For us, that Martinican, whose journey through French culture made him an Algerian revolutionary, will remain the very living example of a universalism in action and the highest approach to be human as yet realized in this inhuman world.
—Francis Jeanson

Partisan universalism—what a wonderful title for a book celebrating Ato Sekyi-Otu’s work. A fighting universalism full of concrete particulars, to paraphrase Aimé Césaire (2010, p. 152), a concrete universalism ‘because it is a combination of many objects with different destinations’ (Marx 1857). To discuss this partisan universalism I turn to the partisan, Frantz Fanon.

Movement and Self-Movement

No to man’s contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

In the conclusion to Black Skin White Masks Fanon writes that anyone who takes a stand against the ‘living death’ of bourgeois society—’where the air is rotten and ideas and people are putrefying’—’is in a way a revolutionary’ (2008, p. 199). Fanon explains, quoting Césaire in Black Skin White Masks, that he is ‘open to all breaths of the world’.^[1] This emphasis on openness and movement repeats in Les damnés de la terre, the title itself heralding the internationalism of Jacques Roumain’s poem, ‘Sale nègre’^[2] (which Fanon quotes in his January 1958 article, ‘In the Caribbean, birth of a nation’ (Fanon 2018, pp. 583-590). At the end of the poem Roumain writes of the rising of the damned of the earth, ‘the upholders of justice’, who ‘have learned the language of the internationale’. This is the world of Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre.

Freedom and self-determination are relational concepts and essential characteristics of Fanon’s clinical and political theory and practice. As he discusses his medical work with a seventy-three-year-old peasant woman with dementia in Black Skin White Masks: ‘The very fact of adopting a language suitable for dementia … the fact of ‘leaning over’ to address this poor seventy-three-year-old woman, the fact of my reaching down to her for a diagnosis are the signs of a weakening in my relations with other people’ (2008, p. 16). Fanon is not only critical of the medical model (with its fetish of diagnosis), but of any a priori model that reifies the ‘patient’. This is true from his first medical writing, ‘The “North African Syndrome”’, to his discussions of the North African’s so-called criminality in the last chapter of Les damnés de la terre in a section titled ‘From the North African’s Impulsiveness to the War of National Liberation’. Rather than denying ‘criminality’, he decries the psychological and material reality of colonial depersonalization and objectification. In contrast to the Algiers school theory of the Algerian’s natural born criminality (reproduced in academic and ‘scientific’ psychiatric studies of the time), he considers the rationality of the ‘colonized’s indolence’ as a ‘conscious way of sabotaging the colonial regime’ (Fanon 2004, p. 220). He contextualizes rather than dehistoricize the idea of the biological. Reminding us of his critique of Octave Mannoni’s so-called dependency complex of the colonized, he argues, ‘on a ‘biological level, it is a remarkable system of self-preservation’ (Fanon 2004, p. 220). For Fanon, the colonized’s resistance, or non-cooperation with the colonial regime, is not a product of ‘political consciousness’ but a question of survival (see 1968, p.295) just as in Black Skin White Masks he had argued that the Black workers in Martinique did not carry on the struggle because of a ‘Marxist or idealist analysis’ but from the concrete: they could not conceive of life other than a ‘combat against exploitation, poverty, and hunger’. At the same time, in Les damnés de la terre, the recognition of this resistance requires new self-critical attitudes among militant intellectuals and is based on their willingness to break with their former elitism (2004, p. 223): ‘He’s an idealist, they’ll say’, Fanon remarks in Black Skin White Masks. ‘Not at all’, he replies, ‘it’s the others who are the scum bags [les autres qui sont des salauds] … I refuse to indulge in any form of paternalism … you need to … behave like a human being’ (2008, p. 16). Behaving like a human being is to be actional not simply reactional, where respecting ‘the fundamental values that make the world human … is the task of utmost urgency for [those] who, after careful reflection prepares to act’ (2008, p. 197).

Fanon begins Black Skin White Masks warning, ‘every human problem cries out to be considered on the basis of time’ (2008, p. xvi), just as he later warns of the problems that face Africa and the decolonization and freedom movements of that particular historic moment. And yet Fanon continues to be with us beyond his times, speaking as it were, to our times. If in Les damnés de la terre he does not separate the revolution from the real material, social and political economic issues it is facing he continues to insist that it is consciousness that needs help (2004, p. 229). And while the material and the ideal are not that far apart, it is the objectification of human beings that remains a ‘major theoretical problem’: ‘the insult to [hu]man beings which is in ourselves must be identified, demystified and hunted down at all times and in all places … If the revolution in practice is meant to be totally liberating and exceptionally productive, everything must be accounted for’ (Fanon 2004, p. 229, my emphasis).

We face multiple crises and at the same time there is also a new clarity about the depth of change that is called for. While, following Fanon, each generation must work out its own mission and fulfill it or betray it, Fanon provides no readymade answers, but he does raise questions and offer perspectives that we still need to work out.

