Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’ – A Marxist critique

The name of Frantz Fanon is intimately associated with the anti-colonial struggle of the postwar period, and his major work, The Wretched of the Earth, is regularly cited as a handbook for anti-imperialist struggle around the world. In this article, Jorge Martín separates the real Fanon from his postcolonial interpreters, and explains both the strengths and the flaws of his ideas.

The article was orginally published as part of issue 45 of In Defence of Marxism magazine, the quarterly theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here!

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is very famous and influential, particularly in the universities. It is common to see Fanon and his ideas raised as a ‘correction’ to Marxism on the question of the colonial struggle, often by people who have read neither Marx nor Fanon.

But if we are to genuinely understand Fanon’s ideas and their relationship with Marxism, it is necessary to study the context in which The Wretched of the Earth was written, and compare the perspective set out in Fanon’s book with subsequent events. And such a study can only lead to the conclusion that, while it contains quite a few very interesting insights and warnings, The Wretched of the Earth also contains several points about revolutionary strategy that are wrong, and cannot offer a way forward for revolutionaries today.

Early influences

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique, which remains a French colony to this day. Fanon was born into what you could describe as a middle-class family, which allowed him to get a proper education. He attended a private secondary school where he was educated in the values of the French Republic - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - and he looked up to the French classics in literature, to the French enlightenment authors, and the French Revolution. These shaped his early ideas. Fanon was also influenced by one of the teachers at his lycée: Aimée Cesaire, who had joined the Communist Party, like many other Black intellectuals of his generation.

France capitulated to Nazi Germany in 1940, and its colonies were split between those territories that supported the Nazi-collaborating ‘Vichy’ regime, headed by Marshal Pétain, and those who supported ‘Free France’, headed by De Gaulle. In 1943, at the age of 17, Fanon made a failed attempt to join the forces of ‘Free France’ by fleeing to Dominica, and in 1944 he crossed the Atlantic, landing in Morocco and later travelling to Algeria as part of De Gaulle’s army.

Through his experience in the army, he soon realised that his idealised view of the French Republic as a country of enlightenment, democracy and equality did not correspond to reality / Image: public domain

Through his experience in the army, he soon realised that his idealised view of the French Republic as a country of enlightenment, democracy and equality did not correspond to reality. He could see how, even within the ranks of the French Army there was racism, discrimination and prejudice. Soldiers were split along ethnic lines into different categories and units.

After the war, he returned to Martinique. In 1945 he participated in the campaign of Aimée Cesaire to be elected as a Communist deputy.

Studies in psychiatry

In 1946, Fanon went to France to finish his studies in psychiatry. His book, Black Skin, White Masks, was originally presented as his thesis for his degree. It was rejected and then published as a separate work. Many try to read a lot into this book, as if it were a work of political theory. In fact it is an attempt to analyse the psychological impact of racism, both on the minds of the oppressed colonial peoples, and on the minds of the colonisers. For that reason it is very much loved in postmodern academia, which likes anything that is obscure and deals mainly with the mind.

To say, as many argue today, that Fanon’s standpoint hinged on the need to “decolonise the mind” is completely false. In fact, if you read what Fanon actually wrote, he argues that people are changed through direct revolutionary action and that only a violent uprising against colonialism can change the people who are colonial subjects. Precisely the opposite of what is presented by postmodern or ‘postcolonial’ academia today.

After the end of his studies he worked at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban, in France. There, he became a close friend and collaborator of the director, Francesc Tosquelles, who had been a member of the POUM during the Spanish Revolution and had been exiled into France.

Tosquelles argued that one should not see the psychiatric patient in isolation or try to treat him just on the basis of chemical and psychological processes in his brain, but rather, the patient had to be approached as a social person as well; a patient’s environment and background had to be taken into account, not just to diagnose him but also in order to treat him. This approach had a great influence on Fanon, who challenged the dominant racist approach in psychiatry regarding the existence of a so-called “North African syndrome”.

In 1953, Fanon took a position as the director of a psychiatric hospital in Blida-Joinville, Algeria. This decision was not politically motivated, but rather he was driven by the fact that it was easier to get such a position in Algeria (which was legally treated not as a colony but part of France proper) than in metropolitan France.

