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Home , Frantz Fanon

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 , only to soon leave under colonial rule, it was a prophetic again for , 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 ’s - analysis of racial subjugation that stood Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. Appalled by The Communist Manifesto on its head. the psychic trauma of colonial 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. 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 , 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 For Marx and Engels, revolutionary With its arousing language, its gripping in Iran, in South Africa, Paulo impetus advanced through inclusionary descriptions, and its compelling argu- Freire in Brazil, in , and exploitation, while for Fanon it advanced ment, it traverses seamlessly between the and the in through exclusionary dispossession. psychological and the structural, between the . Indeed, many – 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 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 of the French grant to recapitulate and consolidate nization: a national bourgeois road (NBR) colony of Martinique; he died racial domination. Blackness is framed animated by an emerging Black bour- in 1961 of , fighting against by and against whiteness. If Black Skin, geoisie (made up of civil servants, teach- French 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 , 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 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- , Giovanni Arrighi, that Fanon knew of the great Italian nosis of the NBR—that it would follow a Issa Shivji, John Saul, , and Marxist, , 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 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. ” (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 . 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. Western ment being far weaker and international direction of was being powers were not tamed; to the contrary, capital much stronger. This would require

Contexts, Vol. 20, Issue 1, p. 70-73. ISSN 1536-5042. © American Sociological Association. WINTER 2021 contexts 71 http://contexts.sagepub.com.10.1177/1536504221997879. books

the reconstruction of Fanon’s theory of from bottom up. As a researcher on the National Independence Party (UNIP)? decolonization. spot I saw how the “forced succession” Wasn’t the raison d’etre of the anti-colo- It was 1968, four years after inde- of Zambians led to the promotion of the nial struggle to bury the colonial order? pendence, that I arrived in Zambia pen- displaced expatriate into newly created Following Fanon, the answer turned on niless. Jack Simons, celebrated social positions to “oversee” his Zambian suc- the class interests of the new Zambian scientist and long-standing member cessor. Alternatively, an entire depart- elite. The ruling party did not want to risk of the South African Communist Party, ment, such as the Personnel Department, the all-important foreign revenue upon forced into exile by the apartheid regime would be Zambianized even as its power which it depended. It had more faith in and soon to be one of my teachers, sug- was diminished by denying it author- expatriate expertise than in Zambians with gested I try to get a job in the copper ity over expatriates. That authority was their limited experience and education. industry. We know about the working surreptitiously passed on to a previous Even when the mines were nationalized class, he said, but little about the way (White) personnel manager. the government gave the mining com- the mining companies are responding From the outside everything seemed panies the management contract. Addi- to Zambian independence. Fresh out of to be going smoothly, but from the inside, tionally, the ruling party did not want to college, with a degree in mathematics, I saw the retention of the colonial color risk the formation of an opposition party, I duly got a job as a researcher in the bar, the rule that no White should receive based on control of a precious national mining companies’ Personnel Research any orders from a Black. The reproduc- resource; better to have expatriates on Unit (PRU) in Kitwe, the main town on tion of the color bar seemed not only three-year contracts running the mines. the Copperbelt. I was strategically placed immoral; it also generated tensions that This account fits Fanon’s NBR to a to observe negotiations between unions, reverberated through the organization as tee: the replacement of White by Black, mining companies, and government. Black subordinates would get frustrated dependence on revenue from interna- As a covert participant observer, I with their new Zambian supervisor who tional capital, and the concentration soon learned something I would never was stripped of crucial resources that of UNIP’s power—but at the cost of a have learned from the outside, that these had traveled upwards with his White bloated management structure, disrup- multi-national companies did not follow a predecessor. There’s nothing worse than tive conflicts, and continuing racial domi- “strategy” with respect to the new Zam- a diminished supervisor, who in compen- nation. Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter bian government but simply sized up the sating for his limited powers may try to of Global China, an extraordinary eth- situation daily and made decisions accord- lord it over his subordinates, also adver- nographic revisit to the Zambian copper ingly. In a context of uncertainty—the tising his status with conspicuous con- industry four decades later, tells of the fluctuating price of copper, the vagaries sumption. All of which led both Zambian tragic denouement of the NBR, but what of underground mining, and political subordinates and the White managerial of other spheres of the postcolonial? instability—flexibility was the name of the class to denigrate Zambian successors as At first sight, student rebellion at game. It was said that President Kaunda incompetent, confirming racial prejudices the new University of Zambia may have and Harry Oppenheimer, then chairman inherited from the colonial period. appeared as part of an NLS but, as I showed of Anglo American, agreed to nationalize Why the organizational manipula- in a second ethnography, it was an intra- the mines on a golf course in Lusaka. I was tion to preserve the dominion of White racial, inter-generational struggle over suc- observing the processes behind Fanon’s expatriates? Following Fanon I assessed cession. Although students might cloak taken-for-granted relation between the the balance of class forces perpetuat- their antipathy to incumbent Black leaders ruling class and foreign capital. ing the racial order. The emergent Black in a radical idiom, they were an aspirant While I was working in the PRU, one bourgeoisie had an interest in displacing elite seeking to replace an entrenched of the more contentious issues under expatriate managers, but unskilled work- elite. Finally, in a third study I show how negotiation was the integration of Zam- ers and their unions, along with the expa- political science, here represented by Rob- bian and expatriate pay scales and the triates themselves, had little interest in ert Bates, supported the NBR by endorsing allied process of “Zambianization,” the Zambianization. As for the mining com- ruling class ideology with erroneous claims replacement of expatriate managers and panies, one might have expected them to about working-class “slothfulness,” and professionals by Zambians. According be interested in employing cheaper Zam- “indiscipline,” thereby consolidating the to a congratulatory government report bian personnel. But instead they adapted colonial mythology of the “lazy native.” from 1968, Zambians were taking over to the political circumstances, taking the The colonial persists despite appearances expatriate positions and the number of lead from the Zambian government. to the contrary, it continues to unravel expatriates was falling. These figures hid I was left wondering why the Zam- inside the postcolonial. a stark reality: instead of Zambianization bian government would assent to the Reflecting back on the last 50 years proceeding from top down, as occurred reproduction of the colonial racial order? of African decolonization, the tortured in government, in mining, it proceeded Wasn’t racial justice the goal of the United path of NBR has been all too common

