Post-humanist philosophy has revived key elements of the post-structuralist critique of humanist universalism. Like their post-structuralist predecessors, post-humanists argue that the conception of subjecthood at the root of humanist universalism is the root cause and justification of oppression. If their arguments are correct, then the humanist model of self-determination is not grounded in a universal human capacity but tendentiously imposes a particular understanding of what it means to be human on subaltern groups. Humanism would be nothing more than the ideological marching tune of ruling class white men as they subjugated the world under their imperial designs. In this view, humanism allowed European powers to declare women, colonized and enslaved people, sexual minorities—anyone who did not ‘measure up’ to the standards of rational self-interest purportedly at the heart of this understanding of subjecthood– inhuman. Summing up the results of post-humanist criticism, Bonnie Washick and Elizabeth Wingrove conclude that ‘the dated ontology that figures humans as (essentially, inherently) subjects, over and against an (essentially, inherently) object-world is undoubtedly part and parcel of the reproduction of patriarchal racialized capitalism’ (Washick and Wingrove 2015, p.76).

If the old ontology of self-determining (male, white, property-owning) subjects striding colossus-like across the earth is the problem, then the solution is to affirm the opposite: to see human beings not as constituted by a shared identity but criss-crossed by differences and determined by cultural context. Pramod K. Nayar explains, ‘posthumanism … proposes that the human is constituted by differences. It deploys difference and othering as the cornerstone of human identity. … Critical post-humanism is thus a discourse … in which interconnectedness, messy boundaries, blurred origins, borrowings and adaptations, cross-overs and impurities, dependency and mutuality… are emphasised over boundedness, self-containment, distinctiveness, and agency’ (2014, p.30). The problem with the link between ‘messy’ ontologies of difference and the political potential their supporters claim for them appears as soon as we ask two simple questions: Who is it that is interconnected, mutualistic, and interdependent? and how, if the oppressed are not essentially self-determining agents, could they possibly change the system that oppresses them?

I do not think that posthumanists are capable of providing cogent answers to these questions, any more than poststructuralists were.^[1] The very idea of oppression and the capacity to recognise oneself as oppressed presupposes the capacity to distinguishes oneself as a subject capable of self-directed activity from social worlds structured to prevent that from happening. What else could recognizing oneself as oppressed mean than recognizing that one is weighed down by social institutions that ignore, deny, and systematically thwart one’s ability to freely decide how to live their life? If people do not share fundamental human interests in satisfying certain needs and freely realizing certain capacities fully, then how could they become conscious of oppressive social circumstances, i.e., circumstances that fail to treat them as human beings ought to be treated? They could not, but the whole history of human struggles for freedom wherever it occurs is a story of the awakening of agency in groups that were not supposed to be capable of it. While it is true that standard versions of humanism have been Eurocentric, the deeper idea—that human beings are essentially self-determining agents who will eventually struggle for social conditions that satisfy their human needs and enable their capacities—is not the private property of white European men, but a universal truth proven by all struggles against domination and oppression. The agency of the oppressed thus exposes the lie of patriarchal racialized capitalism (and every other invidiously hierarchal society). That lie is the belief that subaltern groups are not really harmed by their subaltern position because they are not fully human. To this lie revolutionary struggles speak a simple truth: the oppressed are and always have been human agents.

While I think that these conclusions are inescapable and condemn post-humanist criticism to incoherence along with its post-structuralist predecessors, the post-humanists do expose a problematic use of universal values. We still live in a world dominated by the legacies of colonialism and riven by conflicts between classes, sexes, racialized people, and genders. Abstract universals encourage even supporters to speak for or through the oppressed rather than with them. When supporters from dominant communities speak for or through the oppressed they assume, on the basis of an abstractly universal value, to know what the oppressed will or should say. Norman Ajari’s recent defence of the singularity of the experiences of different Black communities against the criticisms of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek that any form of identity politics is reactionary exposes the problem with abstract universals. In an attempt to name common ground, abstract universal values obliterate the reality of the experience of oppressed groups. Ajari is correct that ‘souvent, loin de permettre la réalisation glorieuse de l’universel, l’ignorance des singularités est le plus sur indice d’une politique paresseuse et narcissique’^[2]( 2019, p.159). However, the solution to this narcissistic politics which mistakes universal values with the reflection of one’s own face is not to reject universality, as the post-structuralist and post-humanists do, but to understand singularities as concrete universals. When the oppressed speak for themselves, they express concretely universal ways of being human. That is, they reveal to their oppressors and supporters alike that the specifics of what they think, feel, and need are ways of being human that have been ignored. Through these political processes of freeing their voice and articulating their needs, the full complexity of being human is created in historical time. Hence concrete universality is a matter of the oppressed speaking for themselves, and solidarity a matter of historically privileged supporters learning to listen and speak with, not through or for, oppressed people.

My argument will be developed in three steps. In the first I will look at the history of anti-colonial struggle to explore the difference between abstract and concrete universality. My example will be the contradictions that beset the Marquis De Condorcet’s scathing critique of colonial racism (2017). On the one hand, he affirms the humanity of the enslaved and colonised, but on the basis of abstract, patronising, and Eurocentric premises. His is a classic case of speaking for the oppressed. I will then proceed to examine Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonialism and the call for a new humanism that issues from it. Drawing on the work of Ato Sekyi-Otu, I will argue that this new humanism is best understood as the result of the historical and political concretization of abstract universals through the struggles of subaltern groups. Following the arguments of Sekyi-Otu and Dussel, the second section will look at the universal ethical grammar implicit in these struggles. Once that grammar is understood it becomes apparent that all cultures articulate human values, but in concretely different expressions. Hence, to divide up the world into non-Western particulars and Western universals is to misunderstand the universal value of non-Western cultures as ways of being and living human lives. In the concluding section I will apply these lessons to sketch the universal normative framework for the political work of building the sorts of solidarity within and across cultures that must be successful if global challenges are to be met.