The Algerian War

In 1945, with the surrender of the Nazis, demonstrations for national and democratic rights erupted across Algeria. These were brutally repressed, particularly in Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, where thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of Algerians were massacred by the French Army and armed settlers.

Scandalously, both the French and Algerian Communist Parties sided with the French state, describing Algerian protestors as “thugs” and “fascists”. A PCF member was Minister for the Air Force, responsible for aerial bombardment of the nationalist protestors, and the PCF backed “special powers” for the French government in Algeria in 1956. This would permanently sever any link between the Stalinist ‘Communist’ Parties and the Algerian liberation movement.

Under the blows of the colonial regime, the liberation movement itself split over the question of violence, with a more militant layer eventually crystallising into the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). On 1 November 1954, the FLN carried out a series of attacks on French colonial infrastructure, which marked the beginning of the Algerian war of national liberation.

Fanon joined the FLN in 1955, making contact through friends and acquaintances at the hospital. Initially, his main role was to provide medical treatment and refuge for FLN fighters at the hospital, but soon the situation became untenable. In January 1956, he wrote a resignation letter as a doctor and hospital director and went back to France, and then on to Tunisia, which was one of the bases of the FLN abroad.

Already an established intellectual figure, in Tunis he became one of the editors of El Moudjahid, the FLN paper, where he wrote or co-wrote many of the main articles, which were published unsigned. He was also appointed as ambassador of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in Ghana. In that capacity, he travelled to several conferences in African countries where he got a first-hand impression of the situation in these newly independent states.

At the end of 1960, Fanon was diagnosed with leukaemia and told he had only months to live. After unsuccessful attempts to treat him, he died in December 1961 in the US at the age of 36.

This sets the context in which The Wretched of the Earth was written, in the Spring and Summer of 1961. Fanon knew he was going to die and he wanted to leave some of his final thoughts in writing, about what he had seen around Africa, his experience in the Algerian Revolution and any lessons that could be drawn from it for other similar movements.

In fact, the book was not written, but dictated by Fanon, which comes across in the style of the text. It does not contain many references, nor are there many quotations. It is just the raw speech of a dying man, who is desperate, angry, and who wants to leave something in writing about things that really worry him. The book’s raw character and powerful language had a great impact on other revolutionaries at the time and continues to influence movements across the world. But it is necessary for any revolutionary to separate that which is correct in Fanon’s book from that which is false.

Internationalism

The title of the book comes from a line in the original French lyrics of The Internationale, “Debout les damnés de la terre”. However, Fanon did not take it directly from the Internationale, but rather via the poem Sales nègres by the Haitian poet Jacques Roumain, who was also a founder of the Haitian Communist Party. Sales nègres, written in 1945, is a poem about the rebellion of the colonial peoples together with the workers of the advanced countries and it uses the words of the Internationale as a rallying cry to revolt to put an end to the world of bankers and capitalists.

The title of the book comes from a line in the original French lyrics of the Internationale, however, Fanon did not take it directly from the Internationale, but rather via the poem by the Haitian poet Jacques Roumain / Image: public domain

The link between the struggle of the colonially oppressed masses and that of the proletariat in the imperialist countries was also something taken up by Fanon. Contrary to what is argued by most postcolonial theorists, Fanon did not argue that the working class of advanced capitalist countries could not play a revolutionary role. He complained bitterly that the French left and democrats, particularly the Socialist and Communist Parties, were not fulfilling their duty of supporting the Algerian liberation movement, for instance in his famous letter French Intellectuals and Democrats and the Algerian Revolution (published as a series of three articles in El Moudjahid in the issues of December 1, 15, and 30, 1957):

“One of the first duties of intellectuals and democratic elements in colonialist countries is unreservedly to support the national aspirations of colonised peoples. This attitude is based on very important theoretical considerations: … the community of interests between the working classes of the conquering country and the combined population of the conquered and dominated country…”

This open letter ends with a clear appeal to the French Left, one which links the struggle for living conditions and democratic rights by the French people with the struggle of the Algerian people for national liberation:

"The FLN addresses itself to the French Left, to French democrats, and asks them to encourage every strike undertaken by the French people against the rise in the cost of living, new taxes, the restriction of democratic freedoms in France, all of which are direct consequences of the Algerian war. The FLN asks the French Left to strengthen its action in spreading information and to continue to explain to the French masses the characteristics of the struggle of the Algerian people, the principles that animate it, and the objectives of the Revolution. The FLN salutes the French who have had the courage to refuse to take up arms against the Algerian people and who are now in prison. These examples must be multiplied …"^[1]

