Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Colonial War, Mental Illness, and Psychoanalysis: The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Originally Aired on Dec 22, 2019 In our third and final installment of "The Wretched of the Earth" Alyson and Breht summarize, examine, and apply the lessons of the final chapter and conclusion of Frantz Fanon's masterpiece work, then they reflect on the text as a whole.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. So on today's episode, we are finishing our series on France Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and we're covering his two concluding chapters, one on colonial war and mental disorders, and then one just titled Conclusion. As always, if you like what we do here at Red Menace, you can support us by supporting our Patreon. And in exchange, you get bonus monthly episodes. Last month's episode, I was really happy with.

We actually watched the movie, The Battle of Algiers, and we talked about it, discussed it, applied the text to it, et cetera. And I really had a great time with that episode. So definitely if you like what we do and you have a few extra dollars laying around, you want to support us, you do get bonus content in exchange. So I don't really want to. want to do anything else as far as preambles. Let's just go ahead and get into these last couple chapters of France Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Allison, take it away. We're going to talk about

this last chapter, which is a little bit different than the chapters that we've discussed so far. And it's worth sort of giving some introduction in terms of what's happening in this chapter. So while our previous chapters have kind of been focused on the more macro scale development of colonization, decolonization, and then independence, Phenon turns in a really different direction here, and he moves towards looking at sort of case studies of mental illness in the context of colonialism that he saw firsthand. So Fidon, when he was in Algeria originally, was working at a hospital and found himself actually in a very strange situation where he was simultaneously working as a psychiatrist treating French soldiers and policemen who had overseen

torture and overseeing the treatment of Algerian revolutionaries who had survived torture. So he was kind of seeing both sides of this. And this gives Fanon some really interesting insights about the really, like, close, in-depth, subjective experiences of colonialism and how it impacts people's psyche. And that's what he turns to at the end of the text. So Fanon introduces this chapter by relating mental illness to the concept of imperialism in a colonial and post-colonial context. So he writes that, quote, that imperialism, which today is fighting against a true liberation of mankind, leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay, which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.

We shall deal here with the problem of mental disorders, which arise from the war of national liberation, which the Algerian people are carrying on, end quote. And that basically summarizes what the project of this last chapter is, very simply. So in his explanation of the psychological impact of colonialism, Phelon is really careful to complicate theories of psychiatry to a certain extent and show that they might not really easily translate into a colonial context. He notes that the psychiatric conception of a cure

for mental illness when applied in a colonial context means nothing more than asking someone to fit into the colonial social system again. So there's obviously not a goal which is apolitical or outside the scope of the social relations in which psychiatric care is taking place. And furthermore, Phenon points out that one cannot separate mental illness from the context in which it occurs. He insists that the systemic dehumanization of the colonize enacted daily through the demeaning behavior of the colonizers creates the condition for specific specific forms of mental illness to flourish. The colonized are forced into a specific form of self-doubt, whereby they're forced to constantly question their own humanity, whether or not they are

equally human with the European colonizers, and they're placed in a constant state of defensiveness, where they always have to reassert and defend their equal humanity. This defensiveness, when colonization becomes successful and truly dominates the indigenous people of a colonization, can lead to an increase in presentation of mental illness, according to Phenon. This final chapter of the text seeks to examine some particular cases of mental illness that developed in Algeria during the decolonial struggles. And in trying to understand these, Phelon asks the reader to keep in mind, the primary contributing external factors that lead to these disorders are, quote, the bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practice,

and the firm impression that people are caught up in a veritable apocalypse, end quote. The sense in which colonial war is total war that encompasses the whole of the population is central here for Phenon. everyone is plunged into this war. The line between civilian and combatant becomes blurred, and the whole populace is submerged in violence, and as a result, unique manifestations of mental distress develop within a colonial context. And Fanon insists that illness which develop in this context are serious and disruptive for those who suffer from them, and connects them directly to revolutionary struggle. He examines the ways that violent actions impact those who carry them out, and attempts to show how even useful and heroic actions in the context of

the National Liberation Struggle can create psychic disturbance for those who carry them out. In the entrance of the chapter, he briefly describes a revolutionary militant who had carried out a bombing during the liberation struggle and ended up suffering from severe insomnia, anxiety, and suicidal ideation around the time of the bombing every year. And for Phenon, this demonstrates the way that colonialism and the struggle against it can create mental distress and illness for all involved. Even valiant revolutionary fighters are haunted by the actions that they need to take in a decolonial context. So rather than summarizing this chapter in its entirety, Brad and I are each going to pick

two cases to analyze, and we trust that you are listeners will go ahead and analyze the rest of them. So the two reports that I'm really interested in looking at, they interest me because they describe the psychology behind colonial violence and explore the way that colonial sort of monstrosity warps the humanities of those who carry out its violent prerogatives. Well, Fendon was a psychiatrist in France, as I said, he had the weird position of treating the torturers and those who survived torture. and he has some interesting accounts of treating French policemen that I think are very worth looking into.

So the first case that I want to look at relates to one of these policemen who's been having, you know, some negative symptoms because of his responsibility of enacting torture against the Algerian population. So in the first series that Fanon lays out, the fourth case, he introduces us to a French policeman who's worked for some time as one of the army's torturers. So Venom paints a picture of a young man who's mostly well-functioning. He says he's very articulate. but suffers from some very strange and peculiar symptoms at night. We're told that this policeman has had trouble sleeping at night. He's begun to shutter his windows. He stuffs his ear with cotton, and he plays loud in music in order to drown out some noise that only he can hear.

And this is causing massive distress in his life, not only because these are terrible things to have to do when you go to sleep, but it's also apparently frustrating his wife and keeping her awake. So as Finanskra probed the policeman for an explanation for this behavior, the policeman gave some background, which I will just quote here at length, because it's been on summarized as well. So, quote, a few months before, he had been transferred to an anti-FLN brigade. At the beginning, he was entrusted with surveying certain shops or cafes, but after some weeks, he used to work almost exclusively at the police headquarters.

Here, he came to deal with interrogations, and these never occurred without some knocking about. The thing was that they would never own up to anything, he explained. Sometimes we almost wanted to tell them that if they had a bit of consideration for us, they'd speak out without forcing us to spend hours tearing information word by word out of them. But you might as well talk to a wall. To all the questions we asked, they'd only say, I don't know. Even when we asked them what their name was, if we asked them where they lived, they'd say, I don't know. So, of course, we have to go through with it. But they screamed too much. At the beginning, that made me laugh. But afterwards, I was a bit shaken. Nowadays, as soon as I hear someone shouting, I can tell you exactly at what stage of the questioning we've got to.

The chap who had two blows of the fist and a belt eaten behind his ear has a certain way of speaking, of shouting, and of saying he's innocent. After he's been left two hours strung up by his wrist, he has another kind of voice. After the bath, still another, and so on. But above all, it's after the electricity that it becomes really too much. You'd say that the chap was going to die any minute. Of course, there are some that don't scream. Those are the tough ones. Now I've come, so as I hear this scream, even when I'm at home, especially the screams of the ones who died at the police. headquarters. Doctor, I'm fed up with the job, and if you manage to cure me, I'll be asked to transfer to France if they refuse, I'll resign." End quote. So Fanon treated this individual as best as he could in his private practice, essentially, but he was unable to convince him to go to the hospital for

more full-time and extensive psychiatric care. And this patient did see Fanon several times, and on one occasion while waiting for his appointment, he decided to go and walk around at the nearby hospital grounds, where he was spotted by a recovering Algerian revolution. who he had actually previously tortured. And so this encounter, unfortunately, led the revolutionary to attempt suicide out of fear of further torture because he thought this guy was there to kidnap him again and take him captive. And this in turn sparked a panic attack in the French policeman and led to Phenon having to pick him up and untangle what events had occurred.

