FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Fanon considered race, not class, to be the most important social category. His most systematic writing about race is in his books Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon saw racism as the result of colonialism.  He held “European civilization and its agents” responsible for it. This overlooks racism in the rest of the capitalist system, like the racism of Japanese capitalism against Chinese and Koreans. Fanon focuses on racism against black people, with some discussion of anti-Arab and anti-Jewish racism.
Fanon was a psychiatrist and most of his writing about racism is about its subjective aspects:  the psychological pain and confusion it causes.  He had a lot of personal experience of racism in Martinique, France and Algeria.  However, he took much of his analysis of the psychology of racism from French idealist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre.
Fanon claimed that “the black … needs white approval” but does not get that recognition. Racist contempt and accusations of inferiority make the victims suffer.  They rob black people “of any value or originality,” seen only as a thing or “a bodily image,” not a human being. The results he saw were a widespread black inferiority complex and the alienation of blacks from whites and from their own bodies and families. Racism also produces guilt, masochism and phobias in whites.
Fanon found these symptoms “in students, workers, and the pimps of Pigalle or Marseille.”  He did not consider them mainly class phenomena, but he emphasized some aspects that primarily affected intellectuals like himself.
Fanon did not acknowledge rebellions of enslaved or colonized black people — for example, in Haiti – who sought to overthrow their white  rulers, not to win their approval.   His one-sided emphasis on psychological pain ignored the healthy anger that has often put black workers in the lead of the fight against racist capitalism.
In his professional work, Fanon struggled to find psychoanalytic analyses of the distress and harmful behavior that racism causes.  He did, however, recognize that medical treatment won’t accomplish much without eliminating the social and economic bases of racism.

Racism’s Material Base

Racism is far more than wrong ideas and hostile attitudes. It is a material system of oppression created by capitalism. Capitalists single out the workers of some racial or ethnic groups and impose especially low wages, bad living conditions and police terror on them. The bosses make much greater profits by doing this.
By creating a system of racist myths and large inequalities in standards of living, capitalists also reinforce their rule with racial divisions among workers. This is a political attack on the whole working class, aimed at preventing a united revolt against capitalism.
As Marx wrote in 1870, racism “is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.”  Yet this material side of racism is mostly missing in Fanon’s work. 
In the United States, for example, black adults are 20% more likely than white adults to report serious psychological distress.  Black adults and children are more likely to experience feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness than white peers.
A great deal of this misery is directly due to economic conditions.  Black adults living below the ridiculously low official poverty line are two to three times more likely to report serious psychological distress than those living above the line.
Nor did Fanon focus on ways that schooling and mass culture promote and reinforce racist stereotypes of black “inferiority.”  Instead he concentrated on issues of “recognition” that might have made sense in his psychiatric practice but not in mass anti-racist struggle.
Fanon did advocate revolutionary action:  “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.” 
However, the revolution Fanon had in mind was not for communism but for “national liberation.”  As we discussed in an earlier column, these were complete failures for the masses.  
Fighting back is good for our mental health whatever our “race” or “ethnicity.”  But the point of violent struggle is to defeat capitalism, not to make us feel better.
Only communism can destroy capitalism and, with it, racism. Only by ending capitalism’s wage system, its borders and its divisions can we create the conditions for the mental and physical health of the masses.
Everywhere on the planet we see masses fighting back.  Those who are most oppressed by capitalist racism must take the lead in mobilizing for communism.  In the process we will prove to ourselves and to the world the creativity, courage and intelligence of the masses.

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