In The Wretched of the Earth he adds that the task of liberating mankind, “the whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help of the European peoples”, but that for this to be possible they first must decide “to wake up and shake themselves.” ^[2]

Role of the bourgeoisie

Throughout the book Fanon is very preoccupied with the role of the national bourgeoisie in colonised countries. This is one of the strong points of the book. He describes the national bourgeoisie as treacherous; he says it should never be allowed to come to power because if it does it will become an agent of imperialism. Its only aim is to replace imperialist rule with its own. Fanon argues that it has none of the revolutionary characteristics the bourgeoisie had (and lost) historically in the west, etc. In all of this he is completely correct.

Fanon was speaking from experience. As a representative of the GPRA, he saw exactly this process occur in many of the newly independent African countries he visited, and concluded: “It is commonplace to observe… that in the majority of cases, for ninety-five percent of the population of under-developed countries, independence brings no immediate change”. ^[3]

Fanon explains:

“The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie's business agent, and it will play its part without any complexes in a most dignified manner. But this same lucrative role, this cheap-Jack's function, this meanness of outlook and this absence of all ambition symbolise the incapability of the national middle class to fulfil its historic role of bourgeoisie… In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth.”^[4]

From this premise, Fanon drew very sharp conclusions: “In under-developed countries, the bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for its existence and growth”. And he adds: “The theoretical question that for the last fifty years has been raised whenever the history of under-developed countries is under discussion - whether or not the bourgeoisie phase can be skipped - ought to be answered in the field of revolutionary action, and not by logic.”

While Fanon here seems to reject the role of theory, his conclusion is nevertheless clear: “the bourgeois phase in the history of under-developed countries is a completely useless phase.” ^[5] He insists: “We must repeat, it is necessary to oppose vigorously and definitely the birth of a national bourgeoisie”.^[6]

In this he is completely correct. He did not arrive at these conclusions through any theoretical investigation, but rather through his own practical experience. This indictment of the national bourgeoisie, the middle class and the leadership of the national liberation movements was written in 1961, shortly before Algerian independence. It is likely that he was not just referring to what he had seen in other African countries, but also what he could see in the FLN itself - petty-bourgeois elements coming to the top of the movement, already dividing the spoils among themselves and caring nothing for the wretched of the earth who had carried out the struggle.

As a matter of fact, Fanon’s position on this question (the role of the national bourgeoisie in backward countries) comes close to that elaborated by Trotsky in Permanent Revolution and also in the Communist International’s theses on the colonial and Eastern questions, adopted in 1920 and 1922.

Both Lenin and Trotsky insisted that the bourgeoisie in backward and oppressed countries would not, and could not, play any progressive role in the struggle against imperialism. Instead, they explained, the oppressed masses should seize power and overthrow capitalism, with the working class at their head.

As Lenin put it: “the Communist International should advance the proposition, with the appropriate theoretical grounding, that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.” ^[7]

But there are important differences between Fanon’s conception of the colonial revolution, and that put forward by Lenin and Trotsky. This is where the flaws of The Wretched of the Earth become most clear.

The working class

One of the main weaknesses of the book is that Fanon does not start from a detailed scientific analysis of Algerian society and its history. Fanon makes a couple of references to Marx and Engels in his works, but it is clear that he was never a Marxist. In The Wretched of the Earth he argues that “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem”.

In reality, as we will see, his slight stretching becomes a fundamental departure from Marxist analysis. His reasoning for this is that: “When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a super structure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”^[8]

One of the main weaknesses of the book is that Fanon does not start from a detailed scientific analysis of Algerian society and its history / Image: public domain

This analysis of race replacing class in colonial societies led him further to conclude that “it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” ^[9] To which he adds that also the lumpenproletariat are revolutionary: “So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men”^[10], although later on he himself admits that the lumpen can be used by colonialist reaction:

“Colonialism will also find in the lumpenproletariat a considerable space for manoeuvring. For this reason any movement for freedom ought to give its fullest attention to this lumpenproletariat. The peasant masses will always answer the call to rebellion, but if the rebellion's leaders think it will be able to develop without taking the masses into consideration, the lumpenproletariat will throw itself into the battle and will take part in the conflict—but this time on the side of the oppressor. And the oppressor, who never loses a chance of setting the niggers against each other, will be extremely skillful in using that ignorance and incomprehension which are the weaknesses of the lumpenproletariat. If this available reserve of human effort is not immediately organised by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired soldiers side by side with the colonial troops.”^[11]

Lenin and Trotsky, and the Communist International under their leadership, insisted on the leading role of the proletariat, including in backward, colonial countries which, while participating in the general movement for national liberation, had to organise independently from the very beginning.