 The clinic of the real

Outside my psychoanalytic office, I have to incorporate my conclusions into the context of the world.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

The last words from Fanon, the conclusion to Les damnés de la terre, might be considered an example of a Sekyi-Otu’s Africacentric universalism written for a popular audience of anticolonial fighters and their supporters: ‘So, my brothers [and sisters], how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than follow that same Europe Europe?’ (Fanon, 1968 p. 312) This sums up part of the critique he’s been making and practicing, especially since his resignation from Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria at the end of 1956. Leave this Europe where they murder human beings while they speak of humanism, and develop a new humanism out of the new struggles against European domination. Fanon is speaking about drawing a poetry ‘from the future’ (Marx quoted in Fanon 2008, p. 198) of creating a new world not in a ‘future heaven’ (Fanon 1965, p.30) grounded in the new realities and consciousness of emergent Africa. At the same time, he cautions,

If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us. (Fanon 1968, p. 315)

An irony? Perhaps but it was a concrete reality and a dominant perspective articulated by African leaders of the time. This, internalization of the master’s capitalist values is an essential part of Fanon’s conception of neocolonialism in Les damnés de la terre (2008, p. 195). Rather than thinking about a new society, the emergent ruling elites of the newly independent countries see power as a means to accumulate more power and wealth . South Africa’s Jacob Zuma was a great example. But Zuma was neither unique nor original. Fanon had already seen a tendency toward kleptocracy, analyzing it before many African countries were liberated and followed the same route. In other words, he was identifying a contradiction inside the liberation movements.

What happened to those anticolonial movements—and what has continued to happen—is that the lure of accumulation (whether that is framed by discourses of development and modernization or Africanization and decolonization) dominates their thinking. In terms of ‘development’ and ‘plans’ (whether called African or socialist) many anticolonial movements didn’t do much more than follow this model, emphasizing getting hold of the colonial apparatus—its states, institutions, and economy—rather than breaking it up and building something new involving everyone from the ground up. Within such confines Africanization was reduced to a shell, a mask that the new political elites hid behind as they took the place of the colonial managers and the masses were told to be quiet and ‘sent back to the caves’ (Fanon 1968, p. 183). While Fanon addressed this as a crisis of thought, it is worth remembering that while he was a revolutionary before joining the Algerian revolution, he did not go to Algeria to join a political revolution: but his mind was open to as Black Skin White Masks attests.

Movement and self-movement are essential categories to understand Fanon as person, as activist, and as intellectual as well as what we might call his partisan universalism. They are essential elements of Fanon’s praxis, to the goal of the disalienation, and to the freedom of the human being. In his medical thesis written in 1951, after his first submission—a draft of Black Skin White Masks—was rejected for political reasons, Fanon quotes Jacques Lacan that ‘Not only can the human’s being [l’être de l’homme] not be understood without madness, but it wouldn’t be the human’s being if it didn’t carry within it madness as the limit of its freedom’ (quoted in Gibson and Beneduce 2017, p. 13). Fanon then argues, as he does in Black Skin White Masks, ‘the human is human insofar as they are entirely turned toward the future’. He continues, ‘We will show that history is nothing but the systematic valorization of collective complexes’ (quoted in Gibson and Beneduce 2017, p. 42). In his resignation letter from Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (1956), he returned to this idea, adding to it the need to change the world, arguing that taking care of madness is about returning freedom to the mad: ‘Madness is one of the means by which the human being can lose their freedom’. In other words, freedom is the goal and it needs to be consciously and intentionally created addressing all the means by which the human being can lose their freedom. Fanon had tried to encourage a conscious and intentional freedom orientation at Blida-Joinville Hospital by promoting patient autonomy, trying to ‘attenuate the viciousness of the system’ (Fanon 1967, p. 52), and breaking up institutional alienation and hierarchies. But the reality that colonial Algeria was pathological meant that humanizing the hospital in a dehumanizing society became an ‘illogical’ goal. Thus, in the resignation letter, he adds that since the social structure in Algeria is actively attempting to ‘decerebralize’ the people, it must be replaced (Fanon 1967a, p. 53).

By praxis, I mean Fanon’s engagements—social, political, psychological (the three are, of course, intimately connected)—with the world around him. In that short decade between 1952 and 1961, from his first published article to his last publication, Fanon wrote three books, published numerous articles and edited a revolutionary newspaper. This work was connected to action, and continued self-reflection as he thought through and analyzed new situations and refused a priori conclusions.

Fanon was an original thinker whose analyses are grounded in the concrete.^[3] What he did in Black Skin White Masks and continued to do was radically different from what had come before as he challenged grounding notions of the fields of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and philosophy.^[4]

Fanon moved throughout his adult life. As a young adult he left Martinique to join the Free French in early 1943 but didn’t get further than Domenica. He made it out the following year, traveling to North Africa and then to France. By the time Fanon returned to France and began study in Lyons in 1947 he had already had experienced different cultures of racism and colonialism in the French Empire from the metropole to the Antilles and North Africa (see House 2005). After interning with the radical social psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles, Fanon left France to take a position at Blida Joinville Psychiatric hospital in early 1953 and committed to reforming the psychiatric institution. By the end of 1954 he was meeting Algerian revolutionaries and being drawn into the Algerian revolution. Two years later he left Algeria to work as an editor on the FLN (National Liberation Front) newspaper El Moudjahid. By 1958, he was representing the FLN at the Pan-African conference in Accra, Ghana and a year later became the Algerian Provisional Government’s representative in Ghana.

