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Fanon and the
Concept of Colonial Violence
By
Robert C. Smith FRANTZ FANON was profoundly
influenced by Karl Marx. Yet, to say this is to say very
little. Most men who engage in serious social thought,
particularly radical social thought, are influenced by
the writings of Karl Marx. Fanon as a revolutionary
social theorist is no exception; in fact, he is
brilliant example. But Fanon as a philosopher was also
influenced by Jean Paul Sartre and the existentialists
and by Edmund Husserl and the phenomenology movement. As
a Black man he was tremendously inspired in his thinking
by Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas of the Négritude literary
movement. And, of course, as a trained psychiatrist, he
is heavily indebted to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung,
particularly in terms of the methods and purposes of
psychoanalysis.
Clearly one can find the influence of
many scholars and philosophies in the works of Fanon.
Fanon, like Marx before him, was not a great original
thinker but rather a great system builder, using
psycho-social analysis as Marx used socio-economic
analysis to unite many strands of thought into a
coherent whole. Thus, the endless attempts by activists
and academics to label Fanon as Marxist or non-Marxist,
as existentialist or Freudian, are the most part
misguided and sterile. Fanon was all of these and more.
The point worthy of analysis is not to determine
definitively whether Fanon should be characterized as
Marxist, but to ascertain as precisely as possible the
relationship between the thought of the two men. In what
sense does he depart from Marx? And most importantly,
why?
This is my purpose in this essay. By
using a content analysis of Fanon’s published work, I
shall attempt to determine the relationship between Marx
and Fanon by analyzing Fanon’s thoughts in relationship
to certain well known fundamental Marxist organizing
concepts (alienation, determinism, the class struggle,
violence, the role of the bourgeoisie, the
peasants). I shall also discuss the Marxist view of
colonialism in relationship to Fanon’s analysis of the
concept.
First, at the risk of engaging in the
labeling game, Fanon was a Marxist. That is, he
was a historical materialist, a partisan of the
dialectical view of historical change. He was a Marxist
in methodology, applying the method of analysis
postulated by Marx to his particular time and
circumstance. He was a Marxist also in the sense that he
shared one of Marx’s abiding prejudices: opposition to
the exploitation of man by man. But whereas Marx was
Euro-centric in orientation, Fanon takes a world-view;
or, perhaps more precisely, Fanon was Afro-centric in
world view. Marx was concerned in his analysis primarily
with the liberation of the West European proletariat.
Fanon addressed himself to the liberation of the
non-Western colonials. Marx’s focus was class conflict.
Fanon spoke to the dual questions of class and race
conflict. Marx gave voice to the workers of the world;
Fanon to the “wretched of the earth.”
Therefore, it seems fair to say that
Fanon represents a special variety of Marxism. Fanon is
a scholar who applied a Marxist framework to that part
of the world to which Marx gave only passing attention.
Or, in Marxist phraseology, Marx could only give
expression to the historical reality of his time—the
exploitation of the working class; but in the
mid-twentieth century there is a new historical
reality—the historically necessary and irreversible rise
of the suppressed “colored” world. As W. E. B. Du Bois
prophesied in 1903, “The problem of the twentieth
century is the problem of the color line—the relation of
the darker to lighter races of men in Africa and Asia,
in America and the islands of the sea.”1 It
is in the light of resolving this problem that Fanon’s
work is in the final analysis must be viewed.
The concept of alienation in Marxist
thought in recent years has been a source of continuing
controversy. Several years ago Erich Fromm published
portions of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts.2 On the basis of this work
and other writings of the “young Marx,” Fromm and other
scholars have attempted to reorient thinking toward
Marxism, particularly Marxist philosophy. Fromm argues
that Marx’s philosophy, particularly his understanding
of alienation is “… like much of existentialists
thinking a protest against man’s alienations, his loss
of himself and his transformation into a thing; it is an
ethical philosophy that stands against the
dehumanization and atomization of man inherent in the
development of industrial society.”3 Critics
of this new interpretation of Marxism argue first that
philosophically there may be some basis for this view,
from a reading of Marx’s early work, but that Marx’s
main emphasis was not philosophical but sociological and
economic, and that from these readings there is little
to substantiate the philosophical musings of the early
Marx.
