THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#5, DEC/2018-FEB/2019
My intention in this presentation is to elucidate the meaning of the phrase ‘decolonial humanism’ as interpreted directly through the lens of Fanon and Marx. In the first instance, it is clear that the notion of the decolonial, whether or not it is linked exclusively or essentially to Fanon or Marx, is in play currently in contestation with the notion of the postcolonial, and that this state of affairs has occurred owing to the unambiguous anti-humanist stance of many of those who theorize postcoloniality. In calling out the exclusionary usages of the notion of ‘humanism’ perpetrated by Western thought and deeds, postcolonial theory, largely following Foucault and Said, has done good service. In the second instance, however, such theorists have, unfortunately, thrown out the baby with the bathwater. To rescue the baby, humanism, inasmuch as a critique of postcolonial thought is implicit in it, I will proceed directly to the effort to interpret the notion of decolonial humanism,. Moreover, it seems to me that since he held Europe responsible for colonialism and its horrors, yet never missed an opportunity to affirm his humanism, Fanon, who died in 1961 aged 36, was the founder of decolonial humanism. What, then, is decolonial humanism?
Let us begin by considering the renowned last line of Fanon’s incendiary book, Wretched of the Earth: “…for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”[1] Fanon’s proclamation of the “new man” has inspired many encomia. Very few, however, have reflected on its meaning, perhaps because commentators have assumed that meaning to be self-evident within the body of Fanon’s works; or contrariwise, perhaps because they did not want to be called to account for misinterpreting his meaning; or perhaps because they were puzzled or thought that it was not important to unpack its meaning. Indeed, it is not difficult to see and say what the new man, according to Fanaon, will not be—the new man will not be deformed by the depredations of colonialism in all and any of its aspects or its descendants, among which are discrimination, racism, immiseration, subjugation in many modes, and so on. In Fanon’s words in his earlier masterwork, Black Skin, White Masks, the new man will not be “enslaved to the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.”[2] Thus, Fanon tells us clearly what the new man will not be.
The question of interest here is, however, just exactly who will this new man be, or, more specifically, in what sense or senses is the new man precisely that—new? Consistently with Fanon’s vision, we can assume that the new man will not be racist, sexist, classist, etc. Yet, even today, and I assume that Fanon knew this to be true in his own time, there are some people who are not racist, classist, or sexist, although such a consciousness is extraordinarily difficult to sustain in a racist, sexist, classist, world. But again, this is what the new man will not be; we have not yet conceptualized the nature of this newness. Or, put another way, we know that there is a dialectic of new and old—the new is new only in relation to the old, and the old is old only in relation to the new. It is clear, however, that Fanon intended to induce a radical departure, a decisive leaving behind of what man, humanity, has been in the name of a human newness.[3] We can find explosive indications of this radical departure in Fanon’s remarks in the remarkable 5-page conclusion to Wretched of the Earth, the remarks that preceded his evocation of the new man (quoted above) in the last sentence of the book.
Addressing his revolutionary compeers, his comrades, Fanon’s condemnation of Europe is uncompromisingly total, as is shown in the following medley of oft-cited extracts: “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe….”[4] Fanon was a psychiatrist who cared deeply about his patients, amongst whom were both colonized and colonizers We experience this concern in the penultimate chapter of Wretched of the Earth, titled “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders.”[5] It is reflected also in his next statement in the Conclusion: “[We] will not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity.” Fragmentation of the self, seen in its most crippling effects in Fanon’s psychiatric patients, characterizes total dehumanization. That Fanon’s statements just quoted refer to the effect on individual persons of Europe’s horrific deeds and its propaganda is made clear in the light of his next statements: “And in the framework of the collectivity there were the differentiations, the stratification, and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation, and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men.” Thus, Europe also accomplished the crumbling away of the unity of humanity as a whole. Coupled with Fanon’s dissection, in his earlier masterpiece Black Skin White Masks, of the soul destroying sociogenic colonization of the consciousness and the sense of self of the colonized that he showed was the essence and effect of the social relations constituted by colonialism, it is difficult to imagine a more damning description of, and judgment upon, the horrors of colonialism as perpetrated by Europe, at least one that would not consist of overt expression of terrible suffering and concomitant rage.
In view of Fanon’s unequivocal holding of Europe responsible and accountable for colonialism and its dehumanization of the human species as a whole, what, then, are we to make of the following extracts interwoven within the very same scorching 5-page Conclusion of WE: “All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But the action of European men has not carried out the mission that fell to them…” What does Fanon believe was the “mission” that fell to Europe? Would it be out of order here to ask whether or not this statement condones the very Eurocentrism, the mission civilisatrice(civilizing mission), as the French put it, that Fanon scorned and lived and died to defeat? Are the radical postcolonial thinkers right that humanism tout court is a nightmare from which we have not yet awakened, the enabling concept for all oppression?