72 contexts.org while the adoption of socialism in Algeria A modified NBR prevailed as project? Fanon was ambiguous as to the or in such poor countries as Tanzania and came to mean affirmative action or, more timing of the NBR and the NLS, but now Mozambique has had limited success. recently, even a militant anti-racism. there is only one possibility—there is no With its advanced industrial economy, Fanon was only able to anticipate the fork in the road. If it is to take place, NLS much hope was focused on South Africa. tragedy of postcolonial Africa by postulat- must follow NBR. But how? The idea of a There were good reasons for this. In con- ing a democratic socialism, giving him the frontal revolution, war of movement, that trast to the Zambian labor aristocracy, prophetic vision of what accepting the would overthrow capitalism seems out South Africa’s working class had a long terms of capitalism would mean for Africa. of the question, better think of a war of history of militant struggles, propelled by Fanon’s broad appeal dissipated not just position that slowly builds up prefigurative powerful trade unions in association with with the dismal trajectory of Africa, but institutions, “real utopias” as Erik Wright the African National Congress (ANC) and with the ascent of neoliberalism discredit- called them. Just as the commodification the Communist Party (SACP). The ANC’s ing the very idea of socialism, aided and of land portended peasant revolt, so now Freedom Charter contained a socialist abetted by the death of the . we must ask if the dispossessed will be platform of public ownership and democ- When it was alive, whatever its defects, aroused by the accelerated and intercon- racy. There were struggles in the rural the Soviet Union competed with Western nected commodification of labor, money, areas but they never reached the propor- capitalism for political allegiance the world knowledge and nature. Whether it be tions of the strikes, stay-aways, boycotts over, extracting political and economic climate change or a succession of pan- of the urban working class. Surely here concessions at home and abroad. With demics or financial catastrophe, the global was an exception to Fanon’s theory? the Soviet Union a distant memory and order will be compelled to contain com- Indeed, the 1990s witnessed the China becoming state capitalist, liberal modification or speed over the precipice. dismantling of apartheid, but the past capitalism has been unmoored, unre- However, as in the past, the containment would not disappear. Although the 1994 strained in its devastation, tangling with can be worse than the malignancy, but elections catapulted the ANC into power, its own death instinct. it can also offer a newfangled liberation. institutional racism persisted; although It is as if the whole world has taken So long as there is capitalist exploitation public housing, social grants, and edu- the NBR and become Africa writ large. and dispossession, a vision of socialism cation expanded, these welfare projects Under the aegis of finance capital with will never disappear, the latter follows the were accompanied by the privatization of roots in the West, there developed former as day follows night. public enterprises. Socialism was put on dependent nation organiz- hold as the ANC struck a deal with White ing states that strive to contain eruptions references capital, resulting in wealthy Black elites of an uprooted peasantry and expand- Burawoy, Michael. 1972. The Colour of becoming the public face of corporate ing , while cultivating Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization. Man- South Africa. The National Democratic quiescent labor aristocracies desperately chester University Press for the Institute of Revolution had not only suspended but hanging on to precarious employment. African Studies, University of Zambia. hijacked the socialist project, and South This global displacement unleashed great Burawoy, Michael. 1972. Another Look at Africa sputtered along the NBR, displaying swaths of migration with the result that the Mineworker. African Social Research 14:239-87 many of its pathologies. A disempowered the colony is no longer confined to the socialist opposition weaponized Fanon periphery; it is reconstituted as a racial Burawoy, Michael. 1976. Consciousness and Contradiction:A Study of Student against the self-aggrandizing national order within the metropole, sometimes Protest in Zambia. British Journal of Soci- bourgeoisie. openly affirmed, sometimes openly ology, 27(1): 7898. As a theory of revolution, The denied. It is a return to Fanon’s racialized Fanon, Frantz. 1967 [1952]. Black Skin, Wretched of the Earth traveled to coun- experience in post-war France, described White Masks. New York: . tries for which it was never intended— in Black Skin, White Masks but now Fanon, Frantz. 1963 [1961]. The Wretched portending a liberation struggle for the unfolding within the postcolonial era— of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. excluded wherever they may be, including that diasporic space elaborated by Stuart the United States. This was not Fanon’s Hall with such literary finesse. COVID-19 Michael Burawoy is a Professor in the Department agenda: he contrasted the African Revolu- has not only clarified but also amplified of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. tion with a more orthodox view of work- the plight of “the wretched of the earth,” ing-class revolution in the West. He never the “inessential” who now turn out to anticipated the inspiration he gave to the be “essential.” They have been joined by , cultivating socialism within allies in a determined global movement African American communities. In the to defang the repressive arm of the state. end, the radical elements within the civil Under these circumstances what rights movement would be vanquished. can we give to Fanon’s socialist

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