Arwa Awan, University of Chicago
Frantz Fanon is rightly celebrated for offering one of the sharpest analyses of colonialism’s devastating social and psychic structure and for placing the question of violence at the very center of the struggle for anticolonial liberation. Fanon’s reflections on the need to transform social relations after the formal termination of colonial domination have tended to draw less attention, particularly within Western academic scholarship on Fanon over the past two decades. This tendency has also meant a neglect of Fanon’s materialism, that is, Fanon’s acute awareness of the role that economic relations play in giving shape to human reality.
This aspect of Fanon’s political thinking was perhaps recognized more clearly in his own time than in ours. Che Guevara placed Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) in the company of the Marxist economist Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth (1957) as two great accounts of the problem of colonial underdevelopment. [1] The Black Panther Party as well as other Black radical groups and actors drew on Fanon to formulate their analyses of Black communities as American empire’s internal colonies, subjected to economic immiseration and underdevelopment.[2] Fanon’s insights about the distortion of social relations brought by colonial underdevelopment, tied up necessarily with cultural and psychic depredations, are worth revisiting today when capitalism continues to wreak havoc on the social fabric of postcolonial countries in its neoliberal, neocolonial iterations. For it was these insights about the importance of material social relations that shaped Fanon’s understanding of what genuine decolonialization would entail. Put simply, for Fanon, the promise of human emancipation held out by decolonization, which was one of overcoming the profound human disfiguration brought by colonial rule, had to do with re-organizing social relations, which are also economic relations.
This essay elaborates Fanon’s thinking about this predicament of anti/post-colonial politics by highlighting his conceptualization of work. The category of work in Fanon’s thought is a Hegelian inheritance; only when we grasp this philosophical account of work present in his thought can we fully come to see why Fanon placed such emphasis on anti- and post-colonial forms of work. The category of work allows us to glean Fanon’s distinct view of colonization as a shrinking of colonized people’s reality and decolonization as a creative enterprise that allows them to be reintegrated into social reality through collective work that generates their material universe and elevates their consciousness.
The Hegelian idea of work appears for the first time in the last few pages of Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (1952) where he famously engaged with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, popularized especially by the French-Russian thinker Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel from 1931 through 1939 in France.[3] For our purposes, what is key here is Fanon’s takeaway from these famed passages in Hegel interpreted through Kojève’s lens: work as an external manifestation of human activity which performs the role of reconciling the individual with the world. By working on and transforming the material world around us, according to Hegel and Kojève, we come to acquire a social existence which makes our subjective existence real by infusing the world with our activity.[4] At the same time, we come to be at home in this world which is no longer foreign to us. Work, therefore, is a means of humanization, of individuals becoming integrated into a social fabric.
I argue that this idea of work articulated quite early in his writings guided Fanon’s thinking about colonialism as well as the process of decolonization. If work allows the reconciliation between the self and the world through practical human activity, for Fanon, colonialism was marked by a complete rupture of this reconciliation. Work, in the classic sense of labor, appeared as forced work in the colonies, as Fanon put it in his Tunis lectures: “Labour was conceived as forced labour in the colonies, and even if there is no whipping, the colonial situation itself is a whipping; that the colonized does nothing is normal, since labour, for him, leads to nothing.”[5] Colonialism thus prevented the most essential form of humanization by turning the expression of self- and world-creating human activity into back-breaking toil.[6] Idleness of the natives is the necessary response to this degradation of labor: this “idleness is lived in the colonial context as a will not to make raising profit easy.”[7] It “contends with the rapaciousness of the settler,” whose activities are not geared towards “determinate economic development” of the region but rather at “amass[ing] the biggest possible profit in the shortest possible time.”[8] Against this degradation of work as labor, Fanon posited: “Work must be recovered as a humanization of man.” [9]
Fanon’s conception of work was not limited to strictly economic activity. It encompassed various forms of human activity whereby humans come to forge a social bond with others. This expansive view of work attested to Fanon’s belief in the inseparability of the economic realm from other realms of human existence, such as cultural, psychic, and social. The impossibility of humanizing work in the colonial world within the regime of forced labor instituted by colonial capital resulted in an impoverishment of reality, which affected all realms of social life where individuals were turned into fragmented atoms untethered from a cohesive whole. A colonized people, Fanon says, is “reduced to a collection of individuals who owe their very existence to the presence of the colonizer.”[10]