 I: Abstract and concrete universality in the emergence of a new humanism

I will begin with a classic example of an anti-colonial critic speaking for the oppressed with whom he stands in genuine solidarity: the Marquis de Condorcet’s stinging indictment of colonial racism in Sketch for An Historical Picture of the Advances of the Human Mind. My aim in discussing this example is two-fold. First, I want to show how substituting one’s voice for the voice of the oppressed depends upon the elevation of historically specific institutions and practices to an abstract universal criterion of ‘humanity’. The critic thus feels authorised to speak for, that is, in the name of, the oppressed, because they possess this knowledge. Second, I want to show how the political deployment of abstract universal definitions of humanity in effect closes the critic off from the reality of the humanity of the oppressed. That reality does not lie in their potential to become truly human by emulating the abstract universal value, but in the concrete reality of their needs, their work to survive, their capacity to overcome oppressive institutions through their own power, and to create new social conditions in which they can add to the values and creations that define the human project at its best in their own way.

Before turning to the sample, I must first explain the difference between abstract and concrete universals. Abstract universals are single properties abstracted from a complex field of differences and posited as the criterion of identity that establishes the membership of an individual in a set. Aristotle referred to universals of this type as the ‘one apart from many’ abstracted by reflection on experience (1941, pp. 804-805, 1038b-1039a). All human thinking, in so far as it depends upon recognition of sameness and difference for purposes of classification, relies upon abstract universal values. No violence is done to individual entities when they are grouped according to a shared characteristic. The books on my bookshelf all have different content, but they can coherently be referred to as books in distinction to the shelves upon which they sit. No violence is done to their different content when they are grouped under this abstract definition. However, in order to understand what books really are, we need to know more than this abstract definition: we need to read them. The concrete universality of the books is thus not the abstract definition that distinguishes them form other kinds of things, but the information (histories, poems, philosophical arguments) that they contain.

We can apply abstract and concrete universals to the study of human beings as well. Philosophy is full of abstract definitions of the form: ‘human beings are x’. It is true that human beings can be grouped into a class defined by a singular property in the way that inanimate things like books can be, but if we leave our understanding of human being at that abstract level, our definition misses the reality of human life. Human life is not expressed in abstract definitions but in concrete, world-shaping activities. These concrete world-shaping activities ensure that, just as the content of books differs, so too the content of human lives differs, historically, and culturally. Because abstractions ignore differences of content, but differences of content are essential to understand the different experiences of life that differently situated people have, abstract universals easily lend themselves to exclusionary use. In the worst cases they are deployed to mark off a boundary within the set of all human beings between those who are fully human, and those who do not make the cut. Those on the wrong side of the boundary are then reduced to mere objects of the power of those who define themselves as fully human.

The solution is not to abandon the universal for the particular. Any form of social criticism, we will see in Section 2, necessarily makes universalizeable claims. The better approach is to criticize the abstract universal with a concrete universal. Concrete universals, as Hegel showed, are not abstract definitions but the unfolding of a singular idea in different ways through historical time. ‘Philosophy’, Hegel argues, has to do, ‘not with unessential determinations, but with a determination in so far as it is essential; its element and content is not abstract or non-actual, but the actual, that which posits itself and is alive within itself’ (Hegel 1987, p.27). Concrete universality is found in history, not in the mind. Even though (as Susan Buck-Morss shows) Hegel himself hardly employed this idea consistently in his interpretation of Africa and the colonised world, his dialectical method ultimately allows us to overcome the problems of abstractly universal values (Buck-Morss, 2009). As Etienne Balibar understands, the lasting significance of Hegel’s dialectical method is that it explains universals not as things in the mind but as the outcome of ‘une construction progressive … passant par l’interirization a son concept meme de ses opposes’^[3] (Balibar 2016, p.38). By understanding the concrete universal as the outcome of a dialectical historical process, the exclusionary and oppressive use of abstract universals can be avoided and the liberatory value of concretely universal human values becomes clear.

We can now turn to the historical example of Condorcet. Condorcet was a member of the Friends of the Blacks, an anti-colonial and anti-racist political club operative during the French Revolution. He was also, along with Sophie de Condorcet, his wife, an early supporter of women’s equality. Nevertheless, as a Girondin, he ran afoul of the Jacobins and died in prison one day after his arrest. His critique of the racist underpinnings of the colonial system is perhaps the most strident of any during that period, with the possible exception of the Abbe’s Raynal’s prediction of a coming revolution of the enslaved masses in the colonies (a prediction which would come true with the outbreak of revolution in San Domingue in 1793).^[4] Condorcet’s arguments are more useful for my purposes because they combine in a most jarring way genuine anti-colonial critique with Eurocentric devaluation of the indigenous cultures from which enslaved people had been torn.