And eventually, the recovering revolutionary was just successfully convinced that he'd imagined the whole thing so he could continue recovering and not have to live in fear that the police were like tracking him and still trying to hunt him down. So there's really several features of this case that I think are worth looking at, and that made me want to pick it as one of the ones to investigate. On the one hand, we can really see how colonialism destroys any concept of shared and common humanity between people. In that encounter between the policemen and the revolutionary at the hospital, we really see how the brutal conditions of colonialism made a basic face-to-face encounter between two people fundamentally unbearable for either. And the rest of the

of the book, Phenon gives little attention to the psychological condition or the motivation of the colonizers themselves, but in this last chapter, we get some really interesting insights into this reality. We see the way that colonial violence not only dehumanizes and destroys the colonized natives, but guts its own agents of their humanity and withers them away to husks of their former self. Given this reality, it's really easy to understand why Fanon has such a positive view of the transformative power of violence. How can we really mourn too much for the death of a French policeman who's already been gutted of his humanity by his involvement in complicity in the occupation. If decolonization brings about an end to the conditions in which young French men are ordered

to engage in torture that destroys both their victims and their own psyches, isn't there sort of an obvious mercy to the revolutionary violence which might kill those policemen and end the system which produces them in the first place? By seeing the psychological impact of colonization on the colonial forces themselves, we can see how universalized intense violence, and we can see how universalized, is within the colonial context, and we can understand why in comparison, revolutionary violence doesn't look quite so grotesque. It allows us to reframe the context in which revolutionary violence occurs, so we can understand its necessity more clearly. So the second case that I want to look at is very similar to the first in a lot of ways, but the illness in this case manifests very

differently. So while the first policeman that we looked at mostly felt internal conflict that plagued only him as a result of his torture, the second case looks at an external of that conflict onto others. So in the second case, Manon introduces us to another French policeman who sought treatment. And this particular policeman was also involved directly in torture and had begun to find that he was really having trouble like separating his impulse towards violence in an interrogation context from his everyday life. He was finding frustration in real life outside the police headquarters was making him feel urges to attack people. So much like the previous policeman, this man had trouble sleeping. He was plagued by night.

but this was really just one part of a broader problem that he faced. For the most part, his concern had to do with behaviors towards others. So once again, to quote from the report directly, Phonon writes, quote, as soon as someone goes against me, I want to hit him. Even outside my job, I feel I want to settle the fellow who gets in my way, even for nothing at all. Look here, for example. Suppose I go to the kiosk to buy the papers. There are a lot of people. Of course you have to wait. I hold out my hand, the chap who works at the kiosk is a pal of mine to take my papers. in line gives me a challenging look and says, wait your turn. Well, I feel I want to beat him up and say to myself, if I had you for a few hours, my fine fellow, you wouldn't look so clever

afterwards. End quote. So, of course, these kinds of violent impulses exist in many people who are conditioned either by their occupation or their lifestyle towards violent solutions to problems. When that's the mode of operation you get used to operating and it normalizes these things. But this particular police officer had found that he didn't really have the impulse control necessary to manage this in the first place, and this had led him not only to feel sort of an immense frustration and anger in his life, but also to beat his children. Fanon tells us he even beat his 20-month-year-old infant. So, the report continues, quote, but what really frightened him was one evening when his wife had criticized him, particularly for hitting his children too much.

She had even said to him, my word, anyone think you'd gone mad. He threw himself upon her, beat her tied her to a chair, saying to himself, I'll teach her once and for all that I'm the master of this house. Fortunately, his children began roaring and crying and then realizing the full gravity of his behavior, he untied his wife, and the next day decided to consult a doctor, a nerve specialist. He stated that before, he wasn't like that. He said he had very rarely punished his children at all, and Vince never thought with his wife. The present phenomenon had appeared since the troubles. The fact, he said, nowadays, we have to work like troopers. Last week, for example, we operated like as if we belonged to the army. Those gentlemen in the government say there's no

war in Algeria, and that the arm of the law, that's to say the police, ought to restore order. But there is a war going on in Algeria, and when they take up to it, it'll be too late. The thing that kills me most is the torture. You don't know what it is, do you? Sometimes I torture people for 10 hours a stretch, end quote. So this case, unfortunately, doesn't really reach any sort of resolution. The policeman refuses to resign from his job, which means that he simply is going to have to go on torturing Algerians indefinitely, which is clearly the underlying.

cause of his pathology, so there's no real solution, as long as he's not willing to give up his occupation. In the end, this policeman simply asks Phenon to teach him how to more or less turn off his conscience when he's on the job, so that he can continue to ruthlessly torture Algerians without any negative psychic damage being done to him or for those around him. It's in this final, really, just truly horrific request that we see the full cost of colonialism to the colonizer. In order to become effective tools of occupation, the colonizer must totally gut themselves of even basic moral consciousness. They must choose to totally dissociate the human part of their psyche from their actions.

And not only does this transform the colonizer into a monster in their actions towards the colonized, but it destroys their relationships amongst each other. This is because, in its endless need to dehumanize and justify violence, colonialism guts any bonds of solidarity and kinship that might have once had any meaning. And their place is just left brutal domination of occupation, in which one French policeman must bend everyone who he encounters to his will. And what else really could he do? This is what has been bottled for him in his nation's policy.

This is his role in the occupation. Can we at all be surprised that he extends the same behavior to his children and to his wife? There's only stubborn domination and hatred left. This is the psychology of colonialism. And this is why revolutionary violence against the rotting husk of colonial social relations is violent. Yeah. I mean, that stuff is so haunting. dark. And, you know, thinking about Fanon's humanism, the colonizer themselves become dehumanized.

The treatment that they lash out on the Algerians then is the treatment they give to their wife and their own children, losing their own humanity in the process. So that humanist pillar is applicable on both ends of this conflict. Like Allison said, there's so many studies to pick from. So for my case studies, I actually picked three that I think are particularly interesting and cover a lot of different forms that trauma and mental illness can take in this context. But, you know, before I get into the cases, I just want to say that this chapter was by far the most emotional for me. I had to like set the book down several times to wipe the tears from my eyes as I read through all of these these case studies of

human beings being brutalized and mutilated by colonialism. And I wept when I reflected on the fact that this is just a small segment of case studies from one particular conflict on one particular corner of the globe. Imagine if this sort of analysis was conducted for every war of oppression or domination or liberation, we would be buried under an ocean of soul-crushing human suffering. So while you listen through these next case studies, I hope you keep in mind the enormous dimensions and heartbreaking implications of this tiny peak inside the human psyche as it writhes and contorts under the weight of unspeakable pain. The first case study that I picked was one in which Phenon takes on a 19-year-old Algerian patient who fought with the ALN. This

