FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a writer, psychiatrist and political activist. He defended revolutionary violence, advocated “national liberation” of colonies and wrote powerful descriptions of the lives of people suffering racist oppression. His writings had a significant influence in the mass anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s.
Advocates of Pan-Africanist politics or of “post-colonial” thinking appeal to his works today, without taking into account the complete historical failure of politics like Fanon’s. This article is the first of a series that will summarize and criticize Fanon’s often contradictory political ideas about racism, nationalism and capitalism from a communist point of view.
Biography
Fanon was born into a middle-class family in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, dominated then and now by a small group of white landowners. In 1943 he left Martinique and fought with the Free French against Nazi Germany. After the war he studied psychiatry in France, and wrote a book attacking anti-black racism called Black Skins, White Masks.
In 1953 Fanon took a French government job as head of the psychiatric ward in a hospital in Blida, Algeria. In 1954 an uprising against French colonial rule began, led by the FLN (National Liberation Front), which was suppressed with great brutality by the French army. Fanon and some of his staff sympathized with the rebels. As the intensity of the fighting increased, Fanon was put in the impossible position of treating Algerian patients who had been tortured by the French cops at the same time as he treated the cops who tortured them and wanted relief from the misery of being a torturer.
By 1956 Fanon, who could no longer stay in Algeria, moved to Tunisia. There he worked as a writer and editor for the FLN newspaper El Moujahid, and wrote articles and books published in France. In 1959 he was appointed ambassador to Ghana by the provisional government of Algeria, where he was diagnosed with leukemia. While fighting the disease he wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in France just before his death. He died in Washington D. C. in 1961.
Liberation of “Man”
Fanon saw the goal of anti-colonial rebellions as advancing toward the liberation of “man,” humanity in the abstract, of no particular class. He did, however, count some classes as allies in this struggle and others as obstacles or enemies.
The Working Class
Fanon thought that the European working class received “social advantages and wage increases” as a result of colonialism. He hoped, however, for support from European workers for anti-colonial struggles as part of the “general process of man’s liberation,” despite their economic interests. [TAR, 145]
Fanon did not see the working class of the colonies as a positive force in the struggle against colonialism. Instead, he wrote that “in colonial territories the proletariat is the kernel of the colonized people most pampered by the colonial regime.” They are “relatively privileged” and have “everything to lose.” [WE, 64] He did not expect them to support the “general process of man’s liberation,” as he expected European workers to do. Instead of the working class, Fanon saw the revolutionary classes in the colonies as the peasantry and the “lumpenproletariat.”
“Lumpenproletariat”
Marx used this term to refer to pimps, thieves, swindlers, and other petty crooks. Fanon’s lumpenproletariat, however, combines the crooks with the masses of unemployed workers living in shantytowns on the fringes of colonial cities. The “pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals,” he wrote, will devote “themselves to the liberation struggle.” [WE, 81-2]. This is both unscientific and insulting to workers. There is a world of difference in political thinking and power between workers who can’t find work and the petty exploiters who prey on them.
The Peasantry
Fanon’s picture of the peasants (a term which includes rich peasants and rural workers) was an idealized one, ignoring class divisions, although the main support for the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria came from poor peasants and rural workers. He saw peasants as spontaneously revolutionary, committed to violent uprisings, and also disciplined and unselfish. Fanon also realized that spontaneity had its limits, and claimed that peasant revolt “needs control and guidance” by a leadership that provided organization and ideology, which came from “militants” who had run away from the corrupt politics of the towns to the countryside. [WE, 86, 95-6]
The experience of the communist movements in Russia and China had already shown that peasants and rural workers can be a powerful revolutionary force, but they need leadership not just from the cities but from the working class and working class ideas, that is, Marxism. But Fanon was vague about what the ideas of the revolution should be, other than “national independence.” He did not live to see the complete failure of national liberation movements to liberate the masses anywhere, from Algeria to Vietnam, despite the heroism and sacrifice by millions.
References: WE: Wretched of the Earth, R. Philcox, trans., New York, 2004; TAR: Toward the African Revolution, H. Chevalier, trans., New York, 1967.
Next column: Fanon on capitalism and the “national bourgeoisie”