‘This Africa to Come’

I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

In the summer of 1960 Fanon took part in a reconnaissance mission to set up a base in the south of the Sahara. The notebooks from the trip reveal Fanon feeling, experiencing, and listening to the African revolutions as ‘the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (1968, p. 41). By reading these travels one can get the sense of Fanon’s acute attunement with the continent on the move as he intimates its new rhythm and new sensibility: ‘In every corner arms make signs to us, voices answer us, hands grasp ours’ and ‘if one listens with one ear glued to the red earth one very distinctly hears the sounds of rusty chains’ (1967a, p. 179). He writes of his traveling companion, Chawki: ‘one can say anything to them but they need to feel and touch the Revolution in the words uttered’.^[5] Along the way Fanon reads histories, reliving ‘the old Empires’, and begins to understand how the region has been ‘worked over by so many influences’. One is reminded of Fanon’s critical remark in the chapter on National Culture in Les damnés de la terre which he made earlier in 1959, ‘I admit that all the proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilization will not change the fact that today the Songhais are underfed and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes.’ In the ‘Africa to Come’ notebooks he warns that the Revolution ‘will require a great deal of rigor and cool thinking’,^[6] and that mentioning ‘Islam and race … require extra caution’. He ends the first section of the notes with a most profound critique that would be developed in Les damnés de la terre. First, he argues,

Colonialism and its derivatives do not, as a matter of fact, constitute the present enemies of Africa. In a short time this continent will be liberated. For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology’ (Fanon 1967a, p. 185).

These sentences should be read over carefully. Colonialism is not the present enemy, he says. The danger to the realization of a new society is not alone colonialism, with its maneuvering and dirty tricks, but the absence of a unifying liberatory ideology. He set out to answer this problem in Les damnés de la terre.

Thinking about the lack of ideology, he continues: ‘For nearly three years I have been trying to bring the misty idea of African Unity out of the subjectivist bogs of the majority of its supporters’ (Fanon 1967a, p. 187). The United States of Africa, he adds, is supposed to be achieved ‘without passing through the middle-class chauvinistic national phase with its procession of wars and death-tolls’ (Fanon 1967a, p. 187). The problem is how to develop a liberatory ideology inside the popular struggle as well as how to critically analyze the middle-class chauvinistic national phase as the counter-revolution within the revolution. In the front of his mind was the systematic execution of the radical leaders of the African revolutions, Lumumba and Abane, the latter murdered by the revolutionary organization, the FLN.

In his last conversation with Sartre and De Beauvoir in July 1961, he told them, ‘I have two deaths on my conscience which I can never forgive myself: Abane’s and Lumumba’s’. De Beauvoir reported that ‘if he had forced them to follow his advice they would have escaped with their lives’ (de Beauvoir 1992, p.317). In 1960 Fanon had planned to meet Félix-Roland Moumié, the young leader of the UPC (Union du Peuple Camerounais), who was born a year after Fanon in 1926. The notebooks begin with Moumié’s murder, ‘On September 30th we met on the Accra airfield. He was going to Geneva for some very important meetings. In three months, he told us, we would witness a mass ebbing of colonialism in Cameroon’. Fanon continues in short staccato sentences,

In Rome, two weeks later, we were to have met again. He was absent. His father standing at the arrival in Accra saw me coming, alone, and a great sadness settled on his face. Two days later a message told us that Felix was hospitalized. Then that poisoning was suspected … A few days later the news reached us: Felix Moumié was dead. We hardly felt this death. A murder, but a bloodless one. There were neither volleys nor machine guns nor bombs. Thallium poisoning. It made no sense. Thallium! How was one to grasp such a cause? An abstract death striking the most concrete, the most alive, the most impetuous man. Felix’s tone was constantly high. Aggressive, violent, full of anger, in love with his country, hating cowards and maneuverers. Austere, hard, incorruptible. A bundle of revolutionary spirit packed into 60 kilos of muscle and bone. (1967a, pp.179-180)

Just weeks later Lumumba was murdered. In his article ‘Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?’ published in Afrique Action in February 1961, Fanon predicted that with Lumumba’s death ‘Africa is about to experience its first great crisis over the Congo’. By the end of the year Fanon would be dead at 36. Moumié and Lumumba were 35.

The three murders—Abane, Moumié, Lumumba—continued to be on Fanon’s mind when he was writing Les damnés de la terre (a draft of its first chapter ‘On Violence’ was published in Les Temps Modernes in April 1961). But when it came to Africa’s first great crisis, the different positions on violence and non-violence (Lumumba had supported Nkrumah’s non-violent, ‘positive action strategy’, and Ramdane Abane, as the leader of the FLN, supported armed struggle) were beside the point.