In other words, Marx was a better
sociologist than philosopher, and it is on sociological
grounds that Marx’s work as a whole must be treated. It
is also argued that Marx himself only considered these
questions in his youth, and that his “mature” thought
does not reflect the philosophical bent of his youth.4
For purposes of this essay it suffices to take note of
the controversy and to suggest that, at least
philosophically and perhaps also underlying his
socio-economic work, the concept plays a significant
orienting role.5
For Fanon, alienation is central to
the analysis of the colonized man and his society. The
colonized personality is alienated not only from his
color and traditional community but, most importantly,
through the dynamics of colonialism/racism he is
alienated from his very being as a Black person. Fanon
writes: “The Black man has no ontological resistance in
the eyes of the white man.” (1952:33)*
For the analyst of alienation in the
colonial world the problem then is twofold: race and
class alienation. Clearly the latter is of greater
moment in the colonial world for at least the alienated
white worker need not confront “the dilemma, turn white
or disappear.” (1952:184)
Fanon as a trained psychiatrist was
admirably suited to deal with this dilemma. Writing of
one of the prevalent manifestations of alienation among
the Black man in the world, he says, “I wish to be
acknowledged not as Black but as white . . . who but a
white woman could do this for me? By loving me she
proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a
white man. I am a white man. Her noble love takes me
onto the road of self realization—I marry white culture,
white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands
grasp those white breasts, they grasp white civilization
and dignity and make them mine.” (1952:188). This
quotation is from Fanon’s first book, Black Skin,
White Masks, a book he hoped would be a mirror in
which it would be possible to discern the Black man on
the road to disalienation.
What is this road to disalienation in
Fanon’s judgment? He writes: “As a psychoanalyst, I
should help my patient become conscious of his
unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory
whitening, but also to act in the direction of a
change in the social structure. In other words, the
black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma
turn white or disappear, but he should be able to
take cognizance of a possibility of existence. In still
other words, if society makes difficulties for him
because of his color, my objective will not be that
of dissuading him from it by advising him to ‘keep his
place’; on the contrary, my objective, once his
motivation has been brought into consciousness, will be
to put him in a position to choose action or passivity
with respect to the real source of his conflict—that
is the social structure.” (Emphasis added)
Here we see that Fanon, even at this
early stage of his work where his primary focus was on
psychiatric care of the mentally disturbed, clearly
grounds Black alienation in the racist social structure
and prescribes social rather than purely individual
therapy. He implies that there is little really a
psychiatrist qua psychiatrist can do about the
central despair of the Black psyche, the fact that Black
men and women are constrained to live in a world
deliberately constructed to reduce and sicken them,
and that as a consequence there is no such thing as
normal Black people in the colonial world. They are all
pathological cases, the main difference being between
those who can see through the white mask and those who
wear the mask as if it were real. Fanon rips away
the mask, and for those who had expressed “delusions”
about assimilating into the colonial order, the book is
painful though indispensable reading. The
assimilationist is stripped bare with the mask removed,
bare and naked right down to, in Amiri Baraka’s words,
what he came into the world with, “his black ass.”6
Another manifestation of this
alienation, one that is particularly destructive to
native society is the “tribal warfare and feuds between
sects and quarrels between individuals.” (1963:43)
Fanon, of course, argues that the phenomenon of “Niggers
Killing Niggers on Saturday Night” is misplaced
aggression that should be redirected toward the source
of this “tonicity of muscles”—the settler. This racially
determined alienation is added onto the alienation
deriving from class relations. This dual nature of the
problem of alienation in the Black world leads Fanon to
propose drastic measures to deal with the
problem—absolute violence—the formulation that he is
most famous (or infamous) for in the West. However,
prior to looking at this problem, it is necessary to
consider two other key Marxist organizing concepts in
relation to Fanon—economic determinism and the class
struggle.
