The birth centenary of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), a seminal figure among thinkers who emerged from oppressed communities, was celebrated on July 20th. In the late 1960s, Fanon's name became synonymous with armed revolution in the "Third World." He was seen as an apostle of violence, a prophet of a violent Third World revolution that, for some, posed an even greater threat to the West than communism. His concept of Third Worldism posited that the future of socialism, and indeed the world, lay not with the proletariat of industrialized nations but with the "dispossessed wretched of the earth." Fanon's ideas ignited revolutionary fervor globally.
Fanon's contributions to humanity are enduring, leaving an indelible mark on liberation struggles. His thought remains a vital tool for the colonized in the "Battle of Ideas" as long as white supremacy and neocolonialism persist.
Frantz Fanon was deeply committed to revolutionary action and human liberation. A profound thinker who offered original and complex insights, he was also a physician and psychiatrist. He applied his scientific knowledge not only professionally but also to heal victims of oppression and violence.
Fanon delved into the fundamental reasons why revolutionary violence was necessary, establishing foundations for groundbreaking experiments. He powerfully connected human behavior with oppressive living conditions.
Fanon developed a strong affinity for Maoism, exploring and applying its framework that centered the peasantry as the driving force of revolution. He also rejected Leninist and Stalinist conventions regarding the vanguard party concept.
During the revolutionary waves of the 1960s and early 1970s, he was widely read and revered. However, as these movements waned, many formerly revolutionary regimes devolved into dictatorships, and neoliberal triumphalism spread worldwide, Fanon's influence seemed to recede. This obscurity served the interests of those in power, regardless of their race.
Born and raised in Martinique, a French Caribbean island colony, Fanon was deeply shaped by the everyday class and race relations prevalent in the early 20th century. He served in World War II in a segregated column of Black troops. Continuing his studies in post-war France, he directly experienced the racism endemic to Europe. In his first book, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), published when he was just 27, Fanon reflected on growing up in a world where, "For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white."
In 1953, Fanon, a Martiniquais psychiatrist, was assigned to Algeria, where he treated patients severely traumatized by French colonial violence. In 1954, as France waged massacres and torture in its Algerian colony, Fanon, working in a hospital in Algiers, dealt with both French police torturers and their Algerian victims. This experience convinced him that psychiatric treatment was ineffective without the destruction of colonialism—an "absolute evil." He joined the Algerian rebels, despite sharing neither language nor religion with most of them, and traveled across Africa, writing works that explored the necessity, means, and scope of revolt.
In his short life, Fanon produced an impressive body of work. His first book, “Black Skin, White Masks”, explored the psychology of colonialism. “A Dying Colonialism”, also known as “Year Five of the Algerian Revolution”, followed, and a collection of essays, “Toward the African Revolution”, was published posthumously.
“The Wretched of the Earth” is his most famous work, solidifying his reputation as a proponent of violent revolution. The U.S. translation, appearing in 1965, was reprinted seven times within a year and has since been translated into seventeen languages.
“Toward the African Revolution” compiles his writings on forging African and Third World unity, with the Algerian Revolution at its forefront. “A Dying Colonialism” examines how the Algerian people shed their internalized inferiority complex by rejecting the colonizer’s cultural practices and embracing their own traditions.
He dedicated his final days to finalizing his most moving work with his wife, Josie. Six decades after its initial publication in Paris, “The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World” remains profoundly relevant. Its title derives from the line "Arise, ye wretched of the earth" from "The Internationale," the Second Communist International’s official anthem, and from Haitian communist intellectual Jacques Romain’s poem, "Sales négres."
In this seminal work, Fanon analyzed the superstructure and base of economic exploitation and alienation, and argued for the imperative of organized rebellion. It transcended dogmatism and orthodoxy, fostering a cutting-edge creativity. It profoundly explored and expressed the soul of the oppressed, particularly the Afro-American race. Most intrinsically, it delves into the compartmentalization of the colonial world, how colonialism permeates the psyche, instilling an inferiority complex, and presents a highly positive model of decolonization.
Fanon wrote about how the Black person, subjugated by the colonists' unprecedented fusion of greed, righteousness, and military efficacy, tended to internalize the demoralizing judgment of the white gaze. "I start suffering from not being a white man," Fanon wrote. "So I will try quite simply to make myself white." Inspired by Sartre, who argued that the anti-Semite’s gaze created the Jew, Fanon concluded that Blackness was another constructed and imposed identity. "The black man is not," he wrote in the closing pages of “Black Skin, White Masks”. "No more than the white man."
This argument underpins the political programs Fanon advocates in “The Wretched of the Earth”, where he argues that because colonialism is "a systematized negation of the other," it "forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?" By the time he wrote this book, however, his focus had shifted. "The misfortune of the colonized African masses, exploited, subjugated, is first of a vital, material order," he wrote, considering the grievances of educated Black men like himself less urgent. In a scathing 1959 review of Richard Wright’s “White Man, Listen” (1957), Fanon stated that "the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude," while painful, does not "kill anyone."
For much of “The Wretched of the Earth”, Fanon was critical of Wright, showing little respect for how "to give back to the peoples of Africa the initiative of their history, and by which means." Distrustful of the "Westernized" intelligentsia and urban working classes within nationalist movements fighting for liberation, he identified the African peasantry as the true "wretched of the earth" and the primary catalyst for decolonization. According to Fanon, "In colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary," as "it has nothing to lose and everything to gain" and, unlike bourgeois leaders, tolerates "no compromise, no possibility of concession."