Fanon theorises that the working class in a country like Algeria is in fact ‘bourgeois’, it is a privileged layer without which colonial society could not exist. From that, he draws the conclusion that the workers have an interest in maintaining colonialism and therefore they cannot be trusted or relied upon in the struggle for national liberation:

“It cannot be too strongly stressed that in the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonised population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position. In capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have everything to gain. In the colonial countries the working class has everything to lose; in reality it represents that fraction of the colonised nation which is necessary and irreplaceable if the colonial machine is to run smoothly: it includes tram conductors, taxi drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, nurses, and so on. It is these elements which constitute the most faithful followers of the nationalist parties, and who because of the privileged place which they hold in the colonial system constitute also the ‘bourgeois’ fraction of the colonised people.”^[12]

Fanon’s ideas about the role different classes play in the revolutionary movement in backward capitalist countries have been disproven many times in many different countries, including in Algeria itself. Yes, the Algerian working class was very small at that time. But the Russian working class was also small in proportion to the population as a whole at the time of the Russian Revolution and yet the Bolsheviks based themselves on the workers to lead a successful revolution.

The Algerian working class had longstanding revolutionary traditions: militant, communist traditions. To give just one example, in 1950, only 10 years before Fanon was writing those lines, there was a French dockers’ strike against the shipment of weapons for the French colonial war in Indochina. The movement, called by the CGT union, actually started at the port of Oran, in Algeria, before the ports in metropolitan France. 2,500 dockers completely paralysed the harbour, preventing any shipment of weapons for the war. In response to brutal police repression, the movement widened into an all-out general strike in the whole of the town, in a struggle that lasted for weeks and the colonial authorities were unable to put down.^[13]

Here we have a marvellous example of the role the working class plays in a capitalist society, even in a backward, colonised one. A small group of workers using their power to paralyse a key sector of the economy, then rally behind them the masses of the population, in this case in a political anti-imperialist movement. And these are the layers described by Fanon as “the bourgeois fraction of the colonised people”!

Even during the Algerian war of national liberation there were a number of important general strikes. In July 1956, the FLN called a national general strike, not only in Algeria, but also among the Algerian workers in France. The strike had a massive following, not only amongst the workers but also amongst wider layers of the population, including a shut-down of shops and small businesses, the participation of middle-class intellectuals and students, etc.

In 1957, after the defeat of the battle of Algiers (brilliantly depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film of the same name), the FLN called an eight-day national strike, which paralysed the whole country. The strike was led primarily by working-class elements, but involved the Algerian people as a whole, revealing the enormous power of the workers and also the massive support the liberation movement had.

The problem with these actions was that the petty-bourgeois FLN leadership conceived the activity of the workers as nothing more than a means of gaining leverage in negotiations at the United Nations, and presenting itself as the sole ‘legitimate’ representative of the Algerian people in the eyes of the so-called ‘international community’. At no point did the FLN leadership see the strike movement as a way of preparing and organising the forces of the working class towards a mass, revolutionary uprising.

The working class played a very important role in the Algerian war of national liberation / Image: public domain

The working class played a very important role in the Algerian war of national liberation. But there is another element. There were about 300,000 Algerian workers in France, and they worked in the big factories. At the Renault Billancourt factory, there were 2,000 Algerian workers, concentrated in the lower paid grades, for instance in the foundry, where they represented about 60 percent of the workforce. They played a big role in the national liberation struggle, by going on strike, funding the movement, and they were crucial in the 17 October 1961 demonstration in Paris, in which hundreds were killed by police repression.