Marx was a determinist in the sense
that he argued certain events: notably, that the
proletarian revolution was historically necessary or
predetermined. He was an economic determinist in the
sense that he held the motive force at bottom of all
historical change to be the economy. What Marx
understands by the economy is the manner and methods by
which men in a given society produce their means of
subsistence and exchange the products among themselves.
Marx further postulated that the struggle over the
economy was, in the final analysis, the means by which
all epochal changes occur. In deriving this
understanding of historical causation, Marx claims that
he simply recorded the observed fact that “The history
of all hitherto existing societies is the history of
class struggle”7 and drew conclusions
consistent with these findings. It is important to
remember that, for Marx, the term class is used
in a very precise sense to indicate groups standing in
different relationships to the means of production.
Fanon was also a determinist in the
sense that he felt certain events, as in his case of the
national revolution in the Third World, were
historically necessary and irreversible. He writes: “Now
a historic look at history requires that the French
colonialists retire, for it has become historically
necessary for the national time to exist.” (1967:170)
On the question of Fanon as an
economic determinist, there is some confusion in his
writings, particularly on the relationship between the
class and national questions in the Third World. In his
first work, he writes: “The Negro problem does not
resolve itself into the problem of Negroes living among
white men but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved,
despised by a capitalist society that is only
accidentally white” (1952:202). In his essay on “Racism
and Culture,” published posthumously, he writes in a
similar view: “The problem is covered over by economic
disclamation. . . . Here we have proof that questions of
race are but a superstructure, a mantle, an obscure
ideological emancipation concealing an economic
reality.”
Yet, in his last and most
sophisticated work, he seems to break slightly away from
this strict Marxist view. He writes: “When you examine
at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident
that what parcels out of belonging to or not belonging
to a given race, a given species. In structure is also a
superstructure. The cause is the consequence. You are
white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis
should always be slightly stretched every time we have
to deal with the colonial problem. Everything up to and
including the very nature of precapitalist society, so
well explained by Marx, must here be thought out again.”
Of course, the tension between the
revolt of color and the revolt of class did not agitate
the mind of Marx for long. He is reported to have said
in a letter to President Abraham Lincoln that labor in a
white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor in a
black skin is branded, but he never systematically
followed through on the implications of this
observation. This was, of course, Fanon’s raison
d’être. Also it must be said that was weakest—the
psychological foundations of human behavior. Thus, he
was able to draw, even in his youth, on other
formulations of the problem of man’s inhumanity to man,
particularly the understandings developed by the
Négritude poets on the problem of white man’s inhumanity
to Black man.8 Yet he did not abandon his
belief in the possibility of transcending race, of the
race question passing through the dialectic of
anti-racist racism into a higher synthesis of humanism.9
He wrote: “The Negro asserts his
solidarity with the oppressed of all colors. At once the
subjective existential ethnic idea of Négritude
‘passes,’ as Hegel puts it, into the objective idea of
the proletariat. For Césaire says, “The white man is a
symbol of capital as the Negro is that of labor. Beyond
the black skin men of race it is the battle of the world
proletariat that is his song” (1967:133). He goes on to
suggest that the Negro is the new world proletariat; he
writes that the Negro, as “the scapegoats of white
society,” will be precisely the “brutal force” that will
destroy that society. Here we can see Fanon’s use of the
philosophy of Hegel and the dialectic method at his
best.
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*
Fanon’s use of the dialectic can also
be seen in his treatment of the peasants and the
bourgeoisie and the working class of the colonial
world. In the process of Europe’s change from a
traditional to a modern society, no one sang the praises
of the bourgeoisie more than Karl Marx. Yet, for
Fanon, the colonial bourgeoisie is “absolutely
worthless.” In perhaps his most important contribution
to understanding the Third World developmental process,
he writes: “In under-developed countries, then, there
exists no true bourgeois, capable of creating the
conditions necessary for the development of a large
scale proletariat, to mechanize agriculture and finally
to make possible the existence of an authentic national
culture. This means that, since national capitalist
development cannot occur, the colonial capitalist
pattern of appropriate revolutionary strategies must be
very different from those in developed countries”
(1963:30–31).