In early April 1961 Fanon wrote to his publisher Maspero saying that his health had slightly improved and that he had ‘decided to write at least something’ (2018, p. 689). What that something would be is much less than he wanted but it would become a world famous book. Slightly improved but still terribly sick Fanon completed Les damnés de la terre in a ten-week period between April and July 1961. It was a work deeply embedded in its moment, it was completed in a race against time. Fanon had wanted to do something much more. Indeed, his original plan was to title it Algiers-Cape Town, ‘based on the armed revolution in the Maghreb, the development of consciousness and national struggle in the rest of Africa’ (2018, 685).

While David Macey argues that much of the material in the book was produced before 1961 and is text based on ‘emotion’ and rarely justified with ‘hard facts’ (Macey 2000, p. 451), I view the work as Fanon’s powerful critical, analytical and partisan synthesis from inside the revolution with one nodal point being the working out of the notes from the reconnaissance mission the year before. In his notes he argues that to consider the problem of the lack of ideology, ‘we must once again come back to the Marxist formula. The triumphant middle classes are the most impetuous, the most enterprising, the most annexationist in the world’. And he forewarns two major concerns connected with the problem of the lack of ideology developed in Les damnés de la terre: First, the critique of the hollowness of the idea of African unity highlighted by narrow nationalism expressed in the ‘Ghana-Senegal tension, the Somali-Ethiopia, the Morocco-Mauritania, the Congo-Congo tensions’ (1967a, p. 187) which he sums up to be in the retrogressive movement from the promise of nationalism and African unity ‘to ultranationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism’ (1968, p. 155). And second, on the Marxist formula, Fanon is specific to a point. Yes, it has to do with revolutionary subjectivity, and we know that Fanon dismisses the small ‘working class’ in the colonies who, he argues, ‘constitute also the ‘bourgeois’ fraction of the colonized people’ (1968, p. 109). In other words, this formal working class and its organizations were, like the nationalist bourgeoisie, limited to demanding reforms within the system. The mistake made by intellectuals in nationalist political parties is to assume that this ‘tiny portion of the population … is politically conscious’. As Marx (1857) put it in the mid 1850s, the working class is revolutionary, or it is nothing. So, what Fanon means by the Marxist formula is far from formulaic. Concerning the possibility of revolution, he develops them in Les damnés de la terre in terms of ‘the theoretical question, which has been posed for the last fifty years’. Here Fanon is referring to a discussion of the debates about the 1905 Russian revolution that were grounded in Marx’s analysis of the failure of the 1848 revolutions^[7] and the possibility of ‘skipping the bourgeois phase’.^[8] In Les damnés Fanon begins with the composition of the national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries and it is damning. It is ‘incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness’. It is a ‘little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it’ (Fanon 1968, p.175). It should be remembered that when Fanon is saying that the national bourgeoisie is useless, and simply a mimic of the European bourgeoisie, he is not saying that the European bourgeoisie is useful. When he says the national bourgeoisie is cynical, it is a reflection of the agedness and sterility of bourgeois Europe. The European bourgeoisie is senile: the colonized national bourgeoisie, its caricature, is senile before its time. Like the European bourgeoisie its interest is finance capital and get-rich quick schemes. Fanon, in other words, is not setting his hopes on the emergence of an authentic bourgeois, rather he is wholeheartedly dismissive of the bourgeois ‘stage’ which should be avoided at all costs.

All this is, of course, connected with Fanon’s question of the lack of ideology. In Les damnés de la terre he connects his critique of European humanism and the hypocrisy of its universalist claims. ‘Today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of [Europe’s] triumphs of the mind’ (Fanon 1968, p.312). Fanon is not rejecting the idea of humanism, he’s rejecting the hypocrisy of humanism that is being proclaimed in Europe, which is based on colonization, slavery and violence. European humanism is in fact intimately connected with exploitation and dehumanization. ‘We must find something different’ based in our African realities, he argues. And again, Fanon takes a concrete Marxian turn reminding us, ‘Let’s be clear, what matters is to stop talking about output, intensification, and the rhythm of work’ (1968, p. 314). So immediately he rejects what is central to European humanism, profit and the reduction of the human to inputs understood in terms of productivity, output, and intensification. If you listen to African politicians, they’re often talking about output: national output, production, growth, and so on. Fanon views this as an ‘almost an obscene caricature’ arguing, ‘humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation’ (1968, p. 315). That humanity is waiting for something different is reminiscent of the quote above from Black Skin White Masks about introducing invention into life: ‘if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries’ (1968, p. 314). This creativity and invention is one expression of Fanon’s a partisan universalism. He’s saying, if we take humanity as the starting point, we must invent and make new discoveries. But what are the new discoveries?

