THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#21, SEPT-NOV/2016
Why Fanon, Why Now? Why indeed, give that in the past year no less than half a dozen new books about Fanon have appeared in English and French—not to mention a slew of new discussions in journals and online media? And why is it that his words are being referenced more today than in many years, especially by many of those involved in protests against police abuse and racial profiling in the U.S.?
The reason, it seems to me, is that the present stage of globalized capitalism is giving rise to ever-more severe forms of racism and racist dehumanization. This is evident in the crises generated over police abuse in minority communities, the prison warehousing of Blacks and Latinos, and heightened discrimination against and abuse of immigrants from the global South—most of whom are people of color. This is not only a national, but also a global, phenomenon. We see its most striking expression in the ongoing effort to evict immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East who are seeking sanctuary in Europe—something that is evident not just in Hungary, Austria, and Poland (where rightwing parties now hold the balance of power) but in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, which until recently had promoted liberal immigration policies.
Given these and other realities, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that something about this particular stage of capitalist ”development” is generating a dangerous surge in racist attitudes, policies, and institutional approaches. As capitalism’s growth imperative finds itself increasingly under threat from within, due to such factors as the decline in global profit rates, and from without, due to natural limits to the effort to force the environment to completely succumb to the dictates of value production, capitalism finds itself driven to return to and accentuate the racism that defined the “rosy dawn” of global capital accumulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
What challenge does this pose to us as activists and theorists? First, it means we must break from versions of socialism and Marxism that fail to see race and racism as at the inner core of the logic of capital. Race is not, and never has been, ancillary or secondary to the question of class—especially in places like the U.S., where class formations from its inception were shaped on the basis of racial determinations. The time is long gone when it seemed sufficient (at least to some in the socialist Left) that “there is no race question outside the class question.” Simply put, the structural reality of capitalism is such that the logic of capital cannot be overcome if racism is treated as a secondary matter. At the same time, this also means that we need to move beyond approaches that advance a politics of identity that stops short of envisioning and working toward the complete and systematic transformation of capitalism within a Marxian framework.
Fanon’s work is of critical importance, I would argue, in meeting this two-fold challenge today. As one of the foremost thinkers on race and racism of the twentieth century, Fanon understood that anti-Black racism is not a natural condition but is instead rooted in the economic imperatives of capitalism—beginning with the transatlantic slave trade that created the world market and extending to the neo-colonialism of today. Yet at the same time, Fanon also understood that racism cannot be combatted on economic terms alone, since racialized ways of “seeing” and behaving take on a life of their own and drastically impacts the psychic, inner life of the individual. In all of his works, from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that both sides—the economic and cultural/psychic—have to be fought in tandem. As he wrote in the former work, “The black man must wage the struggle on two levels: whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic…An answer must be found on the objective as well as the subjective level” (Richard Philcox trans., p. xv).
Unfortunately, many still fail to see this today. Just think for a moment of the various critiques being made of the economic distress experienced by so many in the U.S. today, by those campaigning for the presidency. Do we need any greater proof than the Trump campaign to remind us that simply addressing economic distress—including opposing free trade agreements and the power of a globalized world market—is not only not necessarily progressive but atavistically reactionary? And do we need any greater proof than the Sanders campaign, which has struggled to connect its critique of inequality and corporate domination to any kind of articulate opposition to racial oppression and injustice, to know that the one does not necessarily lead to the other?
In some respects the problem goes even deeper than this. What does it mean that so many voters in France who once voted for the Communist Party now cast their ballots for the National Front—which continues to justify France’s genocidal war against the Algerian Revolution of the 1950s and early 1960s? What does it mean that Die Linke Partei, the leftwing party in Germany that combines anti-Stalinist Marxists from the former GDR with a leftwing split-off from the German Social-Democrats, saw one-fifth of his voting constituency in recent regional elections switch their allegiance to the anti-immigrant Alterativ für Deuschland Party, which was founded years go by neo-Nazis?
That racism is rearing its ugly head is too obvious to require much comment. But we must go deeper, and ask what has been missing in anti-capitalist movements that would enable so many of their supporters to fail to adequately combat it?
Here is where it becomes important to ask exactly how does Fanon’s work assist the effort to combat the objective and subjective dimensions of racism “in tandem”? To probe this, let’s return to the fundamental principles that guided his work.
First, he held that racism is deadly insofar as it denies recognition of the inherent dignity and humanity of the colonized subject. As a result of this great denial, the Black man and woman experience a “zone of nonbeing”—a negation of their very humanity. On these grounds, he argues, the colonized subject inhabits a “realm of negativity”—“a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential form from which a genuine new departure can emerge (BSWM, p. xii). This is, clearly, a zone of absolute depravity that renders impossible any “ontology of Blackness.” The Black is not seen as human precisely by being “seen”—not once, but repeatedly—as Black. It seems that we have descended into a “veritable hell.” However, this zone of non-being does not mean the Black has become nothing. Fanon right away reminds us, “Man is a ‘yes’ resonating from cosmic harmonies.” Adhering to the Hegelian stricture that true positivity emerges from a journey through absolute negativity, Fanon charts the process whereby the Black subject is impelled to revolt against the very denial of its subjectivity. Racial alienation thereby cuts deeper than mere exploitation; with the latter, you are denied the product of your labor, whereas with the former you are denied your very being. But the Black person is still a person “resounding with cosmic harmonies,” and this tension can never be negotiated away by even the most systematic form of oppression. Instead, the very denial of its being galvanizes the colonized subject to fight to reclaim its humanity from racial degradation.
