The struggle against racist, colonial oppression on Fanon’s account both presupposes a concept of humanity against which the dehumanizing situation of colonialism can be grasped and generates a demand for and the discovery of a new humanity and universal values.
In This Feature
BY VIRTUE OF HIS RELENTLESS opposition to neocolonialism, as well as strident criticism of tendencies within the socialist and anticolonial movements of his time that fell short of actualizing what he called a “new humanism,” Frantz Fanon continues to be a living presence in today’s battle of ideas. His warning of the pitfalls facing liberation struggles that fail to achieve a thoroughgoing social transformation has proven prophetic, as the tragic history of the past half-century shows.
Today, we are inheritors of this tragedy—whether we live in the Global North or South—in ways that Fanon would no doubt find profoundly unsettling. The absence of a viable and enduring alternative to contemporary capitalism’s imperialism—a response to the global economy facing evermore intractable economic, political, and environmental crises—has left a void filled by a resurgent right-wing populism and neofascism, especially in the advanced capitalist nations. Desiring the liberation of all those who experienced oppression, Fanon’s opposition to racial and colonial discrimination is grounded in a universal vision of democratic human emancipation. Yet, be this as it may, we must accept a note of caution.
Fanon spoke, wrote, and acted from the standpoint of his lived experience as a Black man from Martinique, his six-year residence in the French colonial metropole, and his work as a psychiatrist and spokesperson for the Algerian revolution from 1953 to 1961. His writings are thoroughly situated in the historical contingencies of his time and place and cannot be readily abstracted from them. Acknowledging the contextual origins of his ideals, Fanon opened his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, emphatically asserting “I am not the bearer of absolute truths.”1Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), xi. He resisted bestowing upon himself a revolutionary label. From his earliest work to his later activity in Wilaya–4 of the Front de Libération Nationale (the most politically progressive section of the FLN), Fanon crossed paths and worked with innumerable Marxists. Nonetheless, he never identified himself with any Marxist tendency. Although eschewing the label, this should not preclude those who consider themselves Marxists, on the centenary of Fanon’s birth, from engaging with and experiencing the richness of his enduring works.
The Specificity of Racial Oppression
Less interested in providing a sociological analysis of race and racism, Fanon’s concern was to convey its impact on the subjective consciousness of the colonized. Fanon has us hear his shock and anger at the specificity of anti-Black racism: “I don’t believe it! Whereas I had every reason to vent my hatred and loathing, they were rejecting me? Whereas I was the one they should have begged and implored, I was denied the slightest recognition?”2Karen Ng, “Humanism: A Defense,” Philosophical Topics 49, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 94–95.
Racial oppression is not synonymous with class oppression. Fanon insisted on addressing it on its own terms, being “overdetermined from the outside” by the perception of skin color is (as Lewis Gordon put it) “an ironic way of not being seen through being seen.”3Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 5. This is the famous zone of non-being that Fanon identifies as the distinguishing mark of anti-Black racism. His critique targets a particular form of dehumanization, one that renders invisible the humanity of the individual precisely because the epidermis is all too visible. Fanon’s critique of racialization proceeds from an expansive vision of human possibility that is thwarted by dehumanization. The vision is stated thusly: “Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation…Man is a ‘yes’ resonating from cosmic harmonies.” Fanon subjects to relentless critique forms of social existence that prevent the actualization of this human capacity. As he asserted, “We are aiming for a complete lysis of this morbid universe. We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.”4Fanon, Black Skin, xiv. Years later, in The Wretched of the Earth, he concretizes this in stating, if “the African intellectual expresses the manifest will of the people…[this] will necessarily lead to the discovery and advancement of universal values…It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives.”5Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 180.
The transition from national consciousness to social consciousness entails a transformation of social relations.
