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ABSTRACT
On this 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, what can we learn from Fanon’s turn to Marx over 60 years ago? This paper reviews Fanon’s active engagements with Marx throughout his work from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth; from the importance of Marx’s 18th Brumaire in Fanon’s thinking, to what he calls stretching Marxian concepts. In this moment of crisis and retrogression, what can we learn from Fanon’s creative use of Marxian categories?
Notes
1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 145.
2 This is the manner in which Fanon poses the question in Black Skin, White Masks in his reference to Antonin Artaud’s famous quote on Aeschylus.
3 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 100.
4 Rabaka, “Revolutionary Fanonism”, 138. For Rabaka’s discussion of “Marxist Fanonism” see Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism. For discussions of Fanon and Marx’s humanism, see Turner, “Marxist Humanist Legacy of Frantz Fanon”, and Gibson, Postcolonial Imagination.
5 The 1961 French publication of The Wretched of the Earth was promptly banned by the de Gaulle government but not before “every one was talking about it” according to Le Monde’s Pierre Viansson-Ponté.
6 Certainly Merleau-Ponty did. As Martin Jay puts it, Merleau-Ponty was “one of the first French thinkers to appreciate the significance of History and Class Consciousness”. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 367.
7 Said, “Traveling Theory”, 206–14.
8 On Gramsci and Fanon, see Beneduce, “History as Palimpsest”. and Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience.
9 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 31.
10 In other words, Fanon’s involvement in this anniversary helps contextualize Fanon’s extended reference to Marx’s 18th Brumaire in Black Skin, White Masks.
11 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, xv–xvi.
12 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 186.
13 See, for example, the change from the “rough plan” of the book in July 1960, called Alger-Le Cap (Algiers – Cape Town). See Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 685–6.
14 Quoted in Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 727.
15 Armed workers took over the town in the 1831 revolt and another revolt three years later saw the imprisonment of 10,000 workers. In Capital, 743, Marx writes, “the urban proletariat sounded the tocsin of revolution at Lyons”.
16 We should not forget that Merleau-Ponty was deeply engaged with the humanist Marx in this period. See Sens et non-sens published in 1948.
17 Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait, 16.
18 A key role in the immediate post-war period was played by the French social democratic SFIO, which was in power during most of the Algerian revolution and supported de Gaulle’s coming to power. The PCF, like the SFIO, was opportunist on the Algerian question, which ended marginalizing the Algerian Communist Party from the revolution.
19 Geismar, Fanon, 46–7.
20 Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Bawrricades, 21.
21 Though being a member of the Stalinist Communist Party “separated the two friends”, (Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, 20) Manville did bring Fanon the material.
22 Ayme was a Trotskyist psychiatrist and the secretary of the Hospital Psychiatrists’ Union.
23 Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait, 86. Fanon was impressed by one of his lecturers, Denis de Rougemont, the founding editor of Esprit. Joby Fanon reports ( J. Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother, 63) "Frantz made special mention of one of his lecturers, Professor de Rougemont, whom he considered a deep philosophical thinker: ‘Given that philosophy is the risk that the mind takes to achieve dignity, we hold him in the highest respect’” . Rougemont is a complicated Cold War, anti-Stalinist figure, who likely had ties to U.S. intelligence agencies.
24 David Healy notes in The Creation of Psychopharmacology, 151, that in the 1950s the hospital “captured the public imagination” and "many people made pilgrimages their" believing that the struggle against "tyranny and opression was not over but had to be extended to the rest of bourgeois society".
25 Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life, 118.
26 Young in Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 13, my emphasis.
27 Gibson and Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics, 127.
28 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 11.
29 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 7.
30 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xv–xvi.
31 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 26–7. Though Capecia’s infantile desires cannot be fulfilled, she expresses the Manichean structure of the colonial situation expressed in The Wretched of the Earth. For her, Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks, 27, “Black and White represent the two poles of this world, poles in perpetual conflict: a genuinely Manichaean notion of the world”.