Surely, surely when he refers to the mission that fell to Europe, Fanon means something else—but what? He says that colonialism marks the failure of Europe, and that “It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but will also not forget Europe’s crimes…” And then there is the ringing final statement of this concluding chapter of Wretched of the Earth in which Fanon states in whose interests the liberating revolution must and will be enacted. Note that in the very first citation of it above, I deliberately suppressed the first item on Fanon’s list of those who would benefit from that coming revolution; restored, it reads thusly: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”
We have seen then both the unsparing, blood curdling condemnation of Europe, and at the same time Fanon’s clear determination not only to include Europe in the scope of humanity, but, further, to take from Europe that which in spite of everything it may offer towards the coming into being of the new man. And note, Fanon does not speak of the colonial perpetrators as inhuman animals, however ‘inhuman’ their actions. So, once again, what is this newness, that of the new man, who, in revolutionary refashioning will both transcend the soul-killing horrors of European colonialism and at the same time reflect in part some of Europe’s “prodigious theses”? To further pursue the meaning of Fanon’s new man, we turn to a thinker who was one of Fanon’s primary inspirations, Karl Marx,[6] for perhaps one or two of those “prodigious theses” of which Fanon spoke.
Marx’s formulation of the specific differences between humans and other animals has two mutually reinforcing poles: first, his notion usually translated as “species being,” though the German term (Galtungswesen) admits of being translated as species essence as wesen means in fact essence. Species essence for Marx means not only that the individual human being recognizes herself consciously as a member of a species; even more, she recognizes that beyond her own self-awareness is the universality of the species, i.e., her awareness that other human beings also have self-awareness as members of the human species as she does, and that this perception of the commonality of species awareness is constitutive of self-consciousness as such. Our universality is thus precisely our awareness of our species being, that we are individual members of a species. It is important to point out here that for Marx, human life is activity, the activity of recreation of the species and self-creation of the individual, and these are inseparable. We are beings who are both individual and universal. Thus, for Marx, as Erich Fromm points out, “the individual is the social being,”[7] i.e., the individual is simultaneously the embodiment of human universality.
Given that species being is the first determinant of our humanness, inseparable from this, the second determinant of our humanness, for Marx, is reflected in the goal of the revolution: to enable the full and free development of every human being---our potential for self-realization that, for the following reason, we must assume cannot be eradicated: that is, in whatever manner this species being or essence came, and comes, into existence, Marx understood this to be an occurrence of nature, something natural; but, we must remember that in the first of his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx unequivocally rejected any mechanistic or reductively empiricist view of nature that abstracts from the subject. Also, in the sixth of the Theses on Feuerbach Marx wrote that the “human essence” is “the ensemble of social relations.”[8] This means that the “human essence” is not a fixed abstraction; rather, it is a potentiality, a capacity, the capacity to create through our life, our activity, an “ensemble of human relations” that does not alienate us from ourselves, nature, or our species, but is, rather, the condition for the possibility of the free and full development of all.[9]
Given these determinants of our humanness, it becomes clear that Fanon’s new man is the man—the person—the species--whom we already are that can create a world that is the correlate of our humanity and of our drive and need for full and free development.
To be clear, what I am proposing here is that Marx’s notion of species being or essence is a way of conceiving the originary unity of the human person and species in and through human consciousness; that is to say, species being as a matter of consciousness designates the ontological unity of human beings as individuals with our species being that has been concealed and obscured by the powerful fragmenting forces of capitalism and colonialism. This, I aver, is what Fanon was pointing to when he said that the greatest crime of Europe was the fragmenting of both the individual and the human species, “the crumbling away of his unity.” This unity is also expressed, explicitly by Marx and implicitly by Fanon, in the notion (Marx, as noted above, that the species essence is manifest as “the ensemble of social relations.” Fanon’s humanism is pervasive throughout his works, and humanism does indeed presuppose an essence of the human, but one that in no way precludes or occludes difference and human plurality, but exists rather as a potentiality, a capacity for free self and world creation. What is often overlooked, but was not overlooked by either Marx or Fanon, is that difference cannot exist, that is, it cannot be known or experienced as difference, unless it is dialectically related to universality, subjectivity or consciousness.