As for the working class in the
colonial context, Fanon writes: “In the colonial
territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the
colonized population which has been most pampered by the
colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns
is in a comparatively privileged position. In the
capitalist countries the working class had nothing to
lose: in the colonial countries the working class has
everything to lose.” (1963:86)
As for the true revolutionary force
in the developing countries, Fanon places his faith in
the dispossessed rural peasants in the cities and on the
masses of the peasantry left behind. Where Marx spoke
disparagingly of the “idiocy” of rural life and the lack
of revolutionary potential of the urban lumpen
proletariat, Fanon based his entire strategy on
these groups he canonized as the “wretched of the earth”
who truly have nothing to lose but their chains. He
writes: “The rebellion which began in the country
districts will filter into the towns through that
fraction of the peasant population which is blocked on
the outer fringe of the urban centers, that fraction
which has not yet found a bone to gnaw in the colonial
world (1963:103).10
Fanon departs most sharply from Marx
in his understanding of the functions of violence in the
revolutionary process. Violence was not key to Marx’s
analysis of revolution; he agreed that violence would
probably be necessary because the bourgeoisie
would in all likelihood resist its demise violently;
however, he did admit the possibility of nonviolent
revolutionary change in certain advanced industrial
societies, notably the United States and Britain.
Thus, although Marx expects violence
to be a part of the revolutionary process, he does not
consider it historically necessary nor does he make the
concept central to his analysis. For Fanon, the exact
reverse seems to be the case. He argued that violence
was indispensable in the decolonization process, a
categorical imperative, without which one could not talk
of revolution—or at least one could only talk of
it.
In his essay. “Toward the Liberation
of Africa,” he writes: “Violence alone, committed by the
people, violence organized and educated by its leaders,
makes it possible for the masses to understand social
truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle,
without that knowledge of the practice of action, there
is nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few
reforms, at the top, a flag waving: and down there at
the bottom an undivided masses still living in the
middle ages, endlessly marking time” (1967:118).
To understand Fanon’s insistence on
the absolute necessity of violence, one has to
understand that violence is more than a mere political
method or tool to force the removal of the European
oppressor; for Fanon, it is a vital means of psychic and
social liberation. He writes, “Violence is man
recreating himself: the native cures himself through
force of arms.” Thus, unlike Marx, Fanon seems to imply
that even if the colonialists peacefully withdraw, the
decolonization process is somehow aborted, that
liberation is incomplete—the native remains an enslaved
person in the neo-colonial social system.
The native’s inner violence remains
pent up, unexpressed and is likely to explode in renewed
inter-tribal war, civil war, coups or other forms
of post independence civil violence, deprived of its
only viable outlet—the settler. Thus, the function of
violence is only incidentally political; it’s main
function is psycho-social. He writes: “The native’s
weapon is proof of his humanity. For in the first days
of the revolt you must kill—to shoot down a white man is
to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an
oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time:
(1963:71).
Fanon seems to have reached this
conclusion from generalizations drawn from case studies
of the psyches of the oppressed and the oppressor in
Algeria. From this psychoanalytic work he “desired”
certain assumptions about the nature of colonialism, and
liberation. First, he assumed that colonialism, by
nature, is violent.
Fanon writes: “Colonialism . . .
is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield
when confronted with greater violence. The policeman and
the soldier, by their immediate presence and their
frequent and direct action, maintain contract with the
native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm
not to budge. It is obvious here that government speaks
the language of pure force. The intermediary does not
lighten the oppression nor seek to hide the domination;
he shows them up and puts them into practice with the
clear conscience of an upholder of peace; yet he is the
bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of
the native” (1963:91).
He further argues that colonialism
creates in the native a perpetual tendency toward
violence, a “tonicity of muscles” which is deprived of
an outlet. Hence, the phenomena of “Niggers Killing
Niggers on Saturday Night.”