Fanon held that achieving the transition from national consciousness (the awareness by a colonized people of their oppression) to social consciousness (the collective understanding of the political, economic, and cultural oppression experienced by the colonized) entails a thoroughgoing transformation of dehumanized social relations. As Karen Ng has argued:
The struggle against racist, colonial oppression on Fanon’s account both presupposes a concept of humanity against which the dehumanizing situation of colonialism can be grasped and generates a demand for and the discovery of a new humanity and universal values. Instead of a dichotomy between humanism and social situatedness, the particular social hierarchy of colonizer and colonized comes into view as oppressive by appearing as dehumanization.6Ng, “Humanism,” 160.
For Concrete Universalism, Not Abstract Universalism
Such concrete universalism should not be confused with abstract universalism that cloaks particular interests under proclamations of “universal” values—a hallmark of the Western imperialist episteme. The tendency to conflate the two is ubiquitous: to give one of many examples, Shay Welsh, in an otherwise insightful work, condemns the notion of universality tout court on the grounds that it “is underscored by dualist logic and hierarchical valuations of ways of being.”7Shay Welch, The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 319.
Fanon had a lot to say about how colonialism imposes its will under the guise of universal claims, stating, “For if equality among men is proclaimed in the name of intelligence and philosophy, it is also true that these concepts have been used to justify the extermination of man.”8Fanon, Black Skin, 12. And: “Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.”9Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 235.
Yet that did not stop him from proclaiming, “The liberation struggle does not restore to national culture its former values and configurations…This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism.”10Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 178. As Adam Shatz put it, “Fanon was both a ferocious critic of universality and a deeply universalist thinker.”11Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024), 370.
The notion that a humanist critique of alienation and exploitation is compatible with rejecting the false universalisms of bourgeois society is hardly alien to Marxism. Did Marx not proclaim, “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that humanity is the highest essence for humanity—hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which humanity is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence”?12Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Marx–Engels Collected Works, 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 182. Marx singles out the class struggle as a critical determinant since the domination of labor by capital signifies “that the human being objectifies itself inhumanely, in opposition to himself.”13Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 331.
At the same time, for this very reason his project is not limited to a theory of class struggle. This is already intimated in his critique of treating “a woman [as] a piece of communal and common property” in his early writings and in his view that the liberation of people of color from social subordination is a precondition for the success of the struggle against capitalism in his later ones.14Marx, “Economic and Philosophic,” 294. I am not only referring to Marx’s statement that “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a Black skin” and his argument that the success of the English proletariat depends upon supporting the Irish national struggle (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage Books, 1977]). I am also referring to his very last notes on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the US in which he railed against “the disposition towards sharp repressive measures which is aroused among the wealthy classes by the symptoms of dissatisfaction and aggression by the poor.” See David Norman Smith, “Accumulation and Its Discontents: Migration and Nativism in Marx’s Capital and Late Manuscripts,” in Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, ed. Marcello Musto (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 201.
Class and Oppression
As a movement, Marxism has had, at best, an ambiguous legacy when it comes to proceeding from a concept of universal human emancipation. Many variants of Marxism have assumed that prioritizing the (admittedly vital) issue of class struggle in and of itself supplies such a perspective. But the persistence of racism and sexism not only in bourgeois society but also within radical movements indicates that such a standpoint is insufficient.
Treating struggles over gender, race, and sexual identity as instantiations of class struggle may have its merit in certain contexts, but it becomes counterproductive when defining the parameters of one’s political praxis. What gets left out is the lived experience of those whose dehumanization is not accounted for by class domination. And when that happens, as is common among class reductionists and the “anti-woke” left, efforts to connect the Marxian critique of capital to the social movements of our times become all the more difficult.
Fanon was by no means a bystander to this debate. He was deeply indebted to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre—especially Antisemite and Jew, which he considered a template for grasping the contours of anti-Black racism.15See Luca Basso, Inventing the New: History and Politics in Jean-Paul Sartre (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 186: “Here it is productive to recall Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: by taking up some elements of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew…Fanon emphasizes that antisemitism is also racist, ‘negrophobic,’ and conversely, it is the racist (like the antisemite) who creates the ‘inferiorised’ and not vice versa.” Less known is his debt to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex—largely because he never deemed to acknowledge it.