Fanon, we should remember, was a philosopher concerned with action and change. For him the partisan universalism is practical and internationalist—in Fanon’s dialectic of revolution which expresses the moment he was writing, that decolonization took on a national form was not in itself a limitation. National consciousness is not nationalism, he argues, neither territorially nor in terms of a nation state (see Adalet 2021) and ‘the birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly contemporaneous connection with the African consciousness’ (Fanon 1968, p. 247). To be absolutely clear, he adds, national consciousness needs to ‘deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs’, involving people in genuine political decision making and addressing human needs such as land, housing, and dignity. In short, it needs to be developed ‘into humanism’ (1968, p. 204), which for him means radically rethinking everything. Fanon continues, ‘Perhaps it is necessary to begin everything all over again … to re-examine the soil and mineral resources, the rivers, and—why not?—the sun’s productivity’. Sixty years later we aware how important Fanon’s rethinking has become but should also remember that Fanon was an outlier at the time when the oil based green revolution and cash crop agriculture and massive ‘development’ projects, like the Volta dam, were the dominant plans without regard to how they effected local people. Fanon adds, ‘humanize this world’ necessitates breaking with all the systems of expropriation and exploitation:

 Let’s be frank: we do not believe that the colossal effort which the underdeveloped peoples are called upon to make by their leaders will give the desired results. If conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be needed to humanize this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers (Fanon 1968, p. 100).

This he says, is not only for Africa, but also for the world: ‘For ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new skin. We must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new humanity’. Working out new concepts and setting afoot a new humanity are connected. But for Fanon, because ‘the dialectic emerges out of Subject’ (Dunayevskaya 1982, p. 141), new concepts are not brought to the struggle from the outside but emerge from and are forged in it. The anticolonial struggle Fanon was involved in was world-historic and it is worth noting that Fanon, who demands we work out new concepts in the conclusion to Les damnés has been working out the dialectic of new concepts from the first page of the book. As he explains in the opening pages,

Decolonization as we know it is a historical process. That is to say that it cannot be understood… it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we discern the movements which give it historical form and content (1968, p. 35).

Here we are back to the ‘material’ basis of the revolution, the subjectivity of revolt, and the movements that give it historical form and content. Only by discerning their composition can decolonization as a historical process become clear.

So, again, Fanon is talking about history made from below, ‘an authentic birth … without preliminary instruction’ (1965, p. 50). It is its movement and intentional action that give historical content. It is not something that can be dictated from above or follows a preconceived form. It has to be produced in struggle and thereby makes audible new voices. That is the historical process, that is making history: making a new history that hadn’t been seen clearly before. Essential to this is what he calls ‘the rationality of revolt’. Now of course that is a lovely phrase on which we can all agree, but let’s not forget that he is speaking about the rationality of revolt of those deemed beyond the pale of reason: unreasonable and irrational.

The rationality of revolt

‘The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything’, as Sekyi-Otu, quotes Hegel in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996, p.151). For Fanon this battle of reason becomes expressed in the rationality of revolt that moves us past rigidity and the stillness of colonial Manicheanism and White instrumental reason. This is not the doomed-to-fail battle over ‘reason’ that Fanon details in chapter five of Black Skin White Masks, where ‘reason’ plays cat and mouse with him and walks out when he walks into the room (see Fanon 2008, p. 99; 1967b, p. 119).^[9] Here he is walled in by White instrumental reason. And one can see here a critical connection between Fanon’s critique of Hegel and his critique of struggles that have been limited by the master’s values (including the master’s tools), or what we could also call ‘bourgeois values’ (2008, pp. 191-199).

The idea of the rationality of revolt emerges in Fanon’s chapter on spontaneity where he gives us a lecture on what is to be done. Spontaneity, which he praises and values (for Fanon, to be spontaneous is an expression of human freedom denied by oppression and here we can see a connection between Fanon’s clinical practice and his political practice), has to be deepened since it can become reified and mesmerized by the power and excitement of its opening act. The revolt, in other words, has to become political. ‘In their [the masses] weary road toward rational knowledge’, Fanon argues in the conclusion to the chapter, ‘the people must also give up their too-simple conception of their overlords’, warning that the masses who shout treason at the new Black or Arab exploiters need to understand that the treason ‘is not national’ but ‘social’ (1968, p. 145). Here we have an important explanation of what Fanon means by the lack of ideology. ‘The insurrection proves to itself its rationality’ (1968, p. 145), he argues, in direct contradistinction to how an activity is often spoken of by politicians, and also in the media, as irrational. Fanon warns that this is sometimes a difficult thing for intellectuals to understand. The uprising from below speaks a different language and Fanon warns intellectuals that when we do not understand, we are in fact at the heart of the problem. In other words, we have to listen and think:

The insurrection proves to itself its rationality and demonstrates its maturity every time it uses a specific case to advance the consciousness of the people in spite of those within the movement who sometimes are inclined to think that any nuance constitutes a danger and threatens popular solidarity (Fanon 2004, p.95).

Thinking action and encouraging critical self-reflection, the rationality of revolt, in its multi-dimensionality, can become the basis for a new type of organization in which it can fully express itself and its goals. In the colonies, the European form of vanguard party organization was virtually unquestioned. Fanon calls this a fetish form uncritically imported from the metropole, which becomes the perfect organization for the aspiring anticolonial national bourgeoisie whose desire, Fanon argues, is to take the place of the colonizer (1968, p. 108). Thus the call by the elites for ‘nationalization’ does not offer ‘a new program of social relations’ (Fanon 2004, p. 100) but ‘the transfer into indigenous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period’ (Fanon 2004, p. 100). And for Fanon the one-party state becomes the perfect form: ‘The single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous, and cynical’ (Fanon 1968, p. 165). The question is not simply about the kind of organization but rather how the rationality of revolt opens up new conceptions of organization and democratic inclusivity.