Condorcet begins with a searing indictment of European racism and a ringing endorsement of the humanity of African people:

Philosophers of various nations, embracing in their meditations the interests of mankind as a whole without distinction of country, race or religion, formed a strongly united battalion against all errors, all kinds of tyranny; and they did this despite the difference of their speculative opinions. Driven by a feeling of universal philanthropy, they fought against injustice when it existed in a foreign country and couldn’t harm them, and fought against it also when it was perpetrated by their own country against another. In Europe they rose up against the crimes with which greed had stained the shores of America, Africa and Asia. The philosophers of England and of France were glad to take the name and fulfill the duties of friends of those same Blacks whose stupid oppressors disdained to count them even as men. (Condorcet 2017, p.77)

Universal philanthropy is better than racist tyranny. There can be no doubt that Condorcet is sincere in his affirmation of the humanity of the enslaved and dominated persons that the ‘stupid tyrants’ of the colonies and Europe refuse to count amongst the members of the human race. At the same time, it is also equally impossible to miss the abstract reasoning through which Condorcet conceives of universal humanity. ‘The philosophers of Europe’ he says, embrace the interests of humanity as a whole, and they ‘take the name’ of the Blacks whom colonial administrators treat as nameless drones to be worked to death and then replaced. What he does not do, therefore, is to allow the oppressed to tell Europeans what their names are and speak their humanity in their own voice.

In Ajari’s terms, Condorcet fails to see oppressed Africans as a singularity whose dignity is found in their resistance to the suppression of their capacity to shape their own lives. Condorcet sees it rather in a suppressed or delayed ability to adopt the markers of human civilization, which he can only understand on a European model. Setting aside any practical impediments preventing Condorcet, in Paris, from fully understanding enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic, there is the deeper problem that he conceives of their humanity not in terms of actual needs and capacities, but in their potential to eventually count themselves as human by learning to speak that language and values of European philosophy. This fact comes out quite clearly in his speculations about the future progress of humanity. He laments that Europe has exported its culture through violence when it ought to have exported it through education. He has no doubt that European culture is superior to indigenous African and Caribbean cultures, but insists that this difference should have been overcome through education, not enslaving domination. After noting that the principles of liberty and equality and freedom of thought and argument have conquered the United States, France and were now spreading across Europe, he contends that they will soon conquer the colonies too:

Can it be doubted that … the slow but unstoppable effects of the advances of their colonies, will soon produce the independence of the new world? and that then the European population ·of those former colonies·, rapidly spreading across that enormous territory, will either civilise the savage nations still occupying immense tracts of it or peacefully cause them to disappear? (Condorcet 2017, pp.95-96)

Instead of being tyrants, Europeans ought to have been educators of the peoples who have not yet reached their maturity and learned to think for themselves.^[5] For Condorcet, the key step towards progress in the reduction of equality between nations does not occur when the enslaved rise up and determine their own future as the free human beings that they really are, but when they are liberated by kind-hearted Europeans:

But no doubt the moment is coming when we’ll stop presenting ourselves to these people only as corruptors

or tyrants and will become for them sources of benefit or warm-hearted liberators (p.96).

Thus, for Condorcet, the oppressed adopt the universal values that Europeans first discovered if they are to realise their full humanity. There is no doubt that he takes the side of the oppressed against colonial oppressors, but he speaks for the oppressed rather than with them in their own liberation struggle.

This strategy of identifying universal values with a culturally particular form of life deemed ‘superior’ fails to see that European values are, from an external perspective, equally particular. Truly universal thinking has to start from the fact that cultural conflict is not a conflict between the naturally superior and inferior, with the later posited as hopeful supplicants awaiting admission to the church of universal value, but clashes between different forms of human life. Ajari is not thinking of Condorcet in particular, but his argument against abstract universality captures the problem precisely. ‘Penser ethiquement et politiquement, ce n’est pas chercher a conformer la situation present a une norme ou a une ideal qualifies d’universel, c’est mettre en relation la singularite des circonstances actuelles avec une autre singularite qui s’eclaire et l’enrichit’^[6] (Ajari 2019, p.166). Ajari does not reject universal values as necessarily Eurocentric, but sees them as emerging from these sorts of inter-cultural conflict. When one group is systematically subordinated to another group which deems them inferior, they become conscious of their human agency in a new and poignant way: confronted with the denial of their humanity, they have no choice but to defend it, not by showing how they fit under an abstract ideal, but by protecting the form of life their oppressors attack or resisting the shackles with which their oppressors try to bind them.

The point is that oppressed people cannot be liberated by enlightened benefactors, but must, as human beings, liberate themselves. That is not to say that the values of liberty and equality are not universal values, but that there is a difference between their abstract and concrete expression. Condorcet defines their universal value by abstracting certain contents from the particular context with which he was familiar and positing this abstraction as their complete and sole truth. Yet the ‘rights of man’ which he identified as the fully universal form of freedom and equality were not extended to the enslaved people of the French colonies. They had to seize those rights themselves, and when their long revolution finally succeeded in San Domingue, their constitution differed from the French in so far as its first article abolished and forbade forever slavery.^[7] Ajari is correct to argue that the abstract slogans are not the starting point of the struggles of the oppressed. In this historical case, the fact of slavery is the starting point of the struggle. At the same time, I do not agree with Ajari that the universal values that connect the struggle against absolutism in France and slavery in the colonies are only accidental (Ajari 2019, p.161). It is true that the revolutionaries of San Domingue did not simply adopt and adapt French principles as the universal values that must guide all non-European peoples, but rather actively contributed to, as socially self-conscious human subjects, the concrete unfolding of the real universality of those values.

Etienne Balibar captures the practical logic of concrete universalization clearly in his interpretation of the struggle for democracy. Just as in the case of normative definitions of humanity, ‘democracy’ has been repeatedly used to justify forms of social life which deprive part of the people of the voice and power they ought to have if their society really were democratic. That contradiction does not prove that democracy is nothing but an ideological ruse, but rather serves as a catalyst for struggles for democratization.