This man had stabbed a French woman to death, and he was deeply depressed, had persistent insomnia, had attempted suicide twice, and was racked with auditory and visual hallucinations. But the one thing that stuck up the most to Fanon and his colleagues was that the guy was always talking about his blood being spilled and his arteries being drained. He begged the doctors to stop the invisible bleeding and would ask them not to let anyone come into the hospital and, quote, suck the lifeblood out of him, complaining that a woman would come to him every night to haunt and terrorize him when he was alone in bed. When asked who the woman was, he would say he knew her because he was the one who had killed her. At times, his ability to speak

at all would go away, and he would have to communicate through writing. Fanon concluded that he was suffering through intense depersonalization, and that his psychosis had reached an incredibly serious stage. It then came to Fanon's attention that the man had recently lost his mother, whom he was incredibly close with due to the war and that the man could not talk about his mother without muffling his voice and having tears swell in his eyes. Phelan suspected an unconscious guilt complex surrounding his mother's death but was only able to put the whole story together when he asked the man to tell him more about the woman who haunted him and that the woman that he was supposed to have killed. From that conversation Phelan was able to reconstruct his story and figure out to

some degree why these symptoms were appearing. So here's that story in full. Quote, I left the town where I had been a student to join the underground resistance movement. After several months, I received news of home. I learned that my mother had been killed at point blank range by a French soldier, and two of my sisters taken to the barracks. To this day, I don't know where they are. I was terribly shaken by my mother's death. My father had died some years back. I was the only man in the family and my sole ambition had always been to do something to make life easier for my mother and my sisters. One day we went to a large estate owned by white settlers where the manager, a notorious colonial, had already killed two Algerian civilians. It was night when we arrived at his

house, but he wasn't at home. Only his wife was in the house. On seeing us, she begged us not to kill her. I know you have come from my husband, she said, but he isn't here. How many times have I told him not to get mixed up in politics. We decided to wait for the husband, but I kept looking at the woman and thinking of my mother. She was sitting in an armchair, and her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. I was asking myself why we didn't kill her. And then she noticed I was looking at her. She threw herself on me, screaming, please, don't kill me. I've got children. The next minute, she was dead. I'd killed her with my knife. My commander disarmed me and gave me orders to leave. I was interrogated by the district commander a few days later. I thought I was going to be

shot, but I didn't give a damn. And then I began to vomit after eating and I slept badly. After that, this woman would come every night asking for my blood. And what about my mother's blood? End quote. Fanon goes on. As soon as the patient went to bed at night, the room was invaded by women, all the same. It was the same woman duplicated over and over again. They all had a gaping hole in their stomachs. They were bloodless, sickly pale, and terribly thin. The women tormented the young man and demanded their blood back. At that moment the sound of rushing water filled the room and grew so loud it seemed like a thundering waterfall. And the young patient saw the floor of his room soaked in blood, his blood, while the women slowly got their color back and their wounds began to

close. Soaked in sweat and filled with anxiety, the patient would wake up and remain agitated until dawn. So that's a harrowing case. And Phenon ends this case study by stating that after several weeks of treatment. This man's nightmare symptoms had almost disappeared. They started going away, but his personality was still deeply, deeply fractured. Fanon says that as soon as the man thinks of his mother, the image of the disemboweled woman he killed looms up in her place. In psychoanalytic terms, this is referred to as displacement, where the mind substitutes a new object in place of an original object that is too distressing, unacceptable, or dangerous to the psyche. In this case, the man's mother and the feelings of guilt he has surrounding her death is replaced.

by the nightly haunting image of the woman he himself killed. In the next case that I'm covering, two young teenage Algerians, age 13 and 14, stabbed their European playmate of roughly the same age to death and admitted it in court. Phelan and his colleagues talked to both boys about the murder, and here's the transcript of the crucial parts of that conversation with these young boys. They talked to the 13-year-old first. This is the 13-year-old talking. We were not angry with him.

Every Thursday we used to go and hunt together with the slingshens. shot up on the hill behind the village. He was our best friend. He had left school because he wanted to become a mason like his father. One day, we decided to kill him because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can't kill the grown-ups, but we can kill someone like him because he's our own age. We didn't know how to go about it. We wanted to throw him into a ditch, but this might have only injured him. So we took a knife from home and we killed him. Fanon asks, but why did you pick on him? Because he used to play with us. Another boy wouldn't have gone up the hill with us. But he was a friend of yours. So, why do they want to kill us? His father's in the militia and says we all

ought to have our throat slit. But he didn't say anything like that to you, did he? Him? No. You know he's dead now. Yes. What does that mean being dead? It means it's all over that you go to heaven. Did you kill him? Yes. Are you sorry you killed someone? No, because they want to kill us, so do you mind being in prison? No. And now he turns to the fort. 14-year-old boy. Fanon says, this boy is very different from his classmate. He is almost a man, an adult, judging from his muscular control, his physiognomy, and the tone and content of his answers. He does not deny killing either. Why did he do it? He does not answer the question, but ask me if I have ever seen a European in prison. Has there ever been a European arrested and

imprisoned for the murder of an Algerian? I replied that, in fact, I had never seen any Europeans in prison. And here's the back and forth, starting with the 14-year-old boy. And yet there are Algerians killed every day, aren't there? Yes. So why are there only Algerians in prison? How do you explain that? I can't, but tell me why you killed this boy who was your friend. I'll tell you. Have you heard about the rivet business? Yes. Two of my family were killed that day. At home, they say the French had sworn to kill us all, one after the other. Has any Frenchmen been arrested for all those Algerians that were killed that day? I don't know. Well, no one has been arrested. I wanted to take to the mountains, but I'm too young. So the other

other boy and I said, we should kill a European. Why? In your opinion, what do you think we should have done? I don't know, but you are a child and the things that are going on are for grownups. But they kill children too. But that's no reason for killing your friend. Well, I killed him. Now you can do what you like. Did this friend do anything to you? No, he didn't do anything. Well, that's all there is to it. End quote. I think what strikes me the most about this story is the brutality and depravity foisted upon children by the colonial context. It's precisely the colonizer who separates human beings into racial and ethnic categorical hierarchies. And in this case, we see the tragedy of what happens when that conflict and those racial categories are internalized by otherwise

completely innocent children. The children had nothing against their European friend. It was simply the fact that he was European and he stood in for the entire colonial system to these kids. In the same way that an Algerian is not seen by the colonizer as a particular individual human being, but rather as a stand-in for an entire ethnic category of people. The individuals are reduced to mere representatives of their racial or ethnic group. Children are not born understanding this. They are taught this. And the inhuman barbarity of the colonial system is brought into sharp relief by observing how that entire ideological apparatus gets dropped onto the shoulders of little babies and

innocent children. You can even see in their responses to questioning that they are trying to make sense of a world they were born into but have no control over. Colonialism is, among so many other things, a brutal and barbaric attack on the bodies, emotions, and minds of precious, innocent little children. And by viewing colonial and imperial domination through that particular lens, one can see clearly the abject cowardice and animalistic savagery of European colonialism and imperial powers. cowardice and a savagery, mind you, that are still fully in operation to this very day and will remain in operation until the good people of this planet come together in solidarity to topple this multi-century European empire of bloodshed and slaughter.

