FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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Previous columns have showed Frantz Fanon’s mistaken ideas about a number of things, especially his illusions about capitalism and nationalism. At best, Fanon’s writings about equality of men and women are wrong about what it takes to end sexism. At worst his comments are viciously sexist and reactionary.
A number of passages in Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks [BS], contain outright hostility toward women and repeat outrageous sexist stereotypes. These include the vicious idea that women secretly desire rape. Most of these passages are far too disgusting to quote here, but we give one example: “Just as there are faces that just ask to be slapped, couldn’t we speak of women who just ask to be raped?” [BS, p. 134]
Fanon treats black men who try to gain acceptance in European society by mastering European culture (as he did himself) quite sympathetically, but severely criticizes women of color who had gained status by marrying white men.
These open attacks on women disappear in his later writings, and in his last book, Fanon said that women should “have the same place as men, not in the articles of the Constitution but in everyday life, in factories, in schools and in assemblies.” [Wretched of the Earth, p. 142]. The key question is how he thought this could be achieved.
In his 1959 book, A Dying Colonialism [DC], Fanon described the first 5 years of the Algerian war for independence. His ideas in the book about the restrictions imposed on women in traditional Algerian society are quite contradictory. He praised young Algerian women fighters who had discarded the haik (a veil that covers the entire body). He also defended expecting women to wear the haik as an expression of defiance against French domination.
The French colonial administration had tried to make Algerian women their allies against the nationalist movement. Demonstrations in which women publicly removed their haiks were covertly organized by the French administration in May 1958. Fanon responded to European criticisms of the haik as an attempt to undermine Algerian culture and as an expression of European rape fantasies [DC, pp. 42, 45]. Some of Fanon’s comments on unveiled women have their own air of fantasy, however. [See DC, pp. 58-9]
Fanon’s most serious error about sexism was not his own attitude, but his belief that participation by women in the Algerian nationalist movement could eliminate sexism:
“The unveiled Algerian woman, who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action, developed her personality, developed the exalted realm of responsibility. The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with women’s liberation, with her entry into history…. This woman … was … bursting the bounds of the narrow world in which she lived without responsibility, and was at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and the birth of a new woman.” [DC, p. 107]
A significant number of women did take part in the armed struggle in Algeria. About 11,000 were registered as veterans after the war, but the actual number is probably much higher. It is true that women’s involvement in mass struggles can help weaken the grip of anti-woman ideology. In Algeria, however, they were fighting for the wrong thing, the illusion of “national” liberation. The positive effects of that movement on women were in fact limited to a fairly small number of women and were largely reversed by the new nationalist government.
Fanon paid little attention to the material, economic basis of sexism. That basis is the wage system, which can never produce equality for the mass of women and men workers, and must be destroyed to end sexism, something “national” liberation does not do.
The fight for gender equality is a key part of mobilizing the masses for communism. Communism can’t be created by a few leaders, but the masses themselves must decide and then do what they have decided. This is impossible without the full participation of women in all areas of social life.
Eliminating the wage system is necessary for gender equality, but so is a determined ideological battle against sexist ideas. Fanon seems to have thought that sexism can be ended by women’s involvement in anti-colonial wars alone. It is ridiculous to think that the battle of ideas is not necessary, and specifically that the fight against religious justifications of sexism, whether from Islam (dominant in Algeria) or other religions, can be avoided.
Only the mobilization of the masses for communism, led by women and men workers, can end sexism. Fanon’s ideas do not help do this.