Here he seems to imply that this
violence is inevitable, that it must be expressed if the
colonial personality and society is to be free. He
argues that it is incorrect to view this violence as the
effect of hatred or the resurrection of savage
instincts. On the contrary, he suggests that, given the
colonial context, it is the only way the “wretched of
the earth” can be free.11 For Marx, violence
served no such purpose; and here, Fanon is probably more
Sorelian than Marxist.12 Indeed, Marx
probably would have recoiled in horror at Fanon’s
violence thesis. Yet, one must remember that Marx was
dealing with an alienated personality, Fanon with a
dehumanized one. At the level of colonized individual,
Fanon writes: “For the native, life can only spring up
again out of the rotting corpse of the settler”
(1963:43).13
At the level of society, Fanon writes
that men change at the same time that they change the
world. Individual liberation is only a part of the
societal liberation process. He writes in a Sorelian
vein how the violent struggle for liberation will create
a bond of brotherhood among the oppressed masses: “The
mobilization of the masses, when it arises out of the
war of liberation, introduces into each man’s
consciousness the ideas of a common cause, a national
destiny and of a collective history. In the same way the
second phase, that of building up the nation, is helped
by the existence of this cement which has been mixed
with blood and anger” (1963:83).
Critics admit to the validity of
Fanon’s sociological argument, agree that colonialism is
a dehumanizing process, and in fact most would probably
by and large accept Fanon’s judgment that colonial
society is non-viable and ought to be replaced. That
part of the argument which they cannot accept is the one
drawn primarily from his psychological understanding of
the problem which impelled him to advocate violence as
the indispensable tool of liberation for the oppressed
man of color in a world controlled by white people.
Critics have used Fanon’s “fanatical”
advocacy of violence to deny Fanon his Marxist
credentials, or even his essentially humanist standing,
accusing him of barbarism and terrorism.14 I
contend that such charges are based on a failure to
understand where Fanon (and Marx) were “coming from.” At
the risk of over-generalization, I would argue that both
were seeking “by whatever means necessary” to end the
exploitation of man by men. It is generally recognized
that a serious shortcoming of Marx’s work is its
Euro-centric bias and overemphasis on the socio-economic
at the expense of the psychological. This is not to
suggest that either Marx or Fanon is “wrong,” it is only
to suggest that the problems of exploitation in Europe
and Africa are qualitatively different and require
different approaches.
The issue is the
same—exploitation—but its character and consequence is
different in the Third World today than it was in
western Europe in Karl Marx’s time. Hence, I would
postulate that Fanon is more of a Marxist than are his
Marxist critics in America and western Europe who talk
continuously of the working class revolution when, in
the West today, the workers are more bourgeois in
“outlook” than the bourgeoisie. Of course,
it really does not matter whether Fanon is to be granted
the halo of Marxism, for, as Fanon observed in his first
work, “The body of history does not determine a single
one of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by
going beyond the historical instrument hypothesis that I
will initiate the cycle of my freedom.” I think if Marx
were alive he could see his way clear to say to his
observation, “Right on, Brother!”
Conclusion—A Note on Sources
In this essay I here presented
certain citations from Fanon’s work that reflect my
understanding of his thought in relation to certain well
known Marxist fundamentals. I do not mean to imply that
this understanding is the only valid one.* In assembling
this essay, I tried to use those quotes from Fanon that
most nearly reflect the essentials of his thinking on
the question under consideration. However, the process
of writing is inevitably one of selection. When writing,
one, consciously or not, selects that data most
consistent with one’s particular emphasis or bias;
therefore, it is nearly certain that others with a
different emphasis could find in Fanon’s words
illustration to buttress arguments at odds with those
herein presented.
That is perhaps as it must be, for
Fanon, like Marx, is a thinker whose writings are varied
and ambiguous as the human condition he seeks to
understand. Finally, I have not attempted to ascertain
the truth or falsity of Fanon’s contentions, nor those
of Marx, for that matter. Both the men and their work
must stand or fall before the varieties of human
behavior and the bar of history. I should add that,
although I have not attempted to argue whether Fanon or
Marx were right or wrong, I admire them both and hope I
have treated them with that degree of admiration and
detachment that great thought deserves.