Now, for the third and final case study, I wanted to briefly look at the modes and effects of French torture, which was ubiquitous in Algeria at this time. Fonon covers many forms of torture, like torture by electricity, forced in mobility, brutal beatings, waterboarding, etc., and then charts out the specific psychological effects of that specific form of torture. The one I will focus on is the attempt by the French colonialists to brainwash Algerians. I found this interesting because they had two different brainwashing tactics, one for regular people and one specifically for intellectuals. In the case of intellectuals, the brainwashing focused solely on the mind, whereas for non-intellectuals, the brainwashing

was focused on brutalizing the body in order to shape the mind. In the latter case of non-intellectuals, Algerians are beaten and tortured, then made to chant slogans for hours on end, such as down with the FLN or I am French, long live France. Obedience and chanting is backed up by the threat of evermore beatings. But for the intellectuals, things are different. Fanon says that the principal idea when dealing with Algerian intellectuals is to force them into role-playing games. One game forces the victim to play as a collaborator, giving strenuous and in-depth arguments

in defense of collaboration with French colonialism, and then forced to try and convince other holdouts of the merits of collaboration. Another form this takes is to make the intellectual give a formal presentation to the French and other prisoners on the value of French accomplishments, arguments for their superiority and the right to rule over Algerians, and then a systematic refutation of all arguments in favor of the Algerian revolution. The victim is then awarded a grade on how convincing their pro-French arguments were, which is tallied at the end of every month.

The prisoner has led to believe that getting good grades will allow him to be released earlier. Lastly, they force the intellectual to live what Fanon calls a pathologically communal life. The prisoner is never allowed to be alone even for a moment, and silence is prohibited. So the intellectual must say out loud every single thought that comes to them. Fanon goes on to talk about one such case and the lingering psychological effects of this sort of brainwashing. Fanon says, this is the case of an academic who was interned and subjugated to months of brainwashing. One day the camp officials congratulated him on his progress and announced he would soon be set free. Familiar with the enemy's tactics, he was wary of taking the news too seriously.

The strategy, in fact, was to announce to the prisoners they were going to be freed and a few days before the set date organize a group session of self-criticism. At the end of the session, it was often decided to postpone release since the prisoners showed no signs of being definitely cured. The session, according to the psychologist present, highlighted a single-minded nationalist virus. This time, however, there was no subterfuge. The prisoner was well and truly freed. Once outside, in town, and with his family, the former prisoner congratulated himself on having played his role so well. He was overjoyed at the idea of taking part again in the national struggle and endeavor to get back in touch with the leaders. It was then that a

terrible, nagging idea crossed his mind. Perhaps nobody had been duped. Neither his captors nor his co-inmates, nor even himself. Where was the game supposed to end? Once again, we had to reassure the patient and free him from the burden of guilt. Psychiatric symptoms encountered. There's two main types. A, phobia of any collective decision. As soon as three or four people get together, the inhibition reappears,

and mistrust and reticents reassert themselves. And B, the subject finds it impossible to explain and defend a given viewpoint, an antithetical thought process. Anything which is affirmed can be simultaneously denied with the same exact force. This is certainly the most painful legacy we have encountered in this war. The obsessive personality is the fruit of the psychological warfare used in the service of colonialism in Algeria. And to think it's the French who call the Algerians inhuman savages. Now there are many more cases in this chapter, and I encourage listeners to read them all.

It's as heartbreaking as it is important, because these conflicts don't just exist externally, but are buried deep inside the psyches of its victims and even its perpetrators. As Allison said earlier, both sides are mutilated, brutalized, and deeply damaged by the overall situation. In my opinion, Fanon added this chapter to his book precisely to highlight this point, to show how the colonial context is inherently unstable, inherently violent, and devastates everyone involved, but especially and disproportionately decolonized. There is no peaceful, gradual, or reformist-oriented way out of this macabreth of this macabreth of pain and suffering created by the colonizer. The only option ultimately available to people in this

position is to rise up and through violence expel the colonizers, and by so doing also expel the very apparatus, both material and ideological, that leads to the psychological suffering depicted in these pages. Moreover, Fanon reminds us that even after a successful national liberation struggle, the work is only beginning. The psychic wounds inflicted by centuries of colonialism do not just disappear overnight. They must be systematically addressed and wherever possible treated and cured if the new nation is to grow in a healthy direction and if new and better ways of being human are to be created and with that we end segment one of our episode and we move on to part two discussion questions okay so for part two

we only have two discussion questions today i'm going to be asking alison both questions but because the questions that we wanted to address overlapped we're going to have more in-depth discussion and back and forth, especially this first question about psychoanalysis. So it'll just be, it'll just one question opens up a bunch of discussion. So the first question is, and this is really important because this is sort of the undercurrent that we've been wrestling with throughout this entire text, and we've gestured towards and mentioned a few times throughout these episodes, but just the role that psychoanalysis plays here and how, as Marxist, we should think about psychoanalysis. So the question is, what is that stake in applying psychoanalysis to politics? And what can psychoanalysis tell us that other

methods can't, and what risks are there to psychoanalytic approaches to politics? There's a lot to unpack here, and I want to start by sort of just giving like a broad overview of what we mean by psychoanalysis and what sort of that concept means, and then sort of getting into it. So psychoanalysis, there's sort of two components to it. There's the clinical component of psychoanalysis, how it's done in practice in a psychiatric context. And there's also more of an interpretive methodological component of it. So you'll see psychoanalysis, used a lot in literary criticism and media criticism as well, outside of a clinical context. So psychoanalysis obviously has its foundations and roots in the theories of Freud, who developed

it in various directions and created clinical practices that he also trained students and who would carry on that sort of direction. On the more interpretive side of psychoanalysis, there are Freudian psychoanalysts who do interesting work with that, and there are also sort of Lacanian psychoanalysis who draw on the work of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalysts, who sort of reinterpreted Freud in light of structuralist linguistic theory and tried to use psychoanalysis to think about the mind and consciousness as a language. So when asking what's at stake in applying psychoanalysis to politics, we have to ask sort of how does the psychoanalysis and politics can interact. On the one hand, we see the clinical interaction here because we're

literally seeing Fanon talking about his clinical psychoanalytic practice with patients and connecting it to a political context. But throughout this work, we also see the more interpretive aspect of psychoanalysis. As when not talking about specific cases, Fanon is looking at how these macro-political structures shape certain affects and certain psychological responses within various populations. So it's kind of tricky to disentangle these two aspects of psychoanalysis, but both come into play within Fanon's work. So we really have to ask them, what is it that psychoanalysis can tell us? What's so useful about psychoanalysis that we can't get from maybe a more traditional? traditional Marxist theory. And the first and more obvious answer to that is that it gives us an

understanding of sort of the subjective experience of a given political regime, right? When we do Marxist analysis, we're very focused on these material structures. We get focused on these sort of abstract logics at play and these sort of big questions of production and distribution. And we often miss out on some of the more intimate ways that, you know, the societies we're analyzing impact and shape and maybe even produce the people who are living in them in given ways. In psychoanalysis, I think if it can make a useful intervention into politics, it is bringing us back to that subjective and individual experience of how it is that economy, a society, functions and shapes our minds.

