liberation not only because it wanted to stay relevant with its French constituency, but because it was invested in the French nationalist vision of grandeur, in much the same way that the FCP’s political adversaries and allies in France also believed in French supremacy and colonialism. Their contempt and paternalistic attitudes towards the Algerians and their revolution was but an expression of their racism.
Murqos’ dismissal of the FCP, after thoroughly developing the case against it, is promising in what it can teach us about the uses, requirements, and limits of solidarity within the imperial core, but also in what it illustrates to those outside that core. The FCP effectively functioned as a tool that reified the ties between Algeria and France, especially at the height of the Algerian war for independence. Could the FCP effectively support a national liberation struggle when that struggle was waged against a colonial entity that they believed in and were committed to? When the FCP participated in government, they rested firmly within France’s colonial violence. When they were not, their role as “moderate colonizers” was to downplay and stifle Algerian self-determination and ensure that any positive sentiment towards the Algerian revolution, especially within France, was not transformed to intentional and material solidarity. The FCP consistently couched their racism behind slogans of class struggle and the threat of the far-right within France, mistakenly thinking that the Algerian cause is a marginal issue within French politics. The May 1958 coup, however, attested to the degree in which French national politics, especially within the right, sprung to action when their power was threatened by an independent Algeria.
In this regard, many of the arguments against Algeria’s independence by the FCP uncannily mirror the strategies that the Western political establishment (particularly the US’s Democrats), and Israelis opposed to Netanyahu’s government, have employed alongside their violence on Palestinians. The former US ambassador to the UN, for example, has previously stated that the US’s opposition to Palestinian statehood is due to Palestine not “hav[ing] all of the elements [for] statehood”, closely following the “nation in formation” argument of the FCP. The US Democratic Party’s refusal to address their own role in the genocide during the last elections was due to a logic that considered issues of foreign affairs (i.e., imperialism) as inconsequential to internal politics. This splitting ultimately led to the emboldening of American fascism and Trump’s inauguration for a second term, similarly to how the French far-right’s relationship to Algeria was fundamental to the success of the May 1958 coup in France.
Almost two years into Israel’s genocide on Gaza, discussions on peace rather than putting an end to Israel’s crimes, or holding it accountable to these crimes, abound within Western circles that make spurious distinctions between far-right Israelis versus the more liberal or leftist groups that oppose Netanyahu. In fact, based on Murqos’ reading of the function of FCP within the French colonial order, these groups are indeed aligned with maintaining a vision of a greater Israel that distances itself from a genocide it is currently perpetrating while also legitimising the violence they and other Israeli groups, across a range of political ideologies, inflict on Palestinians. That these groups do not contest or reject the violence inherent in Zionism but disavow them only among Israeli settlers in “illegal settlements” attests to their entrenchment in a world-order that they are invested in, while also being unable to see how this refusal would contribute to their own destruction and irrelevance with time.
Murqos’s refusal to absolve the FCP of their past allows us to see just how much they contributed to both the continued colonization of Algeria and to the “betrayal” of their own principles in France. Perhaps then, it becomes erroneous to view the moderate colonizers’ changing attitudes towards colonial violence as alignment within liberation, or even a reflection of the revolutions’ success, but a strategic move towards locating resistance away from the true battles in which the struggles for liberation were taking place: in the heart of Algeria, then, and Palestine, today.
Salam Jabbour is a researcher, psychologist, and writer who lives between Ireland and Lebanon.
