FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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In our previous column, we saw some of Fanon’s wrong analysis of classes in colonized countries. He lumped unemployed workers together with pimps and thieves in his “lumpenproletariat” and he lumped rich farmers together with poor farmers and rural workers in his “peasantry.”
These errors are not just carelessness on Fanon’s part, but central to his politics. Fanon maintained that the “first and foremost” division in colonial society was race, not class. He wrote that Marx’s analysis had to be “stretched” to apply to the colonies because there “you are rich because you are white and you are white because you are rich.” [WE, 5] This denial that there are class differences that matter among both the colonists and the colonized population is flatly false, however. It was false in particular about Algeria, and he knew it.
As a rule, the colons (European settlers) in Algeria had higher income and better treatment by the government than the Arab and Berber population of the colony, but few of these colons were actually rich. Wealthy business and land owners (called grands colons) were a small minority. As usual for the French colonies, managers, doctors and engineers recruited directly from France (like Fanon himself) were not rich but had a higher standard of living than Europeans recruited locally for jobs like drivers, mechanics, cooks, security guards, etc. These white workers were not much better off than the colonized population of the cities.
Fanon did acknowledge that many colons helped the anti-colonial struggle, including some who were tortured or killed by the French authorities. He even noted that it was the small settlers (petits colons) who often supported the revolt in the countryside, but he does not explain this by their social class. His nationalist take is that they simply “identified themselves with the Algerian cause.” [DC, 158, 153]
Fanon’s position was that class divisions were far less important than the racial division brutally imposed by the colonizing power. Thus he saw “national” unity, not class unity, as the basis of successful revolt against colonialism. This idea of the relative unimportance of class is, however, contradicted by Fanon’s own analysis of the “national bourgeoisie,” a topic he discussed at length and with some insight.
Fanon called the capitalists who take power at the end of a colonial regime the “national bourgeoisie.” He saw them as hoping to step into the colonizers’ shoes, but economically weak and apathetic. Without industrialists or financiers, they are not “geared to production, invention, creation or work.” [WE, 98]
Fanon claimed there is an “imperative duty” of an “authentic national bourgeoisie of an underdeveloped country to repudiate its bourgeois status and as an instrument of capital and become entirely subservient to the revolutionary capital that the people represent.” The bourgeoisie should “betray” the typical course of its class, learn from the people, and make its knowledge and resources available to them. Fanon is well aware, however, that the bourgeoisie “often” takes the “anti-national” course of a “conventional bourgeoisie.” [WE, 98-9]
In fact, capitalists never behave the way Fanon demands, and he gives a fairly accurate account of what they do in former colonies. The national bourgeoisie takes over all the better-paying positions previously held by Europeans. It becomes a middleman, camouflaging the rule of big capitalists, who still pull the strings. It sells national resources and deposits the profits in foreign banks. It promotes hostility to foreigners, tribalism, regionalism, religious conflict and racism, despite its “vibrant calls for African unity.” [WE, 104]
Fanon concluded that the masses “should bar the way to this useless and harmful bourgeoisie” and skip any bourgeois phase of development. [WE, 119-20]  So in the case of the national bourgeoisie, even Fanon sees class as the decisive social reality, but only because the class interest of capitalists makes them bad nationalists.  Instead he looks to socialism, which he thinks rules out a “society where a privileged few hold the reins of political and economic power.” [WE, 56]
The experience of the five decades since Fanon’s death shows clearly that socialism does no such thing, in developed countries or undeveloped ones. Socialism is capitalism in disguise, ruled by a privileged few, who eventually take the mask off and show their capitalism openly.  Only a classless society, the mobilization of the masses for communism, can prevent a “privileged few” from bringing misery to the masses. But Fanon does not advocate communism. Two main things hold him back from it: his expectation that capitalism of developed countries will actually help economic development of former colonies, and his insistence on “national consciousness.” Future columns will discuss both of these issues.

Next column: Fanon on “national consciousness” and nationalism

References: WE: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, R. Philcox, trans., New York, 2004; DC: Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, H. Chevalier, translator, New York, 1965

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