Obviously, some of this exists in Marx. Marx has this theory of consciousness, and these concepts of false consciousness, these concepts of alienation, which are all theories to some extent about how capitalism impacts our mental state, but it's not very unpacked or central to Marx's work at all. And it's here that a lot of theorists have tried to use psychoanalysis in order to sort of augment Marx. So obviously one of the bigger figures who has done this that most people would know is Zhijak, who has tried to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to sort of read the dialectic in terms of desire and apply Lacanian concepts of desire to the way that capitalism constructs ideology to make us

believe in certain things and think in certain ways. And that would be one very major example of that. But we can obviously also look at this text, where Fanon is doing this broader dialectical analysis of society, but then taking us down to the individual level so we can see that what is happening at the macro level is mirrored at the individual level. And psychoanalysis can give us some really useful insights there that other methods can maybe hint at but can't narrow in on to the same degree. So that can be really helpful. I think, furthermore, you know, unpacking ideology is a useful place for psychoanalysis. When we look at capitalist media, capitalist film, we can use psychoanalysis to look at what sort of desires that

capitalism breeds in us are playing out in that film and being communicated to an audience. So it can sort of augment our theories of ideologies in some ways that can be helpful. So that's kind of what I think is useful about psychoanalysis. But I kind of come from a philosophical background that is much more critical to psychoanalysis originally, actually. My graduate school study, like, largely focused on feminist philosophy that sees psychoanalysis as problematic for a number of reasons, and even some post-structuralists have really pushed back against psychoanalysis. Crucial to it as a system is a sort of normative set of assumptions that mental development

should occur in specific ways. In order to look at, basically, what we would see is deviations from proper mental development and health, we have to have a norm that we contrast. that to you in the first place. And so while psychoanalysis can give us really interesting analytical methods, it can also sort of import ideas about what a normal, healthy human individual is, and it doesn't always interrogate those ideas particularly well or particularly closely. And there have been feminist criticisms of this that have looked at the way that psychoanalysis is focused on desire, centers male subjectivity, or the ways that there are

certain heterosexual assumptions built into a lot of Freud and Lecon's work. But beyond that, there's also just sort of the fact that in clinical practice, psychoanalysis seeks to have a therapeutic effect, i.e. to reduce the negative symptoms and disturbances that someone's feeling from a mental illness. And while this is a good thing for many people, it also can be used to quash dissent. And psychoanalytic categories of different illnesses and disease have been used to pathologize people who dissent from a society and are trying to point out the dangers of it. So while psychoanalysis as a method definitely gives us a lot of insight, we might not otherwise get, there's this other legacy to it, too, as a regulating and normative

and often oppressive practice that can be used to put people in very bad situations, often even of literal confinement and imprisonment, on the basis of their deviation from some norms. So those are kind of my thoughts, what's at stake in it, what we get from it, and what some of the risks are. Yeah, no, actually, I thought we might even disagree more than we appear to be disagreeing. I think that's really good. I have a few things to say, and we can take this in whatever. direction we want. I think it's important to also understand that psychoanalysis, even though Freud

obviously presented what he was doing as science, it's not science, right? I think it exists at this sort of nexus of science because there is some formal scientific methodology present. I've been reading Freud's lectures on psychoanalysis a lot recently too, so a lot of this comes out of my reading of Freud directly. But it's at this nexus of science, psychology, and philosophy, but mostly really can be seen as a philosophy. And I think to try to raise it to the level of science, it's one way that you could start to approach some idealist errors in this realm. But I do think that Marxism broadly sort of needs or asks for some supplement for dealing with subjectivity. Marxism and the humanist strains of Marxism certainly gesture towards it in understanding the broader patterns of

history and class society. But many individual Marxists who have this objective understanding of history in society and this materialist understanding of how things develop. There's not a lot in Marxism that tries to address the internal lives of beings, right? We all have an inner life. We all have a subjectivity. And so you'll often see Marxists try to find some other way to fill that blind spot in. You know, I've often talked about my love and deep influence in Buddhism and meditation practice to deal with that. You know, the Sartra and Phenon certainly take existentialism. Sartre talked about existentialism as the new humanism to fill that sort of individual subjective gap left neglected by Marxism. And then psychoanalysis, I think, is the other big one that often comes in

to fill that void. There's plenty of Marxists who, to differing degrees, take psychoanalysis and run with it. And as Allison said, I think Zhugek would be the most famous example of that. But, you know, like on the perverts guide to ideology, what does he do? He uses psychoanalytic ideas to examine how ideology manifest in films through capitalism. And certainly that's a really productive way of understanding how cultural products specifically are sort of imbued with the ideology that creates them. And oftentimes ideology operates

where the people presenting the ideological thing are presenting it as something that it's not, and they're not even aware that it's being presented as something it's not. And I think one example of this would be the DNA kits that we see a lot in our lives recently, right? The outward-facing explanation forward is that, you know, we're a company that just wants to help families find their lineages and understand themselves on a deeper level and kind of go back generationally to see where them and their families came from.

But how does it actually operate ideologically? Well, I would argue that ideologically, one, when it appeared on the stage, was sort of interesting during this sort of nativist right-wing eruption all over Europe and North America, with these far-right movements and governments taking over. And I think what it really does is it sort of reifies these rates. categories at this time when capitalism is really in crisis and the main mechanism by which capital is attempting to paper over that crisis is by othering people, by having this fascist reaction to immigration, trying to focus on white nationalism as a way out of these problems, et cetera. So just thinking along those levels, I think there's lots that a Marxist

understanding can pull from psychoanalysis. And specifically, I think the role of contradiction is really interesting. I've been reading a lot of Todd McGowan lately, and he thinks a lot about Higalian, Marxist, and psychoanalytics, and he thinks a lot about the role that contradiction plays. And one of his arguments is that psychoanalysis is interesting from a dialectical position because at the core of identity, at the core of the self, is this sort of intractable contradiction. If we take seriously the idea that there is this unconscious and that it has its own sort of sets of hidden motives and intentions and goals that it seeks alongside and parallel to our conscious motivations and goals, then this gives rise to this idea that you can only understand

yourself so much, that, you know, trying to understand the self and trying to peel the layers back of subjectivity to find the essential things, self underneath all of that, it always will sort of end in a contradiction. You know, you can't do it yourself. And even if you had a really good psychoanalysis, it could work through some of your problems, but at the end of the day, part of embracing psychoanalysis is understanding that there is no real answer. There's no saving grace at the end of the psychoanalytic method that will cure you of, you know, basically having an unconscious and drives and motivations that you're unaware of. So I think there's some really interesting overlaps that I think even more study and research could certainly be done on.

I do think there's a certain logic of desire, and it really begs this question. This is how I'll sort of end this segment and toss it back over to you, Alison. But there's this lot in psychoanalysis, this desire, right? These two big terms in psychoanalysis are desire and drive. And the logic of desire is basically desiring is sort of reflective of this lack of something we have in ourselves, right? This hole in ourselves. And we seek objects to fill that lack. If I marry this person, I'll be happy.

If I get this job, I'll be happy. If I go and buy this commodity, I'll be happy. Right? And so you go out trying to fulfill your desire. You obtain the object, but you find out very quickly that the lack that you were trying to fulfill with the obtaining of that object or thing, the lack is still there. And so you repeat this process of finding things to try to make yourself whole and being disappointed and doing it again. And this is what in psychoanalysis is known as drive. And, you know, it's really a dissatisfactory process, but in the repetitive nature of it,

and the repetitive nature of trying to seek out satisfaction and only being dissatisfied. There's a sort of satisfaction in there. So you think about that related to capitalism, the question arises, and I think this is a big question in psychoanalysis, is psychoanalysis dealing with human subjectivity or is it dealing with bourgeois subjectivity, right? Is the desire and drive that we're talking about in psychoanalysis? Is that really fostered and given rise to through capitalism? or does it exist prior to capitalism?

