We’ll put Frantz Fanon (born 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique – died 1961, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.) in conversation with Marx and Engels. Please start be reading the short biography on Fanon by Nadra Kareem Nittle.

DECOLONIZATION

Fanon. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. (pp. 1-29, 51-103, 127-44, 235-9)

Fanon is concerned with the methods and goals of decolonization. However, we cannot understand decolonization without first theorizing colonization. Fanon tells us that the colonial world is Manichean and compartmentalized. It’s a universe of settlers and natives, a fundamentally racist world made of two different “species.” It’s also a world made through violence. Foreign forces have brutally carved native lands into territories of extraction and exchange. This has generated European opulence at the expense of human dignity. Fanon argues that because colonization is always violent, so too is decolonization. Violence against colonial forces helps unify the masses while also cleansing their feelings of inferiority. According to Fanon, we shouldn’t expect this upward violence to emerge in the city because the nationalist parties there are typically led by a compromising “nationalist bourgeoisie” (a native middle class). We should instead expect a “spontaneous” movement to surface in the countryside. Fanon insists the peasantry is powerful, especially when they combine with radical intellectuals who have been pushed out of the towns. Their struggle is inevitably brought into the cities where other elements (e.g., the lumpenproletariat) enter the battlefield. None of this is automatic for Fanon, and this point is especially clear in the end. He emphasizes two paths, one toward democratic socialism and one toward neocolonialism.