Having said this, and for clarification, let us take a leaf from the book of Fanon and say what the new man is not and will not be: The new man is not an obscure je ne sais quoi, but is rather that which even European colonialists were and are, malgre lui, in spite of themselves. The decolonial notion of the human does not contest postcolonial thought only insofar as its theorists hold that after the end of colonialism we will be rid forever of the notion of the human as a trans-historical essence. Rather, the decolonial notion of the human, that is, decolonial humanism, means that the unity of the individual that is inseparable from the unity of all, our individual and collective capacity for free and full development, cannot be obliterated as long as human beings exist, and eventually will be our actualized lived experience.
Put another way, the concept of the new man is not a version of the political conservatives’ fantasy of return to a putative golden age in the past; nor is it a form of primitivism or glorification of the remote historical past of early cultures untouched by modernity and its evils; nor is it an instance of the genetic fallacy, of conflating origin and cause; nor is it a form of subjective idealism that denies the externality of the world and nature; nor is it a dead abstraction or an empty signifier. Neither is the newness of the new man an impossible creation ex nihilo out of elements that never before existed, as is the case, for example, in the notion of “emergent” properties put forth by the estimable postcolonial theorist Anthony Alessandrini.[10] Rather, the new man is new precisely in that she, she, is the person whom we all, all of us, can yet become because the capacity to be so is what it means to be a human being.[11] The newness of the new man is her conscious, aware, lived experience of the freedom that we are precisely in the sense that it is our potential to become freely productive and creative individuals within a human socius created by we ourselves.
Both desiderata of the new man—recognition of species essence and free self-development pertain to Fanon’s humanism. (As an aside, I would add here that Fanon’s philosophical stance, and in my view Marx’s as well, is very close to an Husserlian phenomenological perspective as filtered through Merleau Ponty’s existential version of it.) For Fanon, as for Marx, and as for all marxist humanists today, any institutions or modes of social or sociopolitical life or individual acts that circumscribe our capacity for free and full development are anti-human, i.e., they fragment us, including classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, the oppression and abuse of children, of sexual minorities, and so on, and they are so independently of their historical origins or cultural embeddedness, as for example in the case of FGM. Fragmented human beings and societies will not be restored to actual lived experience of that unity that Marx and Fanon believed inheres in us and preexisted colonial mutilation if we, out of cynicism born of despair, disavow its existence.
[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by C. Farrington, (New York City: Grove Press, 1963) p.316.
[2]Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by C. L. Markmann, (New York City: Grove Press, 1967) p.205.
[3] Clear confirmation of Fanon’s radical intentions regarding his notion of the “new man” is found in the quotation from Marx’s 1851 essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that Fanon used as an epigraph to the last chapter of BSWM. Fanon’s quote from Marx begins, “The Socialist revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past.”
[4] All quotations from Fanon, unless otherwise noted, are from the last section, the Conclusion, of Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., 311-316.
[5] WE, 249-310.
[6] For interesting and intricate analyses of the manner in which the key concepts of Marxism are interwoven, and given new elaborations, in Fanon’s work, see Jacqueline Crowell, “Marxism and Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Colonial Identity: Parallels Between Racial and Commodity-Based Fetishism,” downloaded from www.scientificterrapin.umd.edu/fall2011/articles/Marxism.php, and Nazneen Kane, “Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Racialization: Implications for Globalization,” pp. 353-367. V.5, issue 3, of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. See also, Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades, (London: Pluto Press, 2015).
[7] Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, with a translation from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, trans. by T.B. Bottomore, (New York: Unger, 1979) p. 130. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts are the locus classicus of his introduction and explication of his crucially important concept pf species being.
[8]The first of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, states, in part, that “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” Quotation source and citation to Marx for the Theses on Feuerbach can be found at the website, Marx/Engels Internet Archive, Theses on Feuerbach.
[9] This capacity is, it seems to me, what Marx was referring to as “human nature in general” when, in Chapter 24 of the first volume of Capital, he wrote in a footnote critiquing Bentham: “The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, p. 432. note 50.
[10] See Anthony C. Alessandrini, Humanism in Question: Fanon and Said, in: A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed.by H. Schwarz and S. Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 431-450, esp. 440.
[11] A magnificent instance of a person who finally was able to begin to become the person she always already could have been is Sethe in beloved Beloved, Toni Morrison’s visionary masterpiece of world literature. This is poignantly expressed in the final scene between Sethe and Paul D, when he says to her that rather than Beloved, “‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?’” Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York City: Penguin, 1988), 173. See also, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim nor Survivor Be: Who is Beloved’s Baby? In: Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity (Lanhan MD: Lexington Books, 209), 163-193.
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