Mais loin que ses échecs et ses limitations pratique détruisent le principe démocratique, c’est cette contradiction pratique elle-même qui explique son immortalité. Les individus et les groups assujettis ou victims de discrimination se rebellent au nom et pour les défence des principles qui sont reconnue officiellemnt et niés dans la pratique. ^[8] (Balibar 2016, p.140)

The concrete universality of democratic values, like the concrete universality of our humanity is not accidental, as Ajari thinks, but is grounded in the shared human capacity for self-determination which all revolutions against different forms of tyranny and injustice manifest. Hence, the anti-colonial revolutionaries were not students of European enlightened benevolence but set out on their own power to resolve the contradictions that European philosophy and politics could not solve: the contradiction between slavery and human freedom. Yet they drew upon the same human capacity to transform oppressive social structures in their struggle.

 II: Universal moral grammar and shared material needs

This capacity for self-determination, anchored in the bio-social nature of human beings, is the source of all concretely universal human values. Understanding this point is the secret to understanding Fanon’s ‘new humanism’ and its continued significance for our time of global crisis and revanchist particularisms. Unlike Condorcet’s abstract universalism, which takes a singular European norm and projects it as the goal towards which all human beings must aspire, Fanon starts from the actual liberation struggles of oppressed people and examines how new expressions of human self-determining capacity emerge. Fanon understands colonialism as a Manichean world in which the vaunted values of European humanism do not exist for the victims. ‘This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil of and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world’ (Fanon 1968, p.96). However, he does not reject the universality of the values of freedom and equality, but reinterprets them as goals whose concrete universality has not yet been unpacked, because most of humanity has not been allowed to speak for itself. Being prevented from speaking and not having anything to say are opposites. As human beings, all oppressed people have something to say, and their struggles for self-determination are their ways of saying it. As Sekyi-Otu explains, ‘what Fanon retained from Sartre and the existentialists was the formal notion of human liberty as the availability and openness of the field of action ad self-determination’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p.80). But these are not European values falsely universalized, but concretely universal human values as yet given only one-sided expression in European philosophy. The struggle against colonialism is not a struggle against the values of freedom and equality because they are European, but rather a struggle for their concrete realization against their one-sided and abstract expression in Europe.

All the elements of a solution to the great problems of mankind have, at different times, existed in European philosophy. But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to the… let us reconsider the question of mankind … of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be rehumanized. (Fanon 1968, p.314)

The abstract becomes concrete through the self-activity of those humans whose ideas about what universal human values mean have not been consulted.

Fanon’s work exemplifies the humanist implications of concrete universality. Anti-colonial revolution is a necessity, both because the colonialist ruling class would not give up the benefits of their rule willingly, but more deeply because the oppressed need to prove to themselves that they are fully human by acting in their own name when all along they have been derided as incapable of independent action. ‘The native … laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows he is not an animal, and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory’ (Fanon 1968, p.43). Despite the seeming glorification of violence and cultural particularity, Fanon makes it clear that the driving value of anti-colonial revolution is not revenge against the colonisers, but self-determination, the need for racially oppressed human beings reduced to the status of objects to prove their subjecthood to their ‘stupid tyrants,’ and, more importantly, to themselves. Sekyi-Otu argues that Fanon does not celebrate violence for its own sake, or reduce politics to violence. Rather the problem was that there was no other way out of the colonial condition than through violence, because colonialism is ‘a social space in which existential positions are implacably fixed in separate spaces by virtue of racial membership’ and therefore ‘violates the minimal requirements of political association’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 87). Whether those minimal requirements for peaceful, democratic resolution of the still deep structural problems besetting the world are now met must be left an open question here. If there is a peaceful and democratic way forward, it will have to be rooted in concretely universal human values, the vindication of which is my purpose here.

Fanon remains an indispensable guide towards those concrete universal values because, notwithstanding his tactical support for violence, he was always clear that the underlying principles served by anti-colonial revolution were the humanist values of self-determination, freedom, and equality between people. The problem was not the universality of those values, but their one-sided misunderstanding of European philosophy. Their concretization demands social and political conditions in which all of those human beings denied voice by being denied control over the natural and social conditions of their lives, speak for themselves by seizing control over those natural and social conditions. The struggle is directed against European colonialism, but not Europeans so long as they prove to be fellow human beings by supporting the struggle: ‘The Third World does not mean to organize a great crusade of hunger against the whole of Europe. What it expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere’ (Fanon1968, p.106). Note that he says ‘mankind,’ (humanity), and not different cultures considered separately. Yet ‘humanity’ is no abstraction. As a concrete universal, ‘humanity’ is expressed and realized through specific historical cultures all of which are ultimately the products of human reproductive, productive, and intellectual labour.

Humanism is therefore not a relic of a Eurocentric past. It is a reality being created every time real human beings free themselves from conditions in which their self-creative capacities have been buried under the weight of objectifying, dominating social circumstances. ‘After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but colonized man. This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism … A nation which is born of the people’s concerted action … cannot exist save in the expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture’ (Fanon 1968, p.246). To understand the significance of Fanon’s ‘new humanism’ today, we have to look more closely at the universal moral grammar embedded in specific cultures and the underlying, shared, requirements of life that link human beings to the earth and each other at a material level in every culture.

It is an unwitting irony, but an irony nonetheless, critics who contrast European universality with indigenous particularity ignore the universal values at the heart of the dominated cultures. By treating universal values as the problem, these critics in effect conclude that there is nothing of universal significance within them. As Sekyi-Otu argues, ‘to abjure universalism tout court because of imperialist, Eurocentric, and discriminatory auspices of certain versions—as certain Western conscripts to the anti-imperialist cause in common with certain voices from the global South invite us to do– is the last word of the imperial act’ (Sekyi-Out 2019, p.14). Ignoring the universal values at the heart of indigenous cultures is the last word of the imperial act because it says, in effect, that no non-Western culture has anything to teach anyone, because every culture is a symbolically enclosed world.