Even in a country like Algeria in the 1950s, where the working class represented a small percentage of the population, it can and should play the leading role in any revolutionary struggle, for two main reasons. First, because of the way in which the working class is able to develop a collective consciousness as a result of being exploited by the same boss under similar conditions. Second, because the working class in any capitalist society has the power to stop production and bring society to a halt, which is a power that the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat do not have. At the centre of any capitalist society is the opposition between workers and capitalists, the extraction of surplus value from the working class being the mechanism through which capital is accumulated.

Other layers can play an important role in a revolutionary movement, particularly in a country like Algeria, where the peasantry made up the majority of the population, but only the working class is capable of providing an independent leadership that can overthrow both imperialism and its bourgeois puppets in the colonies.

All history demonstrates that the peasantry is incapable of playing an independent role in the revolutionary struggle. This is for three main reasons. First, the peasantry as a class is very heterogeneous, being composed of different layers, from landless peasants to small farmers and to middle and rich farmers employing waged labour. This means that some peasants actually exploit other peasants. Second, the main feature dominating the peasant’s outlook is his desire to own land, summarised in the slogan of “land to the tiller”. This, with very few exceptions, means that the peasantry develops an individualistic outlook, one which is closely linked to the question of his own individual property. Finally, even if a revolutionary movement conquers power in the cities with the help of a peasant army, the peasants themselves must return to their plot of land. Thus, they cannot, as a class, hold power.

Violence

At the beginning of the book Fanon talks about violence, and he is quite right on one thing: the violence of the oppressed cannot be compared nor equated with the violence of the oppressors. One must understand the violence of the oppressed as being the result of decades of brutal repression, petty injuries, and the suppression of national feeling. In this, he is correct.

But he is wrong in regard to violence in two ways. First is when he describes violence as a necessary cathartic experience, from an individual and a collective point of view: “for the colonised people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole… At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”^[14]

This exaggeration of the role of violence, which perhaps reflects Fanon’s training as a psychiatrist, betrayed a serious weakness in Fanon’s analysis. It is certainly true that the mentality of the oppressed changes in the course of a revolution and collective action serves to reveal the strength of the mass movement and creates confidence in its own forces. That does not require that every individual kills an agent of the colonial power or sets off a bomb.

At the beginning of the book Fanon talks about violence, and he is quite right on one thing: the violence of the oppressed cannot be compared nor equated with the violence of the oppressors / Image: public domain

Fanon’s inconsistent application of a class analysis also led him to completely false conclusions. Having drawn a correct criticism of the role of the national bourgeois in colonial countries, he then argues that the problem lies in the methods used to achieve independence in countries like Senegal. There, Fanon explains, independence was achieved through peaceful means, negotiations and compromises. Independence was conceded by the former colonial power and that’s why it went wrong.

If instead, revolutionary violence is used to overthrow and push the colonialists out, he argues, the ‘people’, having carried out the armed struggle, would still have control of the movement after taking power, and would not allow the bourgeoisie to take over. “Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilised through a rapid movement of decolonisation, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no special merit. … When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as ‘liberators’”, he says. “Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification.” ^[15]

Algeria would prove Fanon wrong. The Algerian Revolution, after independence had been conquered in 1962, went through an initial very radical phase of land occupations, factory occupations and workers’ self-management, and the nationalisation of industries. Very soon however, that was completely reversed by the Boumédiène coup in 1965 and the establishment of a bureaucratic, capitalist dictatorship. This was exactly what Fanon was warning against and what he wanted to prevent.

The fact that the Algerian revolution took place through armed struggle, through violence, did not prevent that same degeneration from taking place. The crucial question was not that of the degree of violence used in the struggle for independence, but rather, the class character and the program of the leadership. The responsibility for that lies mainly in the French and Algerian Communist Parties, which had abandoned a clear Leninist position.

A flawed theory will lead to mistakes in practice, and Fanon made one such mistake in his capacity as an ambassador for the Algerian provisional government. At that time, Fanon was dealing with different groups across the continent who were seeking help from the Algerians for their struggle. In Angola, there were two such groups which contacted the FLN. One was Holden Roberto’s UPA (Union of Peoples of Angola) and the other one was the MPLA (Movement for the People's Liberation of Angola).