This social impoverishment can be gleaned in Fanon’s observations about the psychic life of the colonized. For example, in a piece written in 1955, Fanon analyzed the Algerian’s refusal to confess his crime, viewed by colonial authorities as a product of the Algerian’s propensity to lie and deceive. For Fanon, the accused Muslim’s refusal to take responsibility for his act, his refusal to embrace the sentence imposed on him, or admit guilt, is grounded in the absence of recognition “of the group by the individual.”[11] Confession would mean authenticating the social apparatus that is in fact completely foreign to him. Fanon sees the traditional role of confession or admission of guilt as “a way of initiating a reintegration within the social group.”[12] However, there can “be no reintegration if there has been no integration.”[13] Integration, as we will see in Fanon’s reflections on decolonization, has to do with work which allows individuals to become part of a social reality.
Fanon’s reflections on culture in the late 1950s carried over this preoccupation with the state of social dissolution introduced by colonial rule. In his talk “Racism and Culture,” given at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956, Fanon argues that “The characteristic of a culture is to be open, permeated by spontaneous, generous, fertile lines of force.”[14] Appeals to past glory by negritude writers and “external appearances, relics, and knowledge frozen in time” by colonial authorities betray “a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison, to harden.”[15] They neglect the fact that a people’s culture is “a dense, subterranean life in perpetual renewal”—and not “an inventory of behavioral patterns, traditional costumes, and miscellaneous customs” which culture becomes under colonial rule.[16] The sclerosis of cultural life highlights Fanon’s broader analysis of the colonial world: it is shorn of the reconciliation between the subjective and the objective which characterizes an individual’s humanizing, rather than reified and disfigured, relation with the world.
Decolonization meant a restoration of this reconciliation, which meant a rebirth of the social bond that integrates individuals with the world. This rebirth would necessarily involve reorganizing economic relations, which we shall explore towards the end of the essay. Examining Fanon’s views on the role of work clarifies what this holistic vision of decolonization entailed. I argue that we can parse out three significant and distinct variations of anti- and post-colonial work in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: first, work as humanizing violence aimed at the death of colonialism during the war for national liberation; secondly, as collective political activity that allows people to exercise their minds and engage with practical issues of socioeconomic and political import in tandem with others; and lastly, as unalienated, humanizing labor in a system of joint means of production which Fanon contrasted with the numbing drudgery of capitalist work. What is common to all these forms of work is that they perform an integrating function in restoring the social bond that relates humans with the world.
The condition of social disintegration we mentioned earlier is first challenged, Fanon tells us in Wretched, by the development of combativity, which nurtures a nascent national consciousness. As the “decisive confrontation” approaches, oral literature, folk tales and popular songs, having become stale and petrified, gain life and transform; traditional art forms such as woodwork are transformed— “the tormented mask comes to life;” and pottery abandons formalism, embracing a deluge of colors reflecting the revolutionary upsurge.[17] “[E]verything conspires to stimulate the colonized’s sensibility, and to rule out and reject attitudes of inertia or defeat.”[18] What emerges is the possibility of new forms of social relations, which is also the possibility of “integrating oneself into the coherent, constructive development of a world.”[19] As Fanon puts it, “Violent combat begins to undo… [colonial] fragmentation by procuring the people “substance” and “coherence.”[20]
This is precisely why Fanon calls anticolonial violence a form of “work.”[21] Violence aimed at the death of colonialism becomes work because it initiates the process of integrating isolated individuals into the fold of a social collective, which had been sapped of all reality by colonial domination. But the work of anticolonial violence can only be the beginning. For Fanon, anticolonial violence was not synonymous with decolonization. While it contained the seeds for the birth of a new society, the initial burst of explosive violence had to be quickly overcome in other forms of work if those seeds were to actually blossom. The “intense emotion of the first few hours” where “my blood calls for the blood of the other” will spell doom for the possibility of a genuine decolonization “if left to feed on itself.”[22] This form of work had to transform into other forms of durable work in order to sustain a coherent social framework within the horizon of the newly formed nation.
