“Many of Fanon’s recent academic critics, and even some of his sympathizers, continued to distort and misconstrue Wretched. They inflated the significance of one element in the book over all others: violence. And they underplayed Fanon’s socialist commitment and class analysis of capitalism, which are two essential components of his anti-imperialist arsenal. Nowhere is this truer than in recent postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonial theory has come to posit violence as the theoretical core of Wretched. Homi K. Bhabha, for example, has turned Fanon’s work into a site of “deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation” that “speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical change.”1 In his recent preface to Wretched, Bhabha reads colonial violence as a manifestation of the colonized’s subjective crisis of psychic identification “where rejected guilt begins to feel like shame.” Colonial oppression generates “psycho-affective” guilt at being colonized, and Bhabha’s Fanon becomes an unashamed creature of violence and poet of terror. He concludes that “Fanon, the phantom of terror, might be only the most intimate, if intimidating, poet of the vicissitudes of violence.” This flawed interpretation eviscerates Fanon as a political intellectual of the first order. It also skirts far too close to associating Fanon’s contributions with terrorism — a bizarre interpretation for Bhabha to advance in the age of America’s “war on terror.” Rather than emancipation, it is terror, Bhabha posits, that marks out Fanon’s life project.
It is hardly surprising that, in order to turn Fanon into a poet of violence, postcolonial theorists have had to deny his socialist politics. This begins with Bhabha himself, whose intellectual project is premised on undermining class solidarity and socialism as subaltern political traditions. Ignoring Fanon’s socialist commitments is also evident in Edward Said’s reading of him in Culture and Imperialism, which is historically sparked by the First Intifada and Said’s critical disenchantment with Palestinian elite nationalism. If Said is profoundly engaged with Fanon’s politics of decolonization and universalist humanism, he nonetheless fails to even mention the word “socialism” in association with Fanon, let alone read him as part of the long tradition of the socialist critique of imperialism. This dominant postcolonial disavowal of socialist Fanon is also articulated by Robert J. C. Young when he bluntly states that Fanon is not interested in “the ideas of human equality and justice embodied in socialism.
[Jean Paul] Sartre never made that mistake, though his reading of Fanon is not without its flaws. In his famous preface to the book, Sartre does actually inflate the significance of violence in Wretched. His stark injunction is to “Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.” Decolonization, as a result, becomes indelibly associated with a “mad fury,” an “ever-present desire to kill,” and “blind hatred” in which the colonized “make men of themselves by murdering Europeans.” It is hard to stress how damaging this invocation of murder has been for understanding Fanon’s life work and his conception of decolonization.
Sartre, however, does also emphasize Fanon’s core socialist message, which he summarizes as follows: “In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.” And he concludes, “This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America: we must achieve revolutionary socialism all together everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our former masters.” The aim of national struggle is to forge a socialist internationalism premised on popular solidarity and cooperation — one that reconfigures sovereignty as social and economic democracy. That, in a nutshell, is the political cause that Fanon advances in Wretched.
It needs to be admitted that [Fanon’s] acute analysis of the colonial ruling classes stands in contrast with Fanon’s acceptance of the mythology around the bourgeoisie in Europe. At the same time as he debunks the myth of the national bourgeoisie as agent of freedom in the colonies, Fanon fortifies another: that the bourgeoisie had fought for liberal freedoms in its homeland but is betraying that noble mission in the colonies.
But what Fanon does not realize is that the bourgeoisie is actually behaving in character and that the bourgeois revolution is a myth. As Chibber argues, misreading the history of the bourgeoisie and attributing to it a role of political heroism is a common mistake made by postcolonial theorists. Democracy and liberalism do happen in the capitalist era, but they do so not as a result of the “bourgeoisie as historic actor.” As Chibber observes, capital never intended to transpose a liberal order in the colonies, since it never implanted one in Europe. What it “universalizes” is not freedom and liberty but a regime of market dependence; what it seeks is not liberal equality but its own political dominance. Any democratic achievements of the so-called bourgeois revolution result from popular mobilization and pressure from below, both in the metropolitan heartland and in the colonies. Hence, even in the heady days of the French Revolution, “The revolution had finally become antifeudal and democratic, but not because of a ‘bourgeois project.’ The ‘bourgeois’ legislators of the Third Estate had to be dragged kicking and screaming to assume their role as revolutionaries.”
There is, thus, no ideal of a liberal bourgeoisie against which the colonial capitalists might be measured and found wanting. The bourgeoisie behaves in a similar way across the colonial divide: narrowly self-interested, afraid of democracy and popular sovereignty, and authoritarian. “The fact is,” Chibber concludes, “the European bourgeoisie was no more enamored of democracy, or contemptuous of the ancient régime, or respectful of subaltern agency, than were the Indians.” What Fanon reads as its social treason in the colonies was, then, its core universal feature. His analysis and description of its conduct there reflects its class behavior everywhere.
Bashir Abu-Manneh, Catalyst Journal, Vol. 5, No 1, Spring 2021
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