Fanon’s—and Sekyi-Otu’s– approach is fundamentally different. While Fanon defended as necessary the recovery of derided and denied traditions and histories, he defended them as suppressed elements of human history and heritage, as practices, stories, and art forms whose recovery enriched the whole, and prepared the way for new forms of interaction and invention. In his vision cultures are not self-enclosed particulars but express the ‘universality of the universalism that speaks in variegated tongues as they convey the ordinary languages of moral and political judgement’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p.14). The new humanism he envisaged rejects the view of cultures as symbolic monads with no windows in or out. Instead, he treated cultures as creations, as living expressions of human ways of life. Individual identity is rooted in cultural membership, but the cultures to which individuals belong must be created by those self-same individuals interacting in lived space-time. Fanon’s new humanism looked forward to a future in which each individual was free to help create culture by creating themselves. ‘We can hear in … Fanon… an ideal of individuality more liberating … than the forms mandated by racist culture’s mandatory collectivism. … The idea of individuality is twin with Fanon’s vision of ‘a new humanism’. … Such a humanism would testify to a concrete and truly shareable universal’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p.166). Those individuals are defined by their human needs and sentient, affective, cognitive, and creative capacities. Any culture, I will now argue, can be evaluated in terms of how well or poorly it satisfies those needs and enables the culture-making capacities of its members.

If we treat cultures as self-enclosed particulars, not only can they not have anything within them that can be truly shared, they also cannot change themselves in accordance with universal evaluative principles. If each culture is authentic only when treated as a self-enclosed whole, then its authenticity is threatened by any sort of change, whether from without or within. Human cultures, on the contrary, are made up of individuals working in various material, practical, and symbolic relationships with nature and each other. Individuals, whatever their cultural membership, have certain fundamental interests embedded in their embodied being: they must eat, they must drink, they require shelter and clothing; they have the capacities to think and build and create, which must be cultivated or else lie fallow and atrophy. The cultivation of those capacities requires the use of social resources and presupposes social institutions which satisfy the social needs their full and free development requires. Crucially, they also all have the capacity to recognise when those needs are not being satisfied and their capacities not being fully and freely developed, and to reflect upon the causes of those failures. The whole point of a liberation struggle, Fanon and Sekyi-Otu argue, is to free dominated individuals from structures of systematic need deprivation so that people can prove themselves to be self-creative individuals, and not the stereotypical identities imposed upon them by ideologically motivated abstract universals. The end-goal of any successful liberation struggle has to be collective, democratic control over natural resources and social institutions, because only then the society ensure that both are used to comprehensively satisfy the fundamental natural and social needs of everyone. When some groups are demonized—as in racist or sexist ideologies—as not having the full slate of human natural and social needs and deprived of the voice to articulate the harms they suffer, structures of domination are perpetuated. When everyone can speak and participate, harms are known, institutions forced to acknowledge them, and changes forced through by the collective agency of the historically oppressed groups expressing human demands through acting in their own name.

The structure of human natural and social needs means that every human being throughout time, whatever culture they inhabit, is dependent upon connection with the natural life-ground and interdependent with each other for their survival and flourishing. The degree to which these needs are comprehensively satisfied for the sake of all-round self-development yields a universal evaluative principle that any person, in any culture, can apply when they think critically about their life-conditions. Societies are good to the extent that they comprehensively satisfy the fundamental natural and social needs of their members and promote the full and free development of each person’s core life-capacities.^[9] This evaluative principle forms the underlying universal ethical grammar implicit in every society. Enrique Dussel has explained this underlying ethical grammar as a demand for the historically dominated and excluded to be included in the decisions that decisively impact their lives. His critical ethical principle of liberation, from which Sekyi-Otu draws inspiration, asserts that underlying every demand of the oppressed is an argument of this form:

The critical discursive criterion of validity [implicit in the struggles of oppressed groups] consists in the reference to the intersubjectivity of the victims who are excluded from the discourses that affect them (by alienating them at any level of their real existence)… There is critical validity in when the community of the excluded victims, having recognized each other as distinct from the oppressive system, symmetrically participate in the agreements about what affects them. (Dussel 2013, p.345)

Since we cannot change the past, the evaluative principle is future oriented. It is enacted when any person or group identifies and criticizes practices that contradict its requirements. The contradiction is practical and not logical: resources that could be used to comprehensively satisfy everyone’s needs are appropriated by a ruling group for its own exclusive enrichment. Different groups of people are made to suffer for the same general reason: the appropriation of resources by the ruling class for their own selfish use. There are innumerable concrete ways in which these harms are imposed and experienced, but in every case, the form of their wrongness is the same: subaltern groups are harmed because their human needs are not met and their attempts to express this harm are blocked by the normal operation of political power.

The greatness of Sekyi-Otu’s achievement is to have explained how this universal ethical grammar is concretely manifested in and through the particular beliefs, practices, and arguments of different cultures. The very possibility of resistance, refusal, social criticism, argument about the future, and plans and movements for change presuppose the capacity of individuals to distinguish themselves from the existing social whole and say, in effect: ‘it is not working for me, and for people like me, and I (we) are going to tell you why’. Sekyi-Otu explains that this ‘metaethical principle’ ‘is neither an abstract ideal nor a foreign import … it is homemade, a regular product of our domestic discursive industry … committed to the criticism of unjust acts and relations in everyday life’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, 18). It is rooted in a human capacity to recognise harm when one sees it, in the suffering of others deprived of natural and social needs, in the pain their faces express when they are subjected to violence and in the waste of life manifest in people forced into subservient positions.