Fanon mentions how the village assemblies and Djemaas, which had often become emptied of life during the colonial period, are expanded and transformed as spaces for discussion during the struggle (1968, pp. 48, 142). S’bu Zikode, one of the leaders of the shack dweller movement in South Africa Abahlali baseMjondolo, has recently argued that village women have a strategic power to influence or voice their opinion through male partners or neighbors but in Abahlali, where the majority of members are women and meetings are often run by women, women’s voices are not mediated by men. Rather, male leaders are chosen by women and they know that they are accountable to women. According to Abahlali, ‘This example shows how our movement draws on our culture and history, sometimes advancing it quite radically, to build a movement’ (Zikode 2021, p. 109). This radical mutation is what Fanon is talking about raises the question of what the dialectic of organization is for Fanon as it relates to subjectivity and the creation of a new society. We know, of course, models imported from the colonial metropole (such as social democratic-type parties and trade unions) allow people to ‘to conduct and organize the movement’ become for Fanon an important ‘theoretical problem’ (1968, pp. 58-59). Representing privileged sectors, they seek reforms within the colonial system often distinct from the anti-colonial struggle which ‘mobilizes the people, that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one direction.’ However, Fanon warns that if it does this without thought and analysis ‘there is only a blind will toward freedom, with the terribly reactionary risks which it entails’ (1968, pp. 93, 59). Thus, critically and openly engaging with the rationality of revolt and developing a positive vision of the new society and the new social relations that is being fought for is essential and he pinpoints tactical shortcuts as an important critical threat from within the movement. The idea of the living village assembly, including everyone, is echoed in his critique of the militant who believes the strategic decision made behind closed doors is best because ‘any nuance constitutes a danger and threatens popular solidarity’ (Fanon 2004, p. 95). The militant ignores how the lived experience of new forms of struggle, and new subjectivities, upset the old ways of organizing. How then is the revolutionary organization open to these new subjectivities and to new thinking? Fanon does not provide an answer, rather such questions can only be addressed and learned through practice.

The militant’s education is a constant feature throughout Les damnés de la terre. The militant learns through practice, realizing that ‘while they are breaking down colonial oppression, they are building up automatically yet another system of exploitation’ (Fanon 1968, p.145 translation altered). This realization has to be reflected on as the militant demands that the leadership draws up a program and set of objectives (1968, p. 170). But it is the critique of the militant who wants to sink differences to get things done that is an important educational moment. Fanon explains, ‘It sometimes happens at meetings that militants use sweeping, dogmatic formulas. The preference for this shortcut, in which spontaneity and over-simple sinking of differences dangerously combine to defeat intellectual elaboration, frequently triumphs’ (1968, p. 199 my emphasis). So we have an explanation of a situation that many have experienced inside movements: the tactical sinking of differences and the suppression of intellectual elaboration. Fanon calls it a ‘shirking of responsibility’ (Fanon 1968, p. 199).

Part of the difficult work of intellectual elaboration, Fanon argues, is to clarify a situation and then explicate goals and vision, thereby explaining differences. Moreover, Fanon explains that the militant learns and shares his/her learning through failure:

When we meet this shirking of responsibility in a militant, it is not enough to tell them they are wrong. We must make them ready for responsibility, encourage them to follow up their chain of reasoning, and make them realize the true nature, often shocking, inhuman, and in the long run, sterile, of such oversimplification (1968, p. 199, translation altered)

In other words, Fanon sees an important pedagogy in the militant’s ‘failure’. It is not at all about shaming the militant but about learning from the error (absorbing and uplifting it as a dynamic of truth, as Hegel puts it), and sharing and developing the intellectual elaboration in the social setting by making it a ‘collective affair’.

Thus failure and learning from failure are essential elements of political education and one can’t help but think back to Marx’s discussion in The 18th Brumaire of the revolution constantly criticizing itself and returning to what seems to be accomplished in order to ‘deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts’ (Marx 1852).

What Fanon calls the social treason is connected to a new problem, namely national consciousness itself needs to be ‘enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism’ (1968, p. 204). Here we have the class character of the ideological problem, the ‘subjectivist bog’ of those leaders heralding the United States of Africa and the movements from below whose idea of decolonization is measured by real changes in the lives of the majority. Concluding the chapter on spontaneity, Fanon argues that the new relationships between the radical intellectuals, militants, and masses in motion can become the basis for a ‘new politics’ if the new reality of the nation is lived and experienced, in ‘their action’ (1968, p. 147, my emphasis). As I have argued, this action is not devoid of thought, but in fact is the product of a new relationship between thought and action, which we might also call praxis: in fact, it is the action and the movement itself, diagnosed and reflected on itself, that produces new thought and uncovers new contradictions. This action is not narrowly spontaneous, as though the actions have no history—rather it is actively conscious. Fanon develops the argument from Black Skin White Masks: ‘To induce humans to be actional [with] … respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for those who, after careful reflection, prepares to act’ (2008 pp. 200, 197, translation altered). It is action that follows a dialectical spiral, flowing from preceding and repeated collective thought and action. It is the action of ‘muscles and brains’ (Fanon 1968, p. 201) of theory and practice, that enlivens politics and political differences. What I like about this is that a movement needs the people’s muscles and their brains: their force and their reason.