In Wretched, Fanon discusses a second form of work, which is collective political activity enabled by a participatory democratic political system at village, district, and regional levels. This decentralized political structure would foster active participation at the local level so that citizens “have the opportunity to speak, to express themselves and innovate.” Political work would raise people’s consciousness as they become practically involved in the rebuilding of their nation: “At every meeting the brain multiplies the association of ideas, and the eye discovers a wider human panorama.”[23] This economic development had to be bottom-up. For Fanon, even such obvious national goals such as reduction of harmful imports and increasing the GDP should not be dictated by authorities but must involve public campaigns and input of the masses.[24] This is the political work that Fanon found critical for postcolonial societies so that the state does not become an alienated essence, an imposition, but rather a creation of the people meant to serve them and derive its momentum from them.[25]
The democratic feature of Fanon’s political vision corresponded with his socialist economic vision, which emphasized a third form of work, namely unalienated labor that engaged both the mind and the muscles, elevated their consciousness, and reintegrated them into a national social reality that they identified with. “It is only when men and women are included on a vast scale in enlightened and fruitful work that form and body are given to that [national] consciousness.”[26] This is the only kind of national consciousness that Fanon supported, the kind that is anchored in “social and political consciousness,” and, in the end, in “humanism.”[27] As Fanon put it, “capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies” which “are the enemies of under-developed countries” must be replaced by “a socialist regime…completely oriented towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions.”[28]
To become productive and reintegrating, work must undergo a transformation from what it used to mean; it has to lose the meaning of daily drudgery for a specific number of hours and regain its significance as world- and self-creating social praxis. This means restructuring economic arrangements so that the “land belongs to those who work it” and that wealth is distributed and social relations are reorganized.[29] All these structural and institutional changes lead to the realization by the people that “work is not a physical exercise or the working of certain muscles, but that one works more with one’s brain and one’s heart than with muscles and sweat.”[30] This means, to recall Marx, that the hands and the minds of those that work are reunited. Fanon recounts: “The fellahs [peasants] who were able to judge and see for themselves the produce they had harvested were eager to understand how it worked. They very quickly realized that work is not a simple notion, that slavery is the opposite of work, and that work presupposes freedom, responsibility, and consciousness.”[31]
In prioritizing the human task of work, Fanon differs greatly from both colonial and capitalist models of economic development[32] and those upheld by a host of postcolonial statesmen, who (sometimes with good reasons) made the singular pursuit of economic development and industrialization their goal. The economic model that came to dominate in the Middle East and North Africa during the postwar period tended to emphasize the welfare responsibilities of the state while often barring the political arena from democratic contestation and planting a centralized state at the helm of the economic sphere.[33] While it is true that neoliberal policies in the following decades wiped away whatever benefits existed under this older model,[34] Fanon’s vision is an important reminder of the variety of postcolonial development models that were once on the table and that hold important resources for the present.