In every struggle against oppression, universal human values are expressed through a local language, because humanity expresses itself in different symbolic systems and practices. All cultures are built up out of the earth, through life-serving productive, reproductive, caring, and creative labour. Every culture is thus the product of needy human beings working with each other to produce what they need, reproduce themselves, care for each other, and create meaning in their lives. Harm is easy to recognise wherever it exists, because everyone knows the basics about what everyone else needs to survive and flourish. It does not take sophisticated scientific understanding to diagnose exploitative, oppressive, and alienating conditions, because they are always imprinted and expressed on the faces and bodies of those whose lives are damaged by them. Thus, as Sekyi-Otu argues, ‘It is under the aegis of such an everyday universalism that, upon encountering a victim … of harmful or degrading treatment, an Akan speaker in Ghana voices her outrage with this simple question: … Is she not also a human being?’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p.17) He gives several other examples of the universal expressed in different local vernaculars before concluding that he is offering ‘an alternative to European supremacist exceptionalism, the ‘multiverse’ rejoinder, and the pragmatist story of human universality as a contingent disclosure …. That alternative is the argument for the transcendental priority of what Engels called the human being’s “native thirst for freedom”’(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 31). In the terms of my materialist ethics, this native thirst for freedom is expressed in every local struggle against systematically need-depriving systems and the ideologies of invidious difference that justify them. The conception of the human being that underlies them has ‘transcendental priority’ because only if human beings treat themselves as free subjects that deserve that which they know that they need in order to live fully and freely that any struggle against established powers is possible and rationally explicable

Sekyi-Otu makes clear that this underlying universal grammar of ethical judgement is not a case of indigenous people learning how to reason ethically from Western schoolmasters. Therefore, this universality, is not a matter of Western ethical universality speaking through local non-Western cultures. The grammar is rather rooted in the universal human capacity to recognise as wrong and unjust any social system that imposes systematic harms on any group for arbitrary reasons. The subjugation of women, the racist domination of colonised peoples, or the exploitation of working people of any gender or race are structurally the same: they are all cases of a ruling class depriving a group of people of the resources, relationships, and institutions that they require in order to live free, self-creative, meaningful lives that make an acknowledged contribution to the well-being of others, now and through the open-ended future of the human project. The particular histories, experiences, and stories of resistance to these harms differ from place to place, but what makes any criticism or struggle ethical is that it concretely instantiates the humanity of the oppressed: they speak in their own voice to tell the world what they need, and that they intend to vindicate their humanity by taking it. Taking what they need means, in practice, making three general changes to social institutions and values systems. First, the economic system which produces the goods that people need must be made to work for the sake of satisfying everyone’s needs within the known limits of the natural environment. Second, the political system must ensure that everyone has the voice and power to meaningfully participate in the debates and institutions that produce the laws and policies that structure collective life. Finally, the ruling value system and major social institutions must enable each person to explore and express themselves through forms of work, activity, belief, and relationship which are individually meaningful and socially valuable and valued. Understood together, these conditions underly the good of any form of collective life. The goodness is concretely universal: it is one, but expressed in different cultural and institutional permutations.

If this grammar and these goals were not concretely universal, but always only a particular falsely inflated into an abstraction and imposed upon indigenous cultures by foreign oppressors, critique of any society by its own members is impossible to understand. If the universal grammar of ethical criticism is itself nothing but an element of imperialism and colonialism, then all criticism of post-revolutionary societies by indigenous members of that society to the effect that the goals of the revolution were not achieved and the gains usurped by an indigenous ruling class must be false. Such critics must be the secrete tools of imperialism, as indeed conservative forces in post-colonial countries in fact argue. The recently departed Robert Mugabe staved off indigenous challenges to his rule by portraying his opponents as in cahoots with neo-imperialist forces. Exposing this self-serving logic carries a risk: philosophical defenders of universal human values who do not live in the cultures in question have to be careful to not substitute their own voice for the voices of the members of the indigenous movement. Well-meaning western human rights advocates and NGO’s all too easily speak for the oppressed, or hear in their arguments only the language of liberal interpretations of human rights speaking through a local idiom. They repeat the colonial assumption carefully diagnosed by Fanon, of acting as though indigenous peoples lacked ethics and human sensibility (Fanon 1968, p.41). The problem is, then, to discover a way to build solidarity between particular oppressed groups in struggle and supporters who do not share that specific identity. What ties them together in genuine solidarity is a commitment to the universal human values that underlie the struggle. The solidarity is genuine when supporters allow the oppressed to explain in their own terms what those values mean, that is, to only ever speak with the groups in struggle, never for or through them.

 III: Solidarity as speaking with, not for, the oppressed

To conclude, let us return to the beginning, and remind ourselves of the post-humanist claim that ‘the dated ontology that figures humans as essentially, inherently subjects, over and against an essentially, inherently object-world is undoubtedly part and parcel of the reproduction of patriarchal racialized capitalism’ (Washick and Wingrove, 2015, p.76) The two essential errors this argument makes should now be clear. First, it mistakes the ideological deployment of abstractly universal, one-sided definitions of human being for the concrete universal needs and capacity for self-determination that must underlie any struggle against the system of patriarchal, racialized capitalism. Second, it fails to see in the ethical grammar of indigenous critique of all forms of oppression, whether imposed from without or emergent from within, the universal metaethical structure of judgements of wrongness. All criticisms of injustice and systematic wrong-doing give voice to the unmet needs of the human victims. When people reject a form of treatment as unjust, they are saying that the harm is undeserved, and it is undeserved because it violates the conditions of good human lives. As Dussel insists, ‘Human life is the practical criterion of truth … insofar as practical truth aims to foment the reproduction of the life of every single ethical subject in community’ (Dussel 2013, p.339). At root, then, all judgements of practical reason (reasoning focused on the goodness of human action) are judgements about whether or not a practice protects or endangers, preserves or destroys, life.