Instead of looking at their politics, their class content or any other factors of that kind, Fanon concentrated on just one thing: which one of the two groups was the one that wanted to start armed struggle as soon as possible. The MPLA wanted to do some preparatory work and build bases in the cities before launching armed struggle. This led him to choose the worst of the two groups: Holden Roberto’s UPA.^[16]

This tribal-based organisation, which was already in the pay of the United States, was then to become the FLNA, one of the main reactionary forces during the Angolan civil war after independence. It was backed by the US, China and the reactionary Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and fought on the same side as reactionary cut-throats UNITA and apartheid South Africa against the MPLA and the Cubans at the famous battle of Cuito Cuanavale. With Fanon’s approval and the support of the Algerian FLN, the UPA launched a botched and ill-prepared armed incursion into Angola from the Congo in 1961, which led to disaster.

If you take violence as your only criterion, then you are bound to make all sorts of mistakes. There will be organisations that are in favour of violence for all the wrong reasons, that have the wrong perspective, wrong politics. In this case, Fanon ended up supporting a group that was also backed by the CIA, and a few years down the line was on the same side as apartheid South Africa.

Instead of looking at their politics, their class content or any other factors of that kind, Fanon concentrated on just one thing: which one of the two groups was the one that wanted to start armed struggle as soon as possible / Image: public domain

Capitalism or socialism?

Fanon was also extremely confused about what kind of society the Algerian Revolution would create. Was it socialism? Capitalism? He says different things throughout the book about this question, contradicting himself. At one point he says: “the choice of a socialist regime, a regime which is completely orientated toward the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously”.^[17] But then in another passage he says: “The fundamental duel which seemed to be that between colonialism and anticolonialism, and indeed between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth.”^[18] How can you have the redistribution of wealth if you avoid the question of capitalism or socialism?

And then he adds:

“[T]he underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them. The concrete problem we find ourselves up against is not that of a choice, cost what it may, between socialism and capitalism as they have been defined by men of other continents and of other ages.”^[19]

So, what he is saying is that the conflict between socialism and capitalism was not relevant to Algeria in the mid-20th Century, as if that were a question of 19th Century Europe. What was his alternative to this ‘false choice’? The Non-Aligned Movement, which was founded at the Bandung Conference in 1955. In the context of the struggle between the diplomatic bloc around the Stalinist Soviet Union and the Western imperialist bloc, led by the USA, a number of third world countries attempted to balance between the two of them and try to gain more autonomy.

That was similar to some of the ideas floating around today about the progressive character of a ‘multipolar world’. But we must stress that the NAM and the Bandung Conference did not struggle for national liberation and they had no progressive content whatsoever. They involved all sorts of different countries. Some, like Yugoslavia, had abolished capitalism, but others were reactionary semi-feudal monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco, some of them even closely allied to US imperialism. And this was supposed to be the alternative to the ‘false choice between socialism and capitalism’!

Of course, some of the limitations in the political thought of Fanon stemmed from the betrayal of Stalinism. The Stalinised Communist Party of France had betrayed the Algerian Revolution, the Soviet Union was not spreading world revolution, but rather espoused ‘peaceful coexistence’. That was not a very attractive proposition, and he was looking for some sort of third way.

Unfortunately, this led Fanon to draw some extremely naive conclusions. In the book, he argues that colonial countries have to fight for national liberation through violent struggle and then convince the imperialist countries that it is in their best interest to allow and help the national development of those newly independent countries:

“Insofar as the Third World is in fact abandoned and condemned to regression or at least to stagnation by the selfishness and wickedness of Western nations, the underdeveloped peoples will decide to continue their evolution inside a collective autarky. Thus the Western industries will quickly be deprived of their overseas markets. The machines will pile up their products in the warehouses and a merciless struggle will ensue on the European market between the trusts and the financial groups. The closing of factories, the paying off of workers and unemployment will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. Then the monopolies will realise that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries—unstinted aid with not too many conditions. (...)

“We ought on the contrary to emphasise and explain to the capitalist countries that the fundamental problem of our time is not the struggle between the socialist regime and them. The Cold War must be ended, for it leads nowhere. The plans for nuclearising the world must stop, and large-scale investments and technical aid must be given to underdeveloped regions.”^[20]

Distortions

In summary, we can say that there are at least two strong and very important points in The Wretched of the Earth. First, a very sharp criticism and warning against the national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries. Second, that decolonisation can only be carried out successfully by the masses themselves in a revolution. This is reflected in the fact that Fanon, who was a middle-class, educated person from Martinique, in the Caribbean, decided to throw in his lot with the struggle in the country where he was based, and he defended the right of the people of Algeria to rise up against the violence of the oppressors.

