Fanon by Michael Burawoy
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books b return to fanon by michael burawoy during World War Two. After the war, he Written when most of Africa was still returned to Martinique, only to soon leave under colonial rule, it was a prophetic again for Lyon, where he would acquire account of divergent roads out of colonial a medical degree in psychiatry. In 1953 domination. To that end, it was a class he transferred to a post at Algeria’s Blida- analysis of racial subjugation that stood Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. Appalled by The Communist Manifesto on its head. the psychic trauma of colonial violence Marx and Engels regarded the industrial experienced by his patients—Black and working class as the revolutionary class White—he joined the FLN (National Lib- while the peasantry, in Marx’s famous eration Front) in the struggle for indepen- words, was a sack of potatoes; in Fanon’s The The Wretched of the Earth dence. He was expelled from Algeria in view, it was the reverse—the colonial by Frantz Fanon 1957 for his political activities, settling in working class was a relatively privileged Grove Atlantic, 320 pp. Tunis as FLN’s ambassador in West Africa. class interested at best in reform, while He died four years later, but not before the dispossessed peasantry, unifi ed by Articulating the dangers and the possibili- completing The Wretched of the Earth, its shared relationship to land, was the ties of decolonization, Frantz Fanon’s The bible of liberation movements not just revolutionary class. They, not the working Wretched of the Earth, loomed large over in Africa but across the world, infl uenc- class, had nothing to lose but their chains. African studies in the 1960s and 1970s. ing such notable fi gures as Ali Shariati For Marx and Engels, revolutionary With its arousing language, its gripping in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Paulo impetus advanced through inclusionary descriptions, and its compelling argu- Freire in Brazil, Che Guevara in Cuba, and exploitation, while for Fanon it advanced ment, it traverses seamlessly between the Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party in through exclusionary dispossession. psychological and the structural, between the United States. Indeed, many Third World Revolutions – alienation and domination. Yet, it passes As the revolutionary optimism of China, Vietnam, Cuba—were made by lightly over the connecting tissue, the the 1960s has given way to varieties of a dispossessed peasantry. While Theda social processes that are the entry point Afro-pessimism, Fanon has become bet- Skocpol’s classic States and Social Revo- for ethnography. In this essay, I sketch ter known for his fi rst book, Black Skin, lutions reduced the French, Russian and Fanon’s theory of decolonization, how it White Masks (1952), psychoanalytical Chinese revolutions to a single “classical” shaped one of my ethnographies of post- refl ections on Black responses to racial type in which peasant revolt was essential colonial Zambia, and I end with refl ec- domination in France. Whether by speak- to each, Fanon insisted on the African tions on its signifi cance today. ing better French or through inter-racial Revolution as a distinct product of the partners—every attempt to escape racial colonial context. Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 into the domination condemns one Black immi- He discerned two routes of decolo- aspirant Black middle class of the French grant to recapitulate and consolidate nization: a national bourgeois road (NBR) Caribbean colony of Martinique; he died racial domination. Blackness is framed animated by an emerging Black bour- in 1961 of leukemia, fighting against by and against whiteness. If Black Skin, geoisie (made up of civil servants, teach- French colonialism in Algeria, on the eve Whites Masks posed the problem of tran- ers, lawyers, small traders) and a national of independence. At his lycée Fanon came scending racism, The Wretched of the liberation struggle (NLS) driven by a volca- under the spell of the Martiniquan poet, Earth offered a solution: the violent over- nic peasantry becoming organically con- politician, and philosopher of Negritude, throw of colonialism could unleash col- nected to dissident intellectuals expelled Aimé Césaire. Fleeing the Vichy occu- lective energies for social transformation. from the towns, who gave programmatic pation of Martinique, at the age of 18, However, The Wretched of the Earth direction to insurgency. If the NBR was Fanon fought in the French Free Army was far more than a revolutionary tract. concerned with the replacement of White 70 contexts.org by Black, a reformist road in which the shaped by class struggles among the they could be very effective in subverting class structure remained unaltered, only colonized. Still, there were ambiguities socialist projects and forcing former colo- changing the color of its incumbents, the here, especially the temporal sequencing nies into the NBR straight jacket. NLS led to the overthrow of the colonial of the NBR and NLS. Do