There are often some in the movements who are inclined to think that people can’t really think through problems and grasp the inner contradictions, rather all they need is a slogan they will follow while the thinking is left up to the leaders. In contrast Fanon concludes the chapter on spontaneity, ‘the essence of the fight which explodes the old colonial truths and reveals unexpected facets … brings out new meanings and pinpoints the contradictions camouflaged by this reality (1968 p. 147, my emphasis). He has already told us in this chapter that a turning point occurs when the urban radicals begin to discover and hear the revolt. So in this conclusion, Fanon is suggesting a new relationship in the fight which is both physical and intellectual, bringing ‘out new meanings and pinpoints the contradictions camouflaged by this reality.’ But who is listening?

Listening as praxis

It is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

The rationality of revolt is ‘not a rational confrontation of points of view … It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (Fanon 1968, p. 41). Thus, rather than battling normative reason and its liberal assumptions, the rationality of revolt emerges from those who do not counted and deemed beneath and outside ‘civil’ rationality and is the affirmation of the uprisings of the damned of the earth, those seen as good-for-nothing beyond the pale of reason. For Fanon, it is the struggle of these masses of objectified and dehumanized people who do count. The rationality of revolt is where the ‘thing’ which has been colonized ‘becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself’ (1968, p. 36). This double movement, the destruction of the colonial society and the creation of a new society, is of course the problematic of Les damnés de la terre and one that remains for us to work out. At first, there is a seamless character to the double process, as Fanon argues in the opening pages of Les damnés: movement and self-movement encourage movement and self-movement. And self-movement becomes synonymous with making history and becoming historical. Thus, what Fanon calls a new humanism is a politics of becoming, the transformation of the paralyzed and thingified beings into human beings through their own actions ‘imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world’ (Fanon 1967b, p. 109), as he puts it in Black Skin White Masks and Fanon would agree that ‘humanity yearns not to ‘remain something formed by the past but is an absolute movement of becoming’’ (Dunayevskaya 1982, p. 138). Decolonization is an answer to racist-capitalist objectification since ‘it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally’. This modification is a product of history-in-the-making, transforming ‘spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors’. Fanon describes the new humanism being introduced by a new people who emerge through the struggle itself, and ‘with it a new language and a new humanity’ bringing ‘a natural rhythm into existence’. In short, ‘decolonization is the veritable creation of new humanity’ which ‘owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself’ (1968, p. 36). But Fanon is not saying that the process is automatic. Rather we find out that the process is a tortuous one, one beset by misadventures and one that will need commitment and time—a new and anticapitalist conception of time as the space for human development. At the same time as David Marriott puts it Fanon’s ‘attempts to forge a new humanism remained incomplete’ (2018, p. 244). In a certain sense this is a movement of becoming, that is in motion and always incomplete. For me, this is an essential element of Fanon’s anti-formalistic dialectic.^[10]

The challenge to hear the rationality of revolt, to hear its new language, is not automatic because it involves a commitment to the new kind of listening that has to cut through prejudices, assumptions and positivistic models.^[11] As a ‘practicing psychiatrist Fanon spent much of his time as a professional listener’ (Baucom 2001, p. 15). And much of Fanon’s writing is a compilation of voices as well as responses to what he had been hearing. Fanon’s thinking—the notion of working out new concepts, in other words—is grounded in his engagement with the world and the rationality of revolt of those excluded from it. One can see this in all his writing as he develops new concepts from his earliest published writing onward.

It is the revolutionary movement—the self-movement of masses of people—that creates, reflects back and develops the rationality of revolt. And Fanon was convinced that this was the challenge to intellectuals: to ‘return’ to where the people actually are.^[12] In contrast to the stasis of the colonial Manichean zone, this revolutionary zone is one of motion and instability where things are in flux and constantly moving. It is history in the making, which also enlivens political and ideological differences making ‘careful action’ indispensable. The idea is essential to Fanon and essential to Fanonian practices.

In this zone the radical ‘return’ is grounded quite literally by what Amilcar Cabral (1974) calls ‘the source’. Cabral did not by any means mean this uncritically. And Fanon similarly speaking on one hand describes ‘common opportunism’ of those who discover the source and on the other hand he stresses the importance of not confusing the issues and excluding the people from discussions. What he means by this is straightforward and practical. Those who are downtrodden, ripped off, and oppressed understand how labor is forced and the ways it must be humanized. They are quick to understand that in this sense, the practical idea is higher than theoretical abstractions. This is the same reason why the intellectuals who ‘discover’ popular revolt can become impressed with the ‘minor details’ of particulars: the intellectual as opportunist, he writes, becomes mired in ‘adventuring formulas which are sterile in the extreme … set[ting] a high value on the customs, traditions, and the appearances of the people’ (Fanon 1968, p. 221).

