![]() However, with great perspicacity Fanon saw the dangers - of renewed elite, albeit now African, rule - that potentially lay ahead for the Algerian people and other soon-to-be liberated colonised peoples.įanon was inspired by Marx, but he was also disillusioned with the way Marxism had become stultified under the influence of Stalinism. The Algerian revolution against French rule stood at the gates of victory. There was another reason for his urgency. He died, tragically young, shortly after its publication. Fanon’s new humanismįrantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, first published in French in 1961, in a race against time, while he was dying from leukaemia. It combines the longer tradition of socialism from below - combatting and transcending capitalist exploitation through labouring class struggle and eventual control over the means of production - with a radical and highly original vision of a post-racial, post-patriarchal, post-alienated world. In fact, Fanon’s advocacy of a ‘new humanism’ was central to his analysis of the historical moment of decolonisation. Said, for example, draws on Fanon as part of his broader argument for (non-socialist) Palestinian nation-building, while Young is writing primarily for academic purposes. Why are these writers so quick to disassociate Fanon’s critique of colonialism from his advocacy of anti-colonial socialist development? The answer may have to do with the fact they were more conservative than Fanon. In his Culture and Imperialism, the great Palestinian activist-scholar Edward Said argues that Fanon fails to offer ‘a prescription for making a transition after decolonisation to a period … a new political order’ ( 4). For example, in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert Young misinterprets Fanon’s politics by equating them with violent Maoism, whilst ignoring his vision of post-colonial socialist development: ‘What is noticeable about the FLN and Fanon’s position is that it is predicated on an espousal of the virtues and necessity of violence, with little indication of what the free society that was to follow liberation was to be like’ ( 3). By doing so, they are providing a one-sided, lifeless portrayal of Fanon’s purpose. However, some influential thinkers elevate Fanon’s critique of colonial capitalism, whilst demoting and misinterpreting his Marxist socialism. It calls, increasingly, for reparations to redress the damage wrought by slavery.Īll these elements are foreshadowed in Fanon’s work - but he provided much more than this. It reveals and counters the racism within universities and other key institutions. It challenges the ideology and practice of economic growth based catch-up development (where poorer countries squeeze their populations to raise the resources to become like richer countries). It uncovers the violent and ideological processes by which Indigenous voices were and still are marginalised by Northern powers. The movement to decolonise development and development studies draws upon a variety of prior intellectual movements, especially from cultural and post-colonial studies. ![]() It obscures his vision of a decolonised world and the social forces able to construct it. This represents a dangerous misinterpretation of Fanon. However these two elements of his thought - the critical identification of the violence of colonialism, and a real human developmental alternative to it - have often been disconnected by thinkers influential to the decolonial movement. Not only did Fanon explain the horrors inflicted by colonialism upon native populations crucially, he also conceived of real human development as a process rooted in a collective labouring class (comprising workers and poor peasants) transcending capitalist brutality. ’On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them.’ ‘The Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it,’ he warned. ![]() One of the reasons for Fanon’s popularity among those who want to decolonise development is that he argued that post-colonial countries should forge their own paths to development rather than attempting to follow already developed countries. ‘Deportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power’ ( 2). ‘For centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world,’ he wrote. Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world’s population. The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ‘the bible of decolonisation’ as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world ( 1).
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