But as far as this book being a useful contribution or a blueprint for revolutionary strategy in countries dominated by imperialism is concerned, it contains many confused statements and others that are plainly wrong and counter-productive.

Further, Fanon has been mangled beyond recognition by academics in universities. Fanon is extremely popular in those quarters, where they pick up the most obscure aspects of what Fanon said, twist his ideas, turn them around and make them into something that is completely incomprehensible and has very little to do with what Fanon actually said or did.

To give just one example; a group of academics in a Canadian university organised a Fanon seminar in 2020 and wrote about “Fanon’s geographies”:

“[A]cross his texts, Fanon is the arbiter of geographic knowledge, and this positionality provides him with a kind of cartographic precision that simultaneously holds on to, and collapses, coloniality… Fanon’s geographies cannot be theorised as enclosed or contained. His writings can be shared and discussed and practised collaboratively and this kind of capaciousness lends to an interdisciplined and open sense of place.”^[21]

It is almost impossible to understand a single word of what is meant here, and that is deliberate.

It is not by chance that postmodern decolonial academics rely so heavily on Fanon, picking up the most obscure and confused elements of his work and stressing particularly his writings on psychiatry. All they are concerned with is the ‘decolonisation of the mind’. They are time-wasters who revolve around the contemplation of their own inner thought processes.

In contrast to them, Fanon was a revolutionary. He insisted on being given a fighting role in the movement, which was denied by the FLN leaders who thought he could play a more useful role in other capacities. It is as a revolutionary that he should be judged and it is our duty to point out the shortcomings of his approach to revolutionary strategy as well as his strong points.

Which way forward?

Today, the overwhelming majority of former colonial countries have achieved formal independence, but as Fanon presciently warned, under the rule of their ‘national’ bourgeoisies, they remain chained to imperialism, and masses of workers and peasants are still oppressed.

In recent years we have seen courageous mass uprisings in country after country, in Egypt and Tunisia, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Chile, in Ecuador, and many more / Image: Lana Haroun

In recent years we have seen courageous mass uprisings in country after country, in Egypt and Tunisia, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Chile, in Ecuador, and many more. There is no shortage of heroism, courage and willingness to struggle for genuine liberation.

What is required is to arm the revolutionary vanguard in these countries with a clear theoretical understanding of the way forward in terms of the class forces involved in the revolution and the character it should adopt. For this, we need to go back to Lenin and the early days of the Communist International.

The dominated countries can only gain genuine liberation by overthrowing imperialism. This task cannot be carried out by the national bourgeoisie, which is unable and unwilling to play any progressive role (as Fanon correctly pointed out) and is tied in a thousand different ways to foreign imperialism.

Only by the working class, putting itself at the head of the nation, can the chains of imperialist domination be broken. The national democratic tasks will be combined with the socialist tasks by expropriating not only the multinationals but also the local capitalists. Finally, the revolution cannot be completed within the national boundaries but needs to become international in its scope. Only through the world socialist revolution can backward dominated countries achieve a future of economic development and genuine freedom.

References

[1] F Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, Grove Press, 1988, pg 76, 90

[2] F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, 2001, pg 84

[3] ibid., pg 59

[4] ibid., pg 122-123

[5] ibid., pg 142-143

[6] ibid., pg 161

[7] V I Lenin, ‘Report Of The Commission On The National and The Colonial Questions’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers, 1965, pg 139

[8] F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, 2001, pg 31

[9] ibid., pg 41

[10] ibid., pg 103

[11] ibid., pg 109

[12] ibid., pg 86, emphasis added

[13] See: A Aabid, ‘La grève historique des dockers d’Oran’, El Watan, 13 February 2010

[14] F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, 2001, pg 73-74

[15] ibid., pg 74

[16] See: ibid., pg 107

[17] ibid., pg 78

[18] ibid., pg 77-78

[19] ibid., pg 78

[20] ibid., pg 83, emphasis added

[21] J Aguiar et al., “Impermanence: On Frantz Fanon’s Geographies”, Antipode Online, 18 August 2021