Fanon’s critique of common opportunism was directed at those intellectuals who, in returning to the source, are amazed by the people’s practical knowledge of, and without discrimination, essentialize what should be a critical and engaging relationship. What Cabral underscores as ‘class suicide’^[13] always seems to take new coordinates.

Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience was published just after the formal end of apartheid. ^[14] From a South Africa perspective 1994 was a heady moment, an iridescent light, as Sekyi-Otu, puts it, that could be a cruel prelude, quoting Ayi Kwei Armah, to the ‘ineluctable miscarriage of the beauty of the first days’ (1996, p. 12). Sekyi-Otu saw the potency of a liberatory moment but carried with him the warning about negotiated settlements and retrogression that Fanon had made so clear. In 1994 it was not only the White owned multinational banks and mining companies but also the reactionary ‘traditional leaders’ of the apartheid homelands that would be part of the so-called rainbow nation.^[15] Thabo Mbeki, who read Fanon at graduate school in England, thought he could prove Fanon wrong and create a productive national bourgeoisie. And yet, now over 25 years after that first fully franchised election, the South African reality has gone from the pseudo-universalism of the rainbow nation to the retrograde particularism of national chauvinism. From Mbeki’s black economic empowerment to Ramaphosa’s role as Lonmin’s middle-man at Marikana, wealth inequalities in South Africa have gotten more extreme since the end of the apartheid regime and today the country has the worst wealth inequality among the major economies of the world. But no one is surprised. In short, South Africa, like other imagined freedom movements, has been ‘carelessly squandered’ as Achille Mbembe (2019) puts it. The structural economic inequality goes hand in hand with the bankruptcy of ‘post-apartheid politics’ as ‘South African forms of black nationalism are morphing into virulent forms of black-on-black racism’ (Mbembe 2019).

Thus Fanon admonishes in Les damnés de la terre that to politically educate the masses is to build their confidence in their own decision-making, reinvigorating democratic practices of self-government. Again there is a continuity with Black Skin White Masks. Fanon concludes that the work is ‘to induce [men and women] to be actional, by maintaining in their circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human’ (2008, p. 197). In Les damnés de la terre the move from the reified, dehumanized things produced by colonist society to actional human beings is the practical work that is the measure of authentic decolonization: ‘to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them … that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people’ (1968, p. 197).

How is this work done? The question is not simply a technical one. It is about creating space for confidence and consciousness to develop among people who have been silenced, ignored and denied a name. As I have argued, by the end of Les damnés de la terre Fanon makes us painfully aware that this is going to take time and he calls it another major theoretical problem. Remember that he used similar language while referring to the question of ‘skipping the bourgeois’ phase; but where that had to be proved through action, here he returns to the question of movement and motion. For him, ‘it is consciousness that needs help’:

There must be no waiting until the nation has produced new people; there must be no waiting until men are imperceptibly transformed by revolutionary processes in perpetual renewal. It is quite true that these two processes are essential, but consciousness must be helped (1968, p. 305, translation altered).

We are once again back to issues of political education and consciousness-raising based not on doctrinaire repetition, but on careful listening and actionable thinking aimed at engaging with the people and encouraging them to speak for themselves.

It is in this context that Fanon argues that those with technical knowledge, sometimes gleaned from the elite institutions, should put that knowledge into the service of the people. When Walter Rodney spoke about ‘groundings with my brothers’ he did not pretend that he did not have a Ph.D. or did not have ‘professional’ knowledge; the work of Fanon’s militant intellectual is not to eschew what they have learnt and simply become ‘a kind of yes-man who nods assent at every word coming from the people’ as though the oppressive material and discursive reality of colonialism, racism, and exploitation in which they live has disappeared. This he calls uncritical and opportunist (Fanon 1968, p. 49). Rather, the militant should be self-assured so that they can also listen and learn carefully, contribute and teach, knowing that the goal is the building of self-confident social action as well as people who take active roles in running the newly liberated nation. And, when the militant doesn’t understand, they need to take a step back, reconsidering that they are back to the heart of the problem: ‘There must be an idea of [the hu]man and of the future of humanity; that is to say that no demagogic formula and no collusion with the former occupying power can take the place of a program’ (1968, pp. 202-203, my emphasis). Fanon has a constant refusal to collude. ‘I am fighting for the birth of a human world’ he writes in Black Skin White Masks not ‘for values secreted by [the White] masters’ (2008, pp. 193, 195). Sixty years after Fanon’s death, the rationality of revolt continues to be expressed by the maturity of the uprisings challenging militant intellectuals to engage with them on their terms in solidarity and thought. The very maturity of the revolt itself offers an idea of the future of humanity. The decommodification of land and water, of the rivers and the minerals, requires rethinking, as Fanon puts it.

And today, movements of people thousands of miles apart often offer similar views, make connections and act in solidarity. Movements come up against the violence of the state and corporations which aim to silence them and to silence humanity’s future. In this long struggle, there are defeats and there are victories, as Fanon puts it in Black Skin White Masks (2008, p. 196). Each can be carefully analyzed as expressions of partisan universalism. 

References

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