McMurtry adds, not in explicit commentary on Dussel but in the same spirit, that it is not only the reproduction of life (need-satisfaction) that is essential, but also its full and free self-development: ‘The rights-obligations structure of society,’ he argues, ‘is life-blind until it is ordered to enable the lives of all its members by the greatest possible provision of universal life goods each requires to flourish as human. This is the life-value ecology of rights by which civil commons development has long been governed’ (McMurtry 2011, p.47). Together, therefore, need-satisfaction (reproduction and preservation of life) and free life-capacity development, are the universal goals of all struggles against oppression. Oppression is, to repeat, at root a systematic form of depriving demonized groups of some or all of their natural and social needs and justifying this deprivation on the basis of the claim that those who are deprived do not really need that of which they are deprived, because they are not fully human.

However, this underlying material structure of needs and the universal grammar of ethical judgement it grounds does not solve the problem from which we began: how do supporters of struggles against oppression learn to speak with the oppressed rather than (as Condorcet did) speak for or through them? Answering this difficult question first of all demands that we answer a prior question: why is it wrong to speak for or through the oppressed, if speaking for or through them aids the liberation struggle? Sections One and Two demonstrated that liberation struggles must be led by the oppressed themselves, because it is only when they act and speak in their own name that the universal value of their demonized particularity is manifested. When supporters speak for or through the oppressed, they in effect deny the collective political agency they think they are supporting. Even if they do not explicitly say so, their behavior implies that the oppressed cannot free themselves but must be freed by benevolent intervention. When it comes to historical structures of oppression, to speak of freedom in the passive voice, as a process of being freed, is oxymoronic. Oppressed people can only free themselves: the struggle is an essential and irreducible component of their own living, human freedom.

The assumption that non-European peoples, or non-male human beings, are not social self-conscious agents is, as I have argued, the heart of ideological justifications of oppression. Hence, in order to be consistent with the foundational principle of a new humanism, members of historically oppressive cultures must trust that members of historically dominated cultures with whom they want to stand in solidarity are fully capable of identifying, responding to, organizing against, and ultimately overcoming the structures of oppression that have been imposed on them. The oppressed must lead their own struggles against oppression, for that is the only way (as Fanon argued) they can prove to themselves and their oppressors that they are human beings. That is the only way they can overcome all the pathologies that the violence that has dominated their lives have caused, and it is the only way, therefore, that they can ‘rid themselves of all the muck of the ages and become fit to found society anew’ (Marx and Engels 1976, p.53). Fanon’s new humanism requires new forms of social relationships which prioritise the satisfaction of every individual’s needs, for the sake of their own full and free self-development.

The success of this argument depends upon the principle that struggles against oppression are struggles to free individual members of oppressed cultures from the structures imposed upon them by imperialism and colonialism. My argument is consistent with Fanon’s and Sekyi-Otu’s, from whom I have drawn inspiration. However, one important objection to this position has not yet been considered: is the conception of individual development central to Fanon’s conception of a new humanism itself Eurocentric? The Dene political philosopher and activist Glenn Sean Coulthard has advanced just such a criticism of Fanon, and my argument cannot be judged sound unless I can find a successful response to this critique.

While generally sympathetic to Fanon’s argument, Coulthard disagrees with his claim, cited above, that the struggle for freedom is not only future-oriented, but guided by the value of self-creation. Fanon rejects what he regards as backward looking movements bent on recovery of the integrity of traditional material and symbolic life-ways as final goals. Coulthard criticizes Fanon because he remains ‘wedded to a dialectical conception of social transformation that privileges the ‘new’ over the ‘old’. When this dialectic is applied to colonial situations, the result, I claim, is a conceptualization of ‘culture’ that mimics how Marxists understand ‘class’: as a transitional category of identification that colonized people must struggle to transcend as soon as they become conscious of its existence as a form of identification’ (Coulthard 2014, p.153). For Coulthard, on the contrary, liberation from colonial domination has to centre on restoring sovereignty over the land for the sake of the recovery and revitalisation of indigenous cultures. It would therefore follow that Fanon’s idea of a new humanism is too much a part of the European system of thinking, he in other respects so powerfully contests.

If it were true that Fanon’s new humanism is in fact a demand for the ‘transcendence of culture,’ then I think that Coulthard’s argument would be correct. However, I do not think his is the best interpretation of Fanon’s argument. The problem is—ironically– that Coulthard does not grasp the dialectic at the heart of Fanon’s conception of culture, even as he criticizes it for being dialectical. No dialectical argument would set the old and the new in polar opposition, as Coulthard claims that Fanon does. Dialectical thinking is precisely the mode of thinking which sees opposites as two sides of a deeper life process of conflicted development. Recall Balibar’s explanation of Hegel from Part One: dialectical development is a process through which a universal value is realized by confronting and overcoming internalizing its opposites. Fanon—master dialectician– does not contrast past cultures to a new culture which will be created by abstractly negating the old (that is undialectical in the extreme). Rather the new is always mediated by the old: it emerges and grows out of the free appropriation of the living elements of the older life-ways. Freedom struggles are neither struggles to preserve traditions or return to pre-colonial cultural purity nor struggles to invent new societies ex nihilo. They are struggles to overcome the racist domination of the lives of the oppressed so that they can define their own conditions of life and decide how to build the new on the basis of their own valuation of their past.