It is hard to deny the unspoken impact on Fanon of such passages as “The advantage of the master, [Hegel] says, comes from his affirmation of Spirit as against Life through the fact that he risks his own life; but in fact, the conquered slave has known this same risk. Whereas woman is basically an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life; between her and the male there has been no combat.”16Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), 90. This clearly influenced Fanon’s discussion in Black Skin, White Masks of the inferiority complex afflicting colonized subjects that results from refraining to risk their lives in the battle for recognition—a theme that later becomes central in The Wretched of the Earth’s espousal of revolutionary violence.
Nevertheless, Fanon found it necessary to take issue with Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks on the issue of concrete versus abstract universalism. After citing in Black Orpheus Leopold Senghor’s comment, “Among the Black men of his race, it is the struggle of the world proletariat which he sings,” Sartre adds, “the notion of race does not intersect with class” since race is “concrete and particular” whereas class is “universal and abstract.”
Sartre poses class as an abstract universal that stands above the concrete specificity of Black consciousness. Fanon is deeply offended, since “Black consciousness claims to be an absolute density, full of itself…I am not a potentiality of something. I am fully what I am…My Black consciousness does not claim to be a loss.”17Fanon, Black Skin, 113–4. He goes on to proclaim, “Sartre forgets that the Black man suffers in his body differently from the white man.”18Fanon, Black Skin, 117. This is the essential point. Different objective structures generate distinct subjective experiences.
So, how can we do justice to these distinctions while finding common ground between different struggles for social justice? It cannot be achieved by holding that the Black experience is a moment in the “general class struggle” any more than by claiming it has no connection to the class struggle. Fanon, however, provides a valuable concept of human creative capacities that serves as the standard of critique for differentiated forms of dehumanization.
Proceeding from such a standpoint, Fanon can affirm the specificity of Black consciousness at the same time as insisting “in the absolute, the Black is no more to be loved than the Czech, for truly what is to be done is to set humanity free.”19Fanon, Black Skin, xii. And in taking issue with Sartre, he states, “For once this friend, this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness.”20Fanon, Black Skin, 112. Charisse Burden-Stelly captures the sense of this enigmatic passage: “Borrowing from Karl Marx’s dictum that the labor process is the hidden abode of the capitalist production of value, and Nancy Fraser’s conceptualization of reproduction as the even more hidden abode, or background condition, for the possibility of capitalist production, I understand Blackness as the obfuscated abode. The immense value of Blackness is obscured and rendered unintelligible by its positioning as worthlessness, as something that does not amount to anything—but that does not equal nothing. As a structural location at the intersection of indispensability and disposability, Blackness exceeds the category of race, is not reducible to class, and does not fit the specifications of caste.” Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Modern US Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights,” Monthly Review (July–August 2020): 8–20.
Strategies of Liberation
The assertion that battles against racism and colonialism are minor compared to the traditional class struggle fails to grasp their profound revolutionary potential. This argument speaks to Fanon’s effort in The Wretched of the Earth to “slightly stretch” a Marxist analysis considering the realities of colonialism and neocolonialism. The stretching is necessitated by two realities.
First, “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”21Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 5. The vulgar Marxist notion that consciousness, culture, and juridical formations are “nothing but” the reflection of the economic base is clearly untenable in a colonial context in which socially inscribed ideas of race and racism take on a life of their own and structure class relations. It is also untenable in racialized and gendered capitalist spaces in the imperialist metropole, where battles over race, gender, and sexuality often serve as the catalyst of class struggles.
Claiming that battles against racism and colonialism are less than traditional class struggle fails to grasp their profound revolutionary potential.