Sometimes compared with Yugoslavia’s self-management model, Fanon’s vision emphasizes bottom-up popular development. In a striking passage, he says: “If the building of a bridge does not enrich the consciousness of those working on it, then don’t build the bridge, and let the citizens continue to swim across the river or use the ferry.”[35] The importance of efficient transport paled in comparison with the human need to shape reality. “The bridge must not be…foisted upon the social landscape as a deus ex machina, but, on the contrary, must be the product of the citizens’ brains and muscles.”[36] Foreign technicians will probably be needed but the “the techniques [employed must] seep into the desert of the citizen’s brain so that the bridge in its entirety and in every detail can be integrated, redesigned, and reappropriated.”[37] Which is to say that the “citizen must appropriate the bridge.” “Then, and only then, is everything possible.”[38]
Fanon’s expansion of what work means, does, and discloses, signals the emergence of a new human relation to the world, which is inspired, at least in good part, by his reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. His humanist agenda might appear too utopian, unable to survive the concrete demands of political contingencies and economic imperatives. But I believe that Fanon’s unique attunement to the human heart of political and economic questions, which tend to be seen through the prisms of technocratic management and efficiency, is as instructive today as it was sixty years ago. He provides us with a vision of decolonization which aims at a total transformation of the social relations disfigured by colonialism, disclosing thereby the incompleteness of decolonization in our own time.
References
[1] Che Guevara, “Note de Che Guevara,” n.d., FNN 2.17, Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), France.
[2] Mumia Abu-Jamal, “Frantz Fanon and His Influence on the Black Panther Party and the Black Revolution,” in Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory, ed. Dustin Byrd and Seyed Javad Miri (Brill, 2079), 7–26, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004409200_003.
[3] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008); G.W.F. Hegel, “Mastery and Servitude,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. and trans. Terry P. Pinkard, Cambridge Hegel Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 108–16.
[4] Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1980), 23.
[5] Frantz Fanon, “The Meeting between Society and Psychiatry: Notes Taken by Lilia Ben Salem, Tunis, 1959-1960,” in Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 530.
[6] « Etudes et Recherches Sur La Psychologie En Algerie: Recontre de La Societe et de La Psychiatrie (Notes de Cours, Tunis, 1959-60) » (University of Oran, n.d.), 15, FNN 6.2: Articles médicaux, Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), France.
[7] Fanon, “The Meeting between Society and Psychiatry: Notes Taken by Lilia Ben Salem, Tunis, 1959-1960,” 529.
[8] Fanon, 529.
[9] « Etudes et Recherches Sur La Psychologie En Algerie: Recontre de La Societe et de La Psychiatrie (Notes de Cours, Tunis, 1959-60) » (University of Oran, n.d.), 15, FNN 6.2: Articles médicaux, Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), France.
[10] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 220.
[11] Frantz Fanon and Raymond Lacaton, “Conducts of Confession in North Africa (1) (1955),” in Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 412.
[12] Jean Khalfa, “Fanon, Revolutionary Psychiatrist,” in Alienation and Freedom, trans. Steven Corcoran (London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 195.
[13] Fanon and Lacaton, “Conducts of Confession in North Africa (1) (1955),” 412.
[14] Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture (1956),” in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 34.
[15] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, 160–61; Fanon, “Racism and Culture (1956),” 34.
[16] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, 160, 172.
[17] Fanon, 174–75.
[18] Fanon, 174–75.
[19] Fanon, 232.
[20] Fanon, 219.
[21] Fanon, 44.
[22] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 139.
[23] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, 136.
[24] Fanon, 135–36.
[25] Fanon, 136, 139.
[26] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2002, 204.
[27] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, 144.
[28] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2002, 99.
[29] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, 133, 143.
[30] Fanon, 133.
[31] Fanon, 133.
[32] See, for example, France’s technocratic development model in postwar Algeria which sought to create rational economic agents. Muriam Haleh Davis, “‘The Transformation of Man’ in French Algeria: Economic Planning and the Postwar Social Sciences, 1958–62,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (January 2017): 73–94, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009416647117.
[33] Tarik M. Yousef, “Development, Growth and Policy Reform in the Middle East and North Africa since 1950,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 3 (September 2004): 91–115, https://doi.org/10.1257/0895330042162322.
[34] Branko Milanovic, “Notes on Frantz Fanon,” Globalinequality (blog), April 7, 2015, https://glineq.blogspot.com/2015/04/notes-on-frantz-fanon.html.
[35] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, 140.
[36] Fanon, 141.
[37] Fanon, 141.
[38] Fanon, 141.