Politically, Fanon was clear that the ultimate responsibility for what he called ‘the racialization of thought’ in movements like Negritude lay at the feet of ‘colonial racism’. The affirmation of traditions disparaged by European racists was a necessary, but mechanical, and not dialectical, negation of that racism (Sekyi-Otu 1986, p.181). At the same time as he understood and accepted the necessity of the racialization of thought as a first step, he remained wary of invocations of ethnic pride and preservation as ends in themselves. After their critical energy is exhausted, the recovery of demonized traditions are easily exploited by a nationalist bourgeoisie consolidating its rule in the post-revolutionary period. As Sekyi-Otu argues, ‘Africanization,’ according to this disenchanting view, is nothing more or less than the product of the ‘defensive racism’ of a fledgling national bourgeoisie’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p.102). Philosophically, Fanon’s argument is ultimately rooted in the idea, discussed in Section One, that human beings are self-determining, socially self-conscious individuals. Thus, rather than mechanically opposing the old and the new, Fanon argues that the humanity of colonised people will be fully expressed when they can create their cultural future for themselves. The post-colonial struggle is a struggle for concrete human freedom, which means, ultimately, the freedom to create new ways of life not yet considered in the Eurocentric and racist view of human possibility. Sekyi-Otu puts the point with characteristic eloquence: ‘A truly new day is heralded by dropping the West both as object of ‘nauseating mimicry’ and as the audience for sterile litanies. Life begins when we do away with the manifest Eurocentricity of the Westernizer but also with the latent and complicit Eurocentricity of the melodramist of difference’ (1996, p.183). Creative re-appropriation of traditions is completely compatible with Fanon’s new humanism, but its central value is creation: the human capacity of colonized people to preserve, transform, and their societies and cultures in response to contemporary conditions and the new potentialities it makes available. Fanon is opposed to any sort of ethnic essentialism, not because he is opposed to ethnicity, but because he is opposed to treating cultures as museum pieces in favour of the humanist view: they are living creations rooted in of peoples’ connection to the land and each other. Coulthard certainly does not think that indigenous cultures are museum pieces, and his project for indigenous resurgence is not about going back to the past and ignoring the last several hundred years of political, economic, philosophical, artistic, and scientific history, but recovering indigenous nations’ place in these histories as contributing members of humanity whose contributions have been denied, ignored, and attacked. For Coulthard as for Fanon, I would argue, cultures are living traditions open to the future but rooted in the past.

At the same time, Coulthard’s concerns are legitimate, and help conclude my explanation of what it means to speak with members of historically oppressed groups, rather for or through them. No one from outside a given community, who does not know its traditions intimately, does not speak its language, does not understand the way it feels to be a member of that community, can pronounce on whether and to what extent the recovery of traditional life-ways are essential to the process of liberation. All these elements of culture form the basis for the sorts of ‘thick’ understanding of ethical life that Kwame Appiah, following Michael Walzer, (who was in turn following the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) define actual life in a community, and whose value can only be assessed by the members of that community (Appiah 2006, p.47; Walzer 1994, pp. xi, 4). The material basis and universal grammar of ethical criticism are species of thin values because it leaves open the question of how the needs will be satisfied and what meanings will be attributed (or discovered) in the variegated ways free people will satisfy them once they have freed themselves.

What of the practices that appear to deprive some members of the community of their needs while forming purportedly essential elements of traditional integrity? Here, there is only one answer consistent with the principles of the new humanism I am defending: if they are actually in violation of the demands of the humanity of the members of the community subject to those practices, then those members will eventually rebel against them. If, for example, western women and women in traditional cultures in some areas of the Global South are equally human beings, and therefore equally needy but also self-determining, social self-conscious agents, then we can trust women of the Global South to identify, and transform, social roles that actually do violate their integrity and agency. However—and here the importance of Sekyi-Otu’s argument makes itself most strongly felt—people who do not live in that culture must be open to the possibility that some practices that look oppressive might not be felt to be oppressive because they are part of a thick set of values whose contribution to a meaningful and human life outsiders might not understand. That is not at all to say that good and bad are internal matters, synonymous with ‘the way things are done around here’. On the contrary, the point is that unless you understand, from the inside, the way things are done around here you ought not pronounce on whether the practice does or does not violate the universal conditions of human goodness and freedom. We must remember, that is, that the universal voice of humanity speaks many languages, and no one speaks them all. Solidarity must begin with built on listening. The only way for allies who do not belong to a culture or group to avoid speaking for or through the struggles of the oppressed is to listen to what they say for and about themselves.

Listening does not preclude argument, and not every decision that a group in struggle makes is politically coherent. When the oppressed rise up, they are responding to local histories of abuse and might not have foremost in their mind the general lessons that the study of other struggles might have to teach them. To share those lessons is fully compatible with solidarity as speaking with the oppressed. However, outside supporters of struggles cannot coherently insist that there is only one way to be free, only one way to be human. The creativity at the heart of our social self-conscious agency guarantees that uniformity is impossible. What is crucial is not that everyone speak the same language, but that the institutions which govern our lives ensure that the material conditions for free thought, action, and relationship are satisfied. When that goal is finally achieved, we will all be able to relate to each other as free human beings, whatever language we speak, whatever music we listen to, whatever god we believe or do not believe in, whoever we love. At that point- still a long way off—our differences will be essential expressions of the humanity that we all share and recognise in each other.

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