they represent a Today many reject Fanon’s theses for class structure and the inauguration of a fork in the decolonization road, or does their utopian/dystopian quality. However, socialist order. Fanon waxes lyrical about the NLS follow the NBR? Fanon left this in the early years after independence, the possibilities of democratic socialism question to future theorists and strate- the 1960s, when optimism for a new through the inclusive and enthusiastic gists of the African Revolution. order was high, Fanon’s ideas inspired participation of all. Fanon’s vision of the “necessity” of such prominent Africanist scholars as Although I have found no evidence the NLS followed from his pessimistic diag- Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, that Fanon knew of the great Italian nosis of the NBR—that it would follow a Issa Shivji, John Saul, Walter Rodney, and Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, nonetheless, reactionary trajectory, from initial adoption Samir Amin. The Wretched of the Earth The Wretched of the Earth can be read of liberal democracy, to the development became foundational to the common as combining the elements of Gramsci’s of a one-party state, to a dictatorship. sense of Marxist social science, especially theory of revolution. If the overthrow of Under the NBR, the postcolonial economy on the African continent. Like The Com- colonialism required a violent, cathartic, would be unable to extricate itself from munist Manifesto, its political power lay unifying “war of movement”—only such a peripheral place in global capitalism. It in its generality: its indictment of the inex- a violent assault against the barricades of would not be able to deliver the economic tricable connection of colonialism and colonialism could overcome external as concessions necessary for the survival of capitalism along with an imperative and well as internalized oppression—the con- liberal democracy. He saw the national a prescription for constructing socialism. struction of a postcolonial order called for bourgeoisie as an appendage of the met- With the scarcity of socialism, however, a “war of position,” a struggle for hege- ropolitan bourgeoisie and the descent Marxist theory has often turned to the mony between the NBR and the NLS. toward dictatorship inevitable. dissection of the different species of capi- The outcome depended on the Fanon’s warning about the dangers talism, so, in the same way, Fanonian constellation of class forces among the of the NBR, made the NLS that much theory must dissect the different species colonized. Fanon was convinced that the working class would throw its weight The colonial persists despite appearances to behind the emergent Black bourgeoisie forming an urban bloc that would follow the contrary, it continues to unravel inside the the NBR. But where would the vacillating classes stand? The so-called “lumpen- postcolonial. proletariat” (dispossessed of land, find- ing themselves unemployed or working more urgent but not necessarily more of the NBR. episodically in the informal sector, living in feasible. Fanon understood the threat of Just as England stood in for the peri-urban shanty towns) was an uprooted international capitalism but considered its historical narrative of The Communist group, easily bribed into supporting one dependence on African raw materials and Manifesto, Algeria stood in for colonial side or the other. The tribal chiefs, respon- consumer markets as giving postcolonial context of The Wretched of the Earth. sible for administering colonial indirect countries the leverage for autonomous Algeria, however, was a “settler” colony rule, were reformist by position if not by development and even reparations. Still, based on agricultural exports, very dif- nature. However, how could they main- in the final analysis, he argued, the Afri- ferent from the “administered” colony tain their legitimacy with their insurgent can Revolution would depend upon the of Northern Rhodesia, named Zambia followers? The struggle for hegemony Western working class deciding to “wake after independence, where I did my and thus the direction of the postcolony up, put on their thinking caps, and stop research. Zambia was and continued to would be resolved through the political playing the irresponsible game of Sleep- be an “enclave” economy in which cop- articulation of class forces with limits set ing Beauty.” Without support from the per provided 95 percent of its export rev- by objective economic conditions. Western working class, Fanon’s optimism enue, giving enormous power to Anglo Unlike Gramsci who saw the War about the NLS would, therefore, never be American and Roan Selection Trust, the of Movement succeeding or preceding seriously put to the test—where it was two multinationals who owned the the War of Position, Fanon saw them as tried, as in Algeria, the revolutionary road mines. Zambia’s class structure was very coinciding: even as the colonial order was involved violence that did not cease but different from Algeria’s—the settler ele- being overthrown through violence, the intensified with independence.