Fanon made a clear diagnosis of which classes in society would lead the revolution, ideas that were entirely at odds with Marxism. While he had read Marx and quoted him occasionally, his work was more profoundly influenced by Sartre's existentialist phenomenology. Third Worldism exaggerated the role of the peasantry and the dispossessed of the colonial and ex-colonial world (the lumpen proletariat) while downplaying the role of the working class or proletariat.
Fanon's fundamental diagnosis that colonialism is a weapon of "naked violence," which "only gives in when confronted with greater violence," gained immense popularity across Asia and Africa wherever armed revolts erupted against Western colonialists. Fanon presented counter-violence as a form of remedy for dehumanized natives: "As you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs," he wrote, "there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being."
In Fanon's view, the character of the Western bourgeoisie was "fundamentally racist," and its "bourgeois ideology" of equality and dignity camouflaged its capitalist-imperialist nature. In this, he maintained that the West’s material and ideological foundations are rooted in white supremacy. European imperialists had, he charged, "behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world" for centuries, using "deportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery" to amass wealth. Among their "most heinous" crimes were the obliteration of the Black person’s identity, the destruction of their culture and community, and the poisoning of their inner life with a sense of inferiority.
At the same time, Fanon urged the colonized to "stop accusing" their white masters and to do what the latter had so conspicuously failed to do: initiate a "new history of man" that advanced "universalizing values." In his view, anti-colonial nationalism was merely the initial step toward a new radical humanism "for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity."
Many writers overlook the depth of his commitment to thoroughgoing democracy. He leveled his critique of the national bourgeoisie at a general level, without naming specific individuals or organizations in Algeria or other African states. This implied the critique applied only to compromisers with neocolonialism, such as Senegal’s Léopold Senghor or Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast.
Yet, Fanon also critiqued radical, leftist tendencies within African revolutions: "The national bourgeoisie, at the institutional level, skips the parliamentary phase and chooses a national-socialist-type dictatorship." In this process, those who objected were "bludgeoned and incarcerated into silence and then driven underground."
Fanon’s unwavering commitment to democratic governance, thoroughly grounded in the masses, was explored comprehensively in “The Wretched of the Earth”. He understood, like Marx, that socialism was "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." However, in contrast to Europe, it was the peasants rather than the proletariat who constituted the "immense majority" in Africa. This is why Fanon identified them as the revolutionary subject.
Fanon rejected the conventional view that a minoritarian working class led by a "correct" vanguard party could establish a new order. He also did not endorse the idea that a peasantry guided by a "revolutionary" army, operating without democratic governance, could achieve the same. Fanon articulated a position that contradicted many prevailing tendencies in both the Marxist and nationalist-revolutionary left.
While Fanon may have been too quick to dismiss the working class, many of his critics were also too hasty in assuming that peasants could never play an independent political role. Still, the vital question for today lies in the contemporary relevance of his concept of a democratic transition.
Despite much celebration of Fanon’s work, many writers neglect the depth of his commitment to thoroughgoing democracy.
Though Fanon died of leukemia at the age of 36, revolutionaries worldwide have continued his work, applying his ideas to their own national liberation struggles. Fanon's research and diagnoses continue to shape the thought processes of awakening generations in life-and-death struggles from Johannesburg to Gaza to Harlem.
As political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, the Black Panthers were Fanonists. His audio essay and tribute to Fanon explore what the psychiatrist's anti-colonial perspicacity meant to a 15-year-old Mumia, who has spent 40 years in prison. In “Seize the Time”, Bobby Seale recounted Fanon’s influence on the young Panthers and how Huey P. Newton read the book seven times.
In the US, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael claimed Fanon as one of his "patron saints," and Eldridge Cleaver boasted that "every brother on a roof top" could quote Fanon (though Fanon could certainly not be described as a Black nationalist). In 1968, a journalist noted Fanon’s book, “Les Damnés de la Terre”, piled alongside “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung” and works by Régis Debray, during a visit to Palestinian militants in Jordan. In the late 1960s, a Cuban "Movimento Black Power" emerged, and for a brief period, its Afro-styled members discussed Fanon and other Black writers until the group's suppression in 1971. In 1968, a spokesman for the separatist Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) defined himself as a "Quebecois proletarian, one of America’s white niggers, one of the ‘wretched of the earth.’"
The last sixty years have seen numerous examples of hierarchical and dictatorial political tendencies that disregarded the need for the kind of democratic transition to socialism that Fanon envisioned. Today’s social movements have absorbed these lessons, consistently adopting non-hierarchical, horizontal forms that promote free and open public debate on all issues facing the movement, thereby resurrecting the insights found in Fanon’s new humanism, which stands as a more compelling testament to his thinking than ever.
This does not imply that Fanon provided a definitive formula for transcending bourgeois society. He was still examining these problems in his final work and left many issues unresolved.
Fanon would have vehemently rejected the outcomes of the Algerian revolution, which did not usher in a new era of democratic socialism. Today, the country is governed by a military regime grappling with Islamic Fundamentalism. Regrettably, the fundamentalist Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) uses Fanon’s writings on revolutionary violence to justify the brutality with which they attack the Algerian regime.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, amidst widespread revolutionary upheaval and political turmoil, a host of "new" ideas emerged to challenge genuine Marxism. Ideas like those propounded by Frantz Fanon, among others, came to the forefront. Maoism became separated from Leninism, negating the organizing of a vanguard party and the leadership of the working class. "Guevarism" (or guerrillism) gained prominence, advocating focoism. "Third Worldism" also rose, rejecting unity with white workers, thereby triggering the Lin Biaoist doctrine.
However positive, Fanon was unable to formulate a coherent doctrine for Third World liberation. Although Algeria was clearly on his mind throughout “The Wretched of the Earth”, the book did not offer constructive criticism of the FLN or its leading figures and tendencies.
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*Freelance journalist
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