32 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161–2. Fanon’s point seems to contradict his later insistence of developing a politics out of the resistance actions of the wretched of the earth. But both these points need to be held together by recognizing that colonialism erases the colonized world rendering the colonized unintelligible and outside of history. The point is echoed in Fanon’s critique of Mannoni in Black Skin, White Masks, 72. Mannoni, he argues, speaks of Malagasy dependency “deliberately ignoring the fact that since Gallieni the Malagasy has ceased to exist.” In other words, the Malagasy have ceased to be Malagasy since the time of General Gallieni’s slaughter of innocents in 1905.
33 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 68.
34 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 179, my emphasis.
35 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xv.
36 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 80.
37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 199.
38 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 201–2.
39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 74.
40 Quoted in McHale, “Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory”, 15. A former student of Merleau-Ponty’s, Tran Duc Thao published a number of articles on Vietnam in Les Temps Modernes and La Pensée, and in 1951 published Phénoménologie et Matérialisme Dialectique before returning to Vietnam in 1951 working through phenomenology and Marxism to commitment to the revolution. For Tran Duc Thao’s influence on Fanon, see Renault, “Fanon and Tran Duc Thao”, and Davies, Sartre and ‘Les Temps Modernes.’
41 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 199.
42 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 201.
43 Sartre quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
44 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 313.
45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 179, 238.
46 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 5.
47 Marx had of course written of the “rosy dawn” of capitalist accumulation in Capital and the centrality of African slavery and expropriation to Europe’s development from which “capital comes dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and dirt”. The colonial world continues these proceedings with the institutionalization of forced labor and the corveé system (first introduced in Algeria).
48 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 5, 90, translation altered.
49 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 232.
50 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3.
51 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3, my emphasis.
52 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 94. In a sense, this repeats the point from Black Skin White Masks, “the black exploited, enslaved, and despised by a colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white”.
53 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 56, translated altered.
54 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 100.
55 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 57.
56 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 135.
57 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 135, italics added.
58 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 238.
59 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 135.
60 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 32.
61 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 33.
62 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution.
63 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 34.
64 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution.
65 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 36 my emphasis.
66 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 84.
67 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire.
68 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 87.
69 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 87, my emphasis.
70 See Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 645–52.
71 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 98.
72 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 132.
73 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 99.
74 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 64.
75 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 163.
76 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 139, translated altered.
77 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
78 Marx, 18th Brumaire.
79 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 36.
80 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 53.
81 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 187, translation altered.
82 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution.
83 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 186.
84 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 97–8.
85 One of the original leaders of the FLN, Ait-Ahmed was a revolutionary and a socialist who stressed the importance of democracy in the movement and emphasized its Kabylian roots in the Djemâ. He resigned from the GPRA in 1962, denounced the FLN as a one-party state and was condemned to death. He helped found the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS) and the armed maquis (based in the mountains of Kabylia).
86 Quoted in Turner, “Fanon and the FLN”, 390.
87 The original title of the mistitled A Dying Colonialism, L’an cinq de la révolution algérienne “bears an obvious similarity with the Eighteenth Brumaire”. Martin, “Rescuing Fanon from the critics”, 85.
88 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 167, my emphasis.
89 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 186.
90 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 106.
91 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 115.
92 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 187.
93 Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, xi–xii.
94 It is worth noting that new work on Marx’s archive finds Marx’s interest in peasant uprisings and national liberation struggles going back to the 1850s when in many minds he was a solidly Eurocentric thinker: “From the early 1850s, Marx attributed a growing importance to peasant resistance and started elaborating his notion of permanent revolution on a genuinely international plane”. Padella, Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy, 122.
95 Padella, Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy, 160.
96 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 175.
97 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 150.
98 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 143.
99 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 47, 149.
100 Lenin, Selected Works, 439.
101 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 6, 138.