Second, in delineating this process Fanon is both proceeding from and going beyond Marx. He proceeds from Marx insofar (as he writes in The Wretched of the Earth) “A Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (Philcox trans., p. xi). Slightly stretched, but not rejected or abandoned—let alone ignored! Yet at the same, Fanon goes further than Marx, by speaking of racism not purely in economic or objective terms, but by examining its inner life in the colonized subject. There is no adequate conceptualization of race and racism, according to Fanon, that does not come fully to grips with its psychic-affective dimension.
But let us not rush too fast, for on this very point there is also a parallel to
Marx—even if these lines do not always meet in theory or in life. Let’s recall what Marx said of the proletariat: he called it “the class in Civil Society that is not of Civil Society.” It lives in Civil Society, but unlike the bourgeoisie its substantiality is not constituted by it. Why not? Because by being robbed of any organic connection to the means of production the worker is reduced to a mere seller of labor power. Please recall: living labor in capitalism is not, according to Marx, a commodity (if it were, the worker’s subjectivity would be completely absorbed by capital and would be a class of civil society like any other, lacking any critical standpoint towards it). It is the capacity for labor—and the capacity for labor alone—that is commodified. Since the worker “possesses” nothing but a mere labor capacity in the eyes of capital, the worker finds herself hollowed out by the process of capitalist alienation. The worker therefore also inhabits a zone of negativity. But this very hollowing out or negativity is precisely what makes the proletariat potentially revolutionary. It has nothing to lose but its chains.
Marx wrote, only the proletariat “has the consistency, the severity, the courage or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society.” It alone possesses “the genius that inspires material might to political violence, or that revolutionary audacity which flings at the adversary the defiant words: ‘I am nothing and I should be everything’” (“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” [1843], in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 185).
I am not arguing that this signifies that Fanon was in any sense a conventional Marxist. As I show in Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades, he never associated with any tendency of post-Marx Marxism, since they did not speak to his lived experience as a Black man. Moreover, he sharply opposed both Socialist and Communist Parties of France, which actively supported French imperialism’s war against Algeria.
Nevertheless, there is a crucial parallel between Fanon and Marx, in that both see that revolutionary initiative and creativity arises from subjects of revolt who have been robbed of their human potential by existing society. For Fanon, however, the struggle against racist dehumanization and alienation cuts even deeper than the traditional class struggle insofar as the person of color is robbed of their very being—not solely their capacity for conscious, purposeful activity. Their very existence is at issue.
Genocide is, indeed, the ultimate logic of racism, just as turning the worker into an appendage to the machine is the ultimate logic of capitalist class domination. The latter is bad enough. But the capitalist at least needs the worker to produce commodities (even as her labor power is itself commodified). But the racist does not, ultimately, need the Black person at all. Black lives indeed do not matter to this society.
Fanon develops this most profoundly and rigorously in his critical discussion of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in Black Skin, White Masks. He there he argues that the struggle against racism is neither reducible to the class struggle as traditionally conceived, nor is it a mere ancillary or ally of it. This is because, he shows, the relation of master and slave (or dominator and dominated) is radically altered when race enters the picture. The master as Hegel presents it wants to be recognized by the slave, for without it, he is unable to obtain a sense of his own self-certainty and selfhood. Selfhood is neither inherited nor innate; it is acquired by being recognized by the Other. But what happens when the slave is Black? Fanon notes that the master is not interested in being recognized by the slave, just as little as he is interested in recognizing him. This is because the white master does not see the Black slave as a human being. He is only interested in the work of the slave. Which means, of course, that the white master thinks he has a license to dehumanize the Black slave to a degree not true of workers in general.
Hence, relations of racial domination call into question not simply the rights of Blacks as political subjects of civil society, but rather their very ability to be treated, and to live as an authentic human beings. Jacqueline Rose recently spoke to this in discussing the struggles of transsexuals: “In fact, no human can survive without recognition. To survive, we all have to be seen. A transsexual person merely brings that fact to the surface, exposing the latent violence lurking behind the banal truth of our dependency on other people. After all, if I can’t exist without you, then you have, amongst other things, the power to kill me” (“Who Do You Think You Are?” London Review of Books, May 5, 2016, p. 5). This is, in my view, a Fanonian way of putting things. Those who are denied recognition—due to any number of bodily characteristics, epidermal considerations being one of the most significant of them—inhabit a kind of “zone of non-being.” Yet this negativity contains positive potential, since this very logic of degradation impels the subject to revolt against these conditions and recapture its humanity.