A dialectical critique does not reduce consciousness to conditions; instead, it focuses on the process by which concrete subjects produce and reproduce social reality while being historically produced and reproduced by it as well. Consciousness not only reflects but also creates the objective world—for the better when it has revolutionary content, for the worse when it has counter-revolutionary content.
Second, Fanon consistently rejected the notion that either the national revolution or the passage from it to social revolution could be achieved by relying on minoritarian support from the oppressed. In this he was aligned with Marx, who held “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests in the immense majority.”22Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 496.
Marx’s most perceptive followers fully recognized this: as Rosa Luxemburg repeatedly affirmed, “There can be no socialism without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat!”23Rosa Luxemburg, “The National Assembly,” in Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5. Political Writings 3: On Revolution, 1910–1917, ed. Paul Le Blanc and Helen Scott, trans. Jacob Blumenfeld et al. (New York and London, Verso Books), 267. However, in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South the urban proletariat represented a small proportion of the populace, which consisted overwhelmingly of peasants.
Fanon, like other theorists of the African revolutions, held that the effort to defeat the formidable power of imperialism required a broad alliance of class forces, which included the national bourgeoisie. But once independence is achieved, the national bourgeoisie becomes an unreliable and even treacherous ally. The only way forward, he held, is to thoroughly ground the revolution in the peasant masses through a democratic process of transition.
This has direct organizational consequences. While a single unified party or front plays a key role in the struggle for independence, it becomes an impediment when the task shifts to having the masses take effective and not just nominal control of the production and distribution of economic, political, and cultural resources.
He therefore insists, “The single party is the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship—stripped of mask, makeup, and scruples, cynical in every respect.” Sooner or later, “it skips the parliamentary phase and chooses a national-socialist-type dictatorship” which “bludgeons and incarcerates into silence” all opponents.24Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 111, 115.
Fanon’s opposition to the single-party state, his insistence that the newly independent nations should decentralize economic and political life to the utmost, and his view that they should avoid aligning with either side in the Cold War distinguished him from many of his closest allies in the Algerian and sub-Saharan revolutionary movements. Although he refrained from a direct criticism of the FLN or Ghana’s Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sékou Touré in The Wretched of the Earth, his analysis anticipated exactly the authoritarian approaches they implemented not long after assuming state power. The pitfalls of national consciousness do not only apply to neocolonialism. His warning of this eventuality makes him our contemporary.
The pitfalls of national consciousness do not only apply to neocolonialism. Fanon’s warning of this eventuality makes him our contemporary.
Fanon can be criticized for overstating the revolutionary role of the peasantry and downplaying that of the urban working class in some of the African revolutions, just as his fervent advocacy of revolutionary violence led him to make some misguided political judgments (such as picking the wrong side in the disputes within the Angolan independence movement). But what critics of Fanon often fail to appreciate is that his advocacy in the last years of his life of a thoroughly democratic and mass-based participatory process in achieving the transition from national to social consciousness represented a vital contribution to revolutionary theory and practice that offers an alternative to the statist authoritarianism that has defined much of the socialist and communist movements of the past century.
Fanon could not adopt the model of the Russian Revolution of 1917 as his template because he was painfully aware that relying on a minoritarian party that gains hegemony over a minoritarian revolutionary subject made little sense in light of his lived experience as an African revolutionary.
Fanon’s Lessons for Struggle Today
Fanon’s prophetic warning that the failure to achieve a transition from national (or political) to social (or human) emancipation, leading to a series of tragic failures, continues to haunt us today. There is, of course, a major difference between Fanon’s era and our own. Where the anticolonial movements of his time laid claim to some kind of socialist alternative, that is not the case today. Nevertheless, important efforts are underway to renew the struggle for such an alternative, as witnessed in the emergence of a new generation of activists opposed to resurgent racism, sexism, environmental destruction, and Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestine.