I certainly don't have all the answers there, but if the answer is psychoanalysis fundamentally deals with subjectivity under bourgeois modes of production and relations of production, well then, I don't know what that says. It says it might be interesting in understanding the subject under capitalism, but it sort of radically opens up the future to a different kind of humanity. And if material conditions can alter subjectivity,

then psychoanalysis at the very least is limited to its historical epoch. So, I don't know, those are some questions that jump to mind. The last question I have, which is what JMP, I talked to JMP about this, and he says that fundamentally, in his opinion, psychoanalysis fails to demystify the object of its study, which he says is the mind. And as Marxist, as many listeners to the show know, Marxism is so great, and we defend it partially on the grounds that it demystifies capitalism, it demystifies the internal laws and logic of capitalism and it demystifies how history and

societies unfold over time. That's why it's a useful sort of lens by which to understand the world. But does psychoanalysis do that for mind or does it do it for subjectivity? I'm not completely convinced it does. I might be a little more sympathetic to that idea than JMP is because he says absolutely not. But it's an interesting thought at least to pursue a little bit. So I have some more things to say, but I'll just toss it back over to you, Alison. What are your thoughts on any of what I said? So I'll start with that mystification idea, because I think that's actually where we get into some of what I see as the dangers of psychoanalysis potentially. So talking about like the concept of the lack, for example, I think is an interesting way to start with this maybe.

So, Jijek, you see this a lot in his work and in a lot of sort of Lacani and psychoanalysts who are making criticisms of capitalism is they'll look at the way that capitalist consumption utilizes this structure of the lack and this endless desire to fill it and the constant inability to fill it in order to create a consumer culture, right? And that, on the one hand, can be a really incredible insight into the depths of how capitalism literally structures our thought process and our mind on a subconscious level. And if that's what we're taking that as capitalism produces this phenomena, then I think that's very useful. Because at the end of the day, if we're giving an ideology, if we're looking at the

root of everything, we're still moving back to a material substructure that is going to be capitalist material relations, which then shape a psychological experience. And there, I think, if that's our approach, and I would say maybe we could refer to that as like an eminent rather than a transcendent theory of psychoanalysis, one that's just in the moment, not transhistorical, that I think that can be a useful psychoanalytic approach in the context of Marxism. But I think the other side of things, right, is that psychoanalysis can treat these things like the lack, or in the context of Lacan, sort of the structure of the real and the symbolic in relation to each other, as a transhistorical reality that shapes society itself. And in that view, we no longer have a

materialist explanation of society. We have a subjectivist explanation of society, i.e. society is a reflection of our unconscious biases, not our unconscious biases are shaped by society. And I think, that, you know, we brought up Gijek, who I'm actually incredibly critical of on this front, because I think in Gijek's later work, in his most recent work, you really see that kind of mystification happen. Well, I think that Gijek's early work on desire and psychoanalysis actually has a lot that might be redemptive to it. Like, Gijc currently has gone in like a really weirdly right-wing direction, and his discussions of capitalism are all mostly cultural now. There's very little discussion of the material aspects, and this has led to these sort of bizarre

statements about defending European culture and the dangers of multiculturalism. And I think that that is a result of Giac sort of getting lost in that psychoanalytic substructure and seeing that those unconscious desires are more primary than sort of capitalist social relations. So I think that's the risk to it that we have to be really careful with. The other thing that you brought up that I think is interesting is like this question of science, right? Which is that I think undoubtedly psychoanalysis has a bunch of categories that when we apply them to culture can help us understand how culture functions. But whether or not that means those categories are like really there universally in every human mind is another question that's really non-falsifiable. And I think that's

one of the frustrating parts of psychoanalysis is that, yes, you know, Lacan and Freud can give all these case studies where they say, I keep seeing the same complex over and over again, but it also could be imposing that theory onto these other cases simultaneously. And because of some of the non-imperical aspects of psychoanalytic theory, we don't have the ability to parse what's happening in those instances. I'm really reminded of Monique Fatigue, who's a feminist philosopher, writing a Phenon and his relationship to his patient, says, like, I have no doubt that Phenon found these structures in the brain that he says he found. I just think there's a chance he put them there himself. Interesting. And I think that you can't get to the bottom of that question with psychoanalysis.

essentially. It's not very clear how we would get to that. So while I think there's immense use to it, and yeah, Marxism has an underdeveloped theory of subjectivity on its own, we have to, I don't know, subjugate the sort of theory of psychoanalysis to Marxism so that it never mystifies it and never sort of asserts these transcendent transhistorical mental structures as the primary first cause of society in place of material relations, if that kind of makes sense. Totally makes sense. I completely agree with subordinating it to a broader Marxist thing. And I agree it can't be seen as a whole system in and of itself.

It certainly, even if you can say it has some interesting lenses through which to critique capitalism, it certainly doesn't provide any sort of solution for it. And on the question of science specifically, and especially people that listen to our show that know that Allison and I will defend the status of Marxism as a science, but neither of us, as you can tell now, are willing to defend Freudianism or psychoanalysis as a science, which is interesting because the big critic of Marxism as a science that most people are aware of is Carl Popper who applied the same critique to Marxism, not falsifiable, as he did to psychoanalysis and said they're both unfalsifiable.

And we've responded to that. I have shows on RLR just completely dedicated to Marxism as a science where I destroy that. I feel like I adequately destroyed that argument. But it is really important because Freud really conceived of himself as doing science because they lived in a time as we've talked about where science sort of met. something different. It wasn't as hardened into these categories as it is today. But he also, even if we were given the categories of today, I think he would still, Freud at least, would insist that he was doing science. But I think one thing that makes it not science is just the

object of its study, which ultimately, I think psychoanalysis is an attempt to understand and interpret subjectivity. And because of the way that science is structured and because of the way the implicit sort of motivations and methodology of science, it sort of pushes anything that fundamentally tries to deal with subjectivity on its own grounds off the table. And we'll often see in science a reductionism that really wants to reduce the subjective to the objective and sometimes in really reactionary or horrible or just lazy ways because when science becomes scientism, you know, then you see like science as an all-encompassing thing which can basically address everything. But science just plays a role unveiling certain parts of

objective nature. It can't touch with, just by structurally, it can't deal with subjectivity. So Marxism focuses on the external development of history and society and the internal laws and logic of the capitalist mode of production. And that's why it can be science, whereas psychoanalysis is fundamentally focused on understanding the psychological and subjective aspects of human existence. And so just by the definition sort of falls outside of the boundaries of science. And I think that's really important because, again, I think if we insist on psychoanalysis as some form of science, you'll quickly be led down idealist routes. But last thing I want to just bounce back off of you, Allison, I mentioned this idea of contradiction and the role it plays in psychoanalysis.

I've been thinking a lot about contradiction. When I had Todd on our podcast about Hegel, he sort of like pushed the brakes on this a little bit. But in his book, he says that Marxism is a right-wing deviation from Hegel because Marxism believes that contradiction can ultimately be overcome and transcendent. And he says that's a reactionary move, right? And just to make this understandable for listeners, when we think of communism, not socialism, when we think of the ultimate goal of communism, I think a lot of this are sort of taught implicitly to think of that as we've transcended the contradictions of capitalism and therefore we've transcended contradiction.