Fanon’s insights on this speak directly to today, in that it is clear that people of color are not subject to the same forms of oppression that many white workers experience. Black lives are made invisible in this society, they do not matter to it—as seen in rates of prison warehousing, police abuse, and gutting of medical aid that so severely impacts people of color. Is it any accident that the deindustrialization of America over the past four decades has so disproportionately impacted African-Americans? Does their capacity for labor even count? And is it any accident that the first public college in the history of the U.S. that may be forced to close due to a budget crisis is Chicago State University on the South Side, 80% of whose students are people of color?
Fanon powerfully suggests that even more than the traditional class struggle, the “additive of color” in struggles against racial degradation raises the question of what does it mean to be human as the colonized subject struggles to battle against the interior as well as exterior barriers to mutual recognition and freedom. When we think of this in terms of today, it is not hard to see that the fight against today’s racist dehumanization may well open up a new phase of social struggles in this country that has the potential of going way beyond such reformist measures as taxing the rich or ending free trade deals.
I am not of course suggesting that this mean that race has supplanted class, any more than people of color can create a new society on their own. Nor am I suggesting that white labor can be written-off a priori as inherently non-revolutionary. After all, it surely means something that millions of workers and youth in the U.S. are now for the first time in decades casting ballots for a candidate who openly calls himself a socialist (whether Sanders deserves the label of “socialist” is of course a different matter altogether).
What I am suggesting, instead, is that Fanon’s work, as well as the realities unfolding before us today, gives new insights and credence to the Marxist-Humanist principle that Black Masses are Vanguard of the American Revolution.
We should have no illusions, however, as to how deep is the resistance to accepting the revolutionary implications of struggles against racial denigration. This is powerfully addressed in Fanon’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s attitude toward Negritude (one of the earliest Black pride movements of French-speakers of the African diaspora) in Black Skin, White Masks. Sartre was surely a friend of the Black freedom struggle (and by the late 1950s a personal one of Fanon’s as well). However, in the course of praising the Negritude poets in Black Orpheus, Sartre referred to Negritude as a “weak stage” of the dialectic that must give way to the truly “concrete” and “universal” fight—that of the proletariat. Fanon is devastated by Sartre’s position, stating, “The generation of young Black poets has just been dealt a fatal blow” (p. 112). Fanon refuses to see the effort to reclaim a sense of dignity by affirming the attributes that existing society denigrates in those of African descent as a mere particular on the way to confronting the “real” issue—proletarian revolution. He credits Sartre for “recalling the negative side” of the Black predicament, “but he forgot that this negativity draws its value from a virtually substantial absoluity” (pp. 112-13). It is not just that negativity is the font from which the individual is impelled toward the positive. It is that upon being subjected to absolute denial and lack of recognition, the individual finds it necessary to draw upon the substantial reservoir of hidden meaning that it possess as a human subject. “That which has been shattered is rebuilt and constructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands” (p. 117).
Fanon never takes his eyes off of the real prize—the creation of the positive from out of the negative, of absolute positivity from out of absolute negation, of a new humanism from out of total dehumanization. He was indeed an incurable humanist.
In many respects, today’s struggles are forcing us to replay the debate between Fanon and Sartre, as seen in the impatience of some leftists who urge today’s anti-racist activists to “get on to the real issue”—as if that is the state of the economy alone. This is not to suggest that the state of the economy is not of central importance. But so is the psychic impact of racism and discrimination on the inner life of the individual. It is only approaching those struggling for freedom from the particular nexus point that defines their lived experience that we can work out the difficult question of how to surmount the matrix of contradictions that define modern capitalism. Just as there is no road to the universal that gets stuck in the particular, there is no reaching it that rushes over it.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the struggles that have arisen over past year (and others still to come) will find their way to what both Marx and Fanon aspired for—a new humanism to replace the degradation of existing society. Many struggles in the past have fallen far short. Indeed, this is what makes Fanon’s work so important, as especially seen in his virulent criticism of “the pitfalls of the national consciousness” and the tendency of anti-colonial struggles to fall prey to the machinations of the national bourgeoisie and narrow nationalism in The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon never believed that the anti-colonial struggle alone would rid the colonized subject from ”the arsenal of complexes” associated with racial domination. He held that the struggle must continue in permanence until the complete and total liberation of the human subject from all forms of alienation and degradation is achieved. Hence, I would argue that his most valuable—though often unrecognized contribution—lies in theorizing important dimensions of a philosophy of “revolution in permanence.”
When we rethink Fanon along with re-reading Marx, we can make crucial progress in answering the absolutely pivotal issue facing all who are concerned about human liberation—what is the alternative to existing society that transcends the limitations of both “free market” capitalism and its state-capitalist false alternatives that called themselves “socialist” or “communist” over the past century. We need a vision of that alternative now, more that at any point in the history of revolutionary struggles.
Originally Delivered as Why Fanon? Why Now? Critical Reflections on the Recovery of a Legacy at a Panel on “Why Fanon Matters for Today’s Struggles Against Racism,” Left Forum Conference, NYC, May 22, 2016
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