Fanon published four books, the last
being a posthumous collection of essays. The English
translation of these works that I consulted do not
correspond chronologically to the dates of publication
of the French editions. For example, Fanon‘s first work
was published in France in 1952, the English version
that I consulted is dated 1967, while his last work,
The Wretched of the Earth, in English, is dated
1963, four years prior to his first book. To avoid
confusion in the text, I have listed Fanon’s first work
by its French publication date and the other works by
their English edition publishing dates. The citations in
the essay thus refer to the following works: Black
Skin, White Mask, 1952, Grove Press, and 1967
English translation: The Wretched of the Earth,
Penguin, 1963; and Toward the African Revolution,
Monthly Review Press 1967.
The works of Marx are of course
abundant. For purposes of this essay see: Marx &
Engels: Selected Works, International Publishers,
1967, and Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization,
edited by Shlomo Avineri, Anchor Books, 1964.
Endnotes
1. W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk.
2. Erich Fromm,
Marx’s Concept of
Man, Ungar Pub. New York, 1967.
3. Ibid., p. 33.
4. Theodore Rojak,
The Making of a
Counter Culture, Anchor Books, New York, 1969,
88–103.
5. Although the argument of Fromm is
not convincing, there is a new work that argues fairly
well the case for the continuity and coherence of the
young and mature Marx. See: Istavan Meszaros,
Marx’s
Theory of Alienation, Merlin Press, London, 1970.
* For source of this and following
Fanon references, see page 33.
6. LeRoi Jones,
Home, William
Morrow, New York, 1966. This ideological autobiography
is an extraordinary example of American Blacks’ journey
to disalienation.
7. Marx and Engel, The Communist
Manifesto.
8. I would argue that there is no
understanding Fanon without an appreciation of the
influence of the Négritude literary movement on his
thought. English translation of the major poets are
almost nonexistent. Two key works of the movement are
Aimé Césaire’s
Notebook on Return to the Native
Country and Léon Damas’ Pigments.
9. Jean Paul Sartre developed this
notion of anti-racist racism in his influential essay,
“Black Orphéus.”
10. For a perceptive though somewhat
biased account of the attempt to apply this notion to
the wretched of the American earth see Tom Milstein,
“Perspective on the Panthers,” A Commentary Report.
11. Richard Wright made the same
argument in his book,
White Man, Listen.
12. George Sorel,
Reflections on
Violence.
13. This is a recurrent theme in
Black literature in America. See Richard Wright’s
Native Son and especially his
The Outsiders.
See also Amiri Baraka’s plays and poetry.
14. I think the charge of barbarism
and terrorism is particularly misguided. Fanon said
repeatedly that “In a war of liberation the colonized
people must win, but they must do so clearly without
barbarity.” One scholar who makes these charges is Lewis
Coser, yet in his major works on the subject he
identifies several functions of social violence that are
closely akin to Fanon’s. See Lewis Coser,
The
Functions of Social Conflicts and
Continuities in
the Study of Conflict.
* One should note that Fanon’s work
is, unlike Marx’s writings, incomplete, unfulfilled. He
died at age 36 (it is said that men do their best work
at about 49), only weeks before he finished the final
proofs of his last work. Therefore, one will never know
where Fanon’s mature thought in the light of recent
history would have led him, or how he would have pulled
together the varied strands of thought in his writings
into a systematic whole, or even that he would have done
so. Clearly he, like Albert Camus, was a man “becoming.”
Where, with Marx, we have the “early” and “mature” to
compare, with Fanon we have only the “early” with all
the pitfalls Aristotle tells us are inherent in the work
of the young.
Source: Black World •May
1973 • Vol. XXII No. 7 • Chicago, IL 60605
posted 25 March 2000
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updated 18 October 2007 |