Yeah, people will talk about it. Yeah, they do, they do. And I think we, like, everybody kind of talks about it that way. And Todd McGowan's big argument is if you take Hegel seriously, contradiction doesn't end. The contradiction is the motor force of all. all being. It's what allows the dialectic to progress. It can't ever come to an end. And what the implications are for socialism and communism are interesting, he argues that the left, the radical left, instead of trying to transcend or do away with contradiction, should learn to think through

and act with it and not see our project as overcoming it, but perhaps overcoming the specific contradictions of capitalism, which will then open us up to a new set of contradictions, which are actually more intractable than the ones under capitalism. So I don't know. What are your thoughts and all that? Yeah. So this raises like a core question to dialectics that I don't know that I have an answer to. Because yeah, I mean, to certain extent, right, this is the question of does the dialectic resolve at some point at a certain end of history? And does that end of history mean the end of contradictions entirely? And that's like a tough question to debate, I think. Part of it is like the end of contradiction is so unthinkable on some level because every socialist project we've seen has barely even begun resolving the basic bourgeois proletarian contradiction, you know, not to mention the countless other contradictions that are operating in any given social context.

So I understand the sort of concern there. At the same time, I would suggest that this idea of like, this is my concern with psychoanalysis too. certain extent, I think, right? If we take psychoanalysis's focus on contradiction very seriously, for example, or the impossibility of fulfilling a lack, you can use it to sort of justify liberalism in a way that I'm sort of concerned about, where it's sort of, I think psychoanalysis is uniquely poised to say, you can't overcome this thing that we currently find ourselves in. And you have to sort of reevaluate your relationship with it such that you can come to peace with it. And that's where it starts to have that sort of normative function where I get a little concerned that it actually is playing its own ideological role as bringing us in line with liberalism

and basically telling us that no, liberalism can't be transcended, you're just displacing the lack onto some political project now. Your goal to build communism is ultimately this kind of utopian desire to fill an empty void within yourself and you have to learn to live within the reality that you have. I think there's a real risk that psychoanalysis can do that. And there have been psychoanalytic criticisms of Marxism that have gone in that direction. So that sort of really concerns me about it. And I think, like, on the more clinical level, too, like, this is what I think frustrates me, and we'll get into this in the application section a little bit, is that so much

of clinical psychoanalysis and even just clinical psychiatry more broadly is focused on making us not, like, feel the pain of capitalism to a certain extent, and bringing us in line and in peace with that. So I feel like I don't know ultimately if contradictions will ever go away, if the dialectic will resolve, if that's what communism means. We're just so far out from that as a historical project that it just feels like a level of speculation that I'm uncomfortable with, you know, because I don't even know how to start giving a materialist assessment of it. But I do think that, you know, when we go pushing back too hard against that through a psychoanalytic method, we can end up at an ideological naturalization of capitalism, perhaps. And that's,

where I get concerned that there is a mystification in the way that J&P talked about and psychoanalysis can become very liberal very quickly. Yep, I totally agree. I've already read in the past, Civilization is discontents, and I was sort of going over it and prep for this episode. And I mean, I just opened a random page

and it was Freud shitting on communism, right? So Freud himself was anti-communist, which is really interesting. On the other hand, Nazis certainly burned his book. Nazis thought of psychoanalysis. They called it the Jewish science. But just to talk about the contradiction point before we move on and then after this will definitely be done

for people still struggling with these ideas of like what does it mean to like try to be done with contradiction well we can definitely understand it in the terms of fascism right fascism like let's say there's a contradiction between the the german nationalist identity as such and the the influence of jewish people in the german society okay that's a contradiction what is the fascist attempt to do well it attempts to purge the contradiction of its impurity The fascist right-wing reactionary move in the face of contradiction is to try to destroy it, try to purge the elements of the dialectic that it seems that it finds undesirable or whatever. And of course, that, I mean, that's an impossible task, and these fascist movements,

I mean, they might rise for a while, but they can never really last over the long period of time. They really just let capitalism reestablish itself, and then they sort of fall to the background again. And there's a reason for this, and I think that's because the fascist understanding of contradiction will never lead to anything but instability. I mean, the dialectic will carry on, right? By the act of Germans trying to purge Jews, well, then you have this resistance. And then we have World War II and all this stuff.

So just thinking about contradiction and all of that is important. There's some overlap here. But I don't want to, I think we should move on now. Do you have any last words to say on this? Not really. I mean, one thing I would just suggest to people is like both of us, you know, have a philosophy background. So if all of this is sort of over your head,

there are a lot of resources online to research psychoanalysis. fairly interestingly. There's a lot of YouTube videos on it that I found actually that might be worth looking at. So I recommend going out there and finding resources and researching for yourself if you're having trouble with some of the concepts that we're just mutually referencing, but maybe not defining.

There's a lot out there that can be very helpful for that. Totally. And I mean, Freud himself is a really interesting, good writer. Very insightful in a lot of ways. He's fun to read. It's not at all a slog to read Freud. And then my recommendation, Todd McGowan has a podcast called Why Theory. and in it is really, you know, if you can mix Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and like leftism slash Marxism, that's what that podcast is.

And they have a few episodes. One is like psychoanalysis in capitalism or psychoanalysis and racism or psychoanalysis and disabilities. And they really defend psychoanalysis and apply its lens to critiquing racism, critiquing capitalism, et cetera. So if you're struggling with these questions or you're interested in these questions, go check out Y theory and you'll have a lot of stuff to, you know, satisfy your intellectual curiosity. But let's go ahead and move on. The last question in this segment, I'll toss it to you, Alison, which is, why is this the way that Fanon ends this text? Why end on case reports of individuals instead of, you know, more traditional political theory? Sure. So there's several reasons for this, I think. I mean, the most obvious is that this is

sort of the humanist impulse in Fanon's work, right? Fanon, you know, for all of the broad, big picture macro political stuff is interested in the way that these political structures influence humanity. And there's really no clearer way to see that whatsoever than to look at these individual cases and see it on a much smaller scale, where, like, you're forced to look at the intense horror of the situation. And in that way, you know, this text ends on a level of humanist appeal and insight that I think is really incredible and really actually gives it a very strong closing in terms of the structure of the book. But the other reason I think that I don't know if this was his intention, but I think that a useful aspect of this is that it forces us to think

about how real this is. A lot of the times when we're interacting with theory, and especially when academics are interacting with theory in my experience, there's a tendency to sort of think very abstractly, think about just the abstract structures that the theory is talking about, see it as an interpretive lens. So academics might be interested in how Phenon can help them interpret various things in their own projects, and they might try to take specific methods from his work, and it all gets treated at this level, which is very inhuman on some level, and which ignores the on the ground political reality on some level. I think the Academy treats all sorts of theory this way, even Marxism. But Fanon in this text makes it a little impossible to do

that all the way by ending on this chapter. If you read this text all the way through, you don't just get to think about colonialism as an abstract reality, or Fanon's ideas about it, as maybe the framework for an analytic you can apply somewhere else. You're forced to hear the stories of specific individual lives that were impacted by colonialism. You're forced to wrestle with those things, and you're forced to remember that all the theory you just read isn't there because it's some great academic achievement or to show off the ability to create a nuanced account of a situation. It's there because at the end of the day, Vennon wants to change the world. He wants to make decolonization happen. He wants to enact what he talks about the reality of the