This makes it all the more important to develop a critique of existing society that proceeds from a vision of emancipation from all forms of dehumanization. This is especially relevant because of a problem that continues to afflict today’s radical movements: campism, the tendency to treat the enemies of one’s enemy as one’s friend even when they are reactionary state powers that are premised on the repression of their own working-class and national minorities.
This dehumanizing repression and its toleration by those ostensibly committed to emancipation has long been with us. It was a staple of Stalinism, but the tendency not to speak out against the crimes committed by forces that may at times oppose the US continuously resurfaces.
Is there not a price to be paid for opposing Israel’s colonial effort to eradicate the very existence of the Palestinian people while refraining from supporting the resistance of Ukrainian people to Russia’s neocolonial effort to annul its national existence? Is there not a price to be paid for opposing US imperialism’s demonization of Muslims while not opposing China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority? While the main enemy is always at home, the price paid for doing so is to desensitize ourselves to the lived experiences of those suffering from the ravages of global capitalism. An alternative to capitalism cannot emerge from so narrow a standpoint.
We cannot limit our response to any forms of repression and dehumanization by simply pointing out their political deficiencies. Following Fanon, we can rely on a theoretical framework grounded in a vision of universal human emancipation from all forms of alienation and oppression. On the centenary of his birth, revisiting Fanon’s humanist opposition to racism and colonialism remains a vital part of this effort, but the work of achieving it has to be done by ourselves, on the basis of the realities facing us as we move forward. ×
Notes & References
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), xi.
- Karen Ng, “Humanism: A Defense,” Philosophical Topics 49, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 94–95.
- Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 5.
- Fanon, Black Skin,
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 180.
- Ng, “Humanism,” 160.
- Shay Welch, The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 319.
- Fanon, Black Skin, 12.
- Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 235.
- Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 178.
- Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024), 370.
- Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Marx–Engels Collected Works, 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 182.
- Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 331.
- Marx, “Economic and Philosophic,” 294. I am not only referring to Marx’s statement that “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a Black skin” and his argument that the success of the English proletariat depends upon supporting the Irish national struggle (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage Books, 1977]). I am also referring to his very last notes on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the US in which he railed against “the disposition towards sharp repressive measures which is aroused among the wealthy classes by the symptoms of dissatisfaction and aggression by the poor.” See David Norman Smith, “Accumulation and Its Discontents: Migration and Nativism in Marx’s Capital and Late Manuscripts,” in Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, ed. Marcello Musto (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 201.
- See Luca Basso, Inventing the New: History and Politics in Jean-Paul Sartre (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 186: “Here it is productive to recall Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: by taking up some elements of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew…Fanon emphasizes that antisemitism is also racist, ‘negrophobic,’ and conversely, it is the racist (like the antisemite) who creates the ‘inferiorised’ and not vice versa.”
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), 90.
- Fanon, Black Skin, 113–4.
- Fanon, Black Skin,
- Fanon, Black Skin, xii.
- Fanon, Black Skin, 112. Charisse Burden-Stelly captures the sense of this enigmatic passage: “Borrowing from Karl Marx’s dictum that the labor process is the hidden abode of the capitalist production of value, and Nancy Fraser’s conceptualization of reproduction as the even more hidden abode, or background condition, for the possibility of capitalist production, I understand Blackness as the obfuscated abode. The immense value of Blackness is obscured and rendered unintelligible by its positioning as worthlessness, as something that does not amount to anything—but that does not equal nothing. As a structural location at the intersection of indispensability and disposability, Blackness exceeds the category of race, is not reducible to class, and does not fit the specifications of caste.” Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Modern US Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights,” Monthly Review (July–August 2020): 8–20.
- Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 5.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 496.
- Rosa Luxemburg, “The National Assembly,” in Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5. Political Writings 3: On Revolution, 1910–1917, ed. Paul Le Blanc and Helen Scott, trans. Jacob Blumenfeld et al. (New York and London, Verso Books), 267.
- Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 111, 115.