first becoming last and the last becoming first. And you are forced at the end of this text to encounter that head on. And it's a disturbing, uncomfortable, difficult encounter that Phenon makes you have at the end of this text. But it also forces you to really bear the weight of colonialism for a second, to really think about it, to put yourself in the shoes of the people who are on both sides of the colonial contradiction and to realize the full scope of it on the individual psyche. So ultimately, I think one of the most powerful things about ending it this way is that it ties his theory down to reality and down to lived experience in a way that cannot be ignored and that makes it very hard to abstract this text. This text is a text for doing things and for changing

the world. And it ends on a reminder of why that world needs to be changed. Yeah. And if you get too abstract, you do detach from the emotive force of these stories. And so by bringing it down to the level of individual human suffering, it can really, you know, hedge against the worst excesses of too much abstraction, which is often, you know, in every, almost every political theory text, it's very abstract and it never, almost never comes down to the level of how this shit individually affects people. And one story that stuck out, we didn't get to address it. There's so many, definitely go read that chapter. But one story that stands out to me is the story of the of the daughter of one of the French colonialists, you know, she had a great relationship with

her father. She saw how the colonial situation when they moved to France sort of dehumanized her father to the point where he would literally be torturing people in their basement and she'd be trying to sleep hearing the screams of Algerians. And one thing she said in the case study with Fanon, this is a white European French girl. She was like, you know, I couldn't even hug my dad. I couldn't kiss my dad anymore. He eventually died at the funeral. Everybody was saying, what a great patriot and person he was. And she like, it made me fucking sick to my stomach. She's like, it makes me want to join the Algerians. If I had a choice, if I had to choose, I would fight on the side of the Algeria. This is what I assumed to be something like a

teenage French girl saying, I sympathize more with the Algerians and my own fucking father. And that sort of interpersonal complexity, I mean, there's nothing like it compared to Phenon's chapter here. I think it is really the perfect ending to this book and really drives home. What's at stake here? Definitely. No, I think so. And it's not something you see in theory often enough, I think, actually. And if only just because of how unique it is in really driving things home, it really, I think, emphasizes the strength of the psychoanalytic method in the context of this and gets back to some of those reasons that, you know, despite whatever problems it may have, it can be very useful in a political context. Absolutely.

All right. So with all that said, we're going to go ahead and start moving to the next section of our episode, which is section three, which is our sort of application of theory, where we take some of the ideas that are in this text and the part that we've looked at today and we apply it to our current situation in order to understand how this text is relevant to our own lives. So Brett's going to go ahead and start that off for us. All right. So from my application point, I want to address criminality in the context of colonialist domination and subjugation. And I want to highlight how Western science can and has been used to legitimize a social order by giving it a sort of scientific sheen. So at the end of the chapter on case studies, Phelon dedicates several

pages to highlighting the attempt by scientists from the colonizing countries to justify colonialism in the hierarchy of race that makes it possible. Phelan centers his analysis around stereotypes that we, living as we are in the jailhouse of nations currently, will be intimately familiar with, the supposed inherent criminality of the colonized broadly and of black people specifically. Fanon writes, one of the characteristics of the Algerian people established by colonialism is their appalling criminality. Prior to 1954, magistrates, police, lawyers, journalists,

and medical examiners were unanimous that the Algerian's criminality posed a problem. The Algerian, it was claimed, was a born criminal. A theory was elaborated and scientific proof was furnished. This theory was taught at universities for more than 20 years. Algerian

medical students received this education and slowly and imperceptibly the elite, after having consented to colonialism, consented to the natural defects of the Algerian people. Born idlers, born liars, born thieves, and born criminals. So Fanon goes on to chart out the stereotypes of Algerians and then the so-called scientific discoveries that ostensibly prove such stereotypes true. The stereotypes, as I said, are all too familiar as they still exist in our own society to this day. It was taken as common sense by the colonizer

that Algerians were habitual criminals and killers and when they killed, they killed savagely. and without reason or rationale. They steal, they lie, they are lazy, and in an interesting overlap with disgusting anti-Semitic tropes, it was believed that Algerians have a need for the blood of others, a need to bathe in their victim's blood. These stereotypes were then seen as sufficient evidence upon which to base scientific theories

and to systematize this understanding of Algerian savagery. But discontent to limit their scope to just Algeria, these theories and their peddlers grew to encompass the entirety of North Africa. Algerian doctors and students were taught such theories for decades before the revolution at the Algerian university under the departmental leadership of a French psychiatrist, and many of them accepted these things as scientifically valid and objectively true. Fanon writes. Consequently, the Algerian doctors who graduated from the faculty of Algiers were forced to hear and learn that the Algerian is a born criminal. Moreover, I remember one of us in all seriousness expounding these theories, he had learned in adding, It's hard to swallow, but it's been scientifically proven. The North African is a criminal. His predatory instinct, a known fact, and is unwieldy aggressiveness visible to the naked eye.

The North African loves extremes, so you can never entirely trust him. Today, your best friend, tomorrow your worst enemy. He is immune to nuances. Cartesianism is fundamentally foreign to him. In moderation, a sense of proportion and level-headedness, are contrary to his inner nature. The North African is violent, hereditarily violent. He finds it impossible to discipline himself and channel his instincts. Yes, the Algerian is congenitally impulsive.

End quote. So that's obviously Phenon mocking, but also explaining these ideas that were very prevalent and ubiquitous at that time. So numerous scientific studies followed, pretending to outline various reasons for North African criminality, ranging from the idea that North Africans had little to know internal life, to the notion that they were highly credulous and couldn't really reasoned, to the claim that North African adults had a childlike mentality which made them mentally inferior to even that of European children, all the way up to the claim that North Africans lacked a prefrontal cortex, reducing them objectively to the level of subhuman.

One of these medical scientists even went so far as to put forward the idea that the normal African is equivalent to a lobotomized European. one scientific paper put in an internationally respected scientific journal at the time says we have observed at the impulsiveness of the Algerian the frequency and nature of his murders his permanent criminal tendencies and his primitivism are no coincidences we are in the presence of a coherent pattern of behavior and a coherent lifestyle which can be explained scientifically the Algerian has no cortex or to be more exact like the inferior vertebrates he is governed by his diencephalon. The cortical functions, if they exist at all, are extremely weak, virtually excluded

from the brain's dynamics. There is therefore neither mystery nor paradox. The colonizer's reluctance to entrust the native with any kind of responsibility does not stem from racism or paternalism, but quite simply from a scientific assessment of the colonized's limited biological possibilities. End quote. Now, of course, Fanon goes on to destroy this racist scientism, which I won't go into here, since everyone listening should take as obvious that this shit is nothing more than racist garbage masquerading as science. I would remind you, however, that all of this was seen as scientifically legitimate by majorities of the French population all the way up until and perhaps even beyond for some segments of the population, the 1960s. Now, just to put some time on this, like, both of my

parents were born in the 60s. So we are literally only one or two generations away from this bullshit being presented in internationally respected scientific journals. grandfather who's still alive today was well into his 20s during this period. So please resist the temptation to conceptualize this as mistakes from a distant past. It's not distant at all. But what I want to point out is how these tropes and these stereotypes still exist in our general population, and there are still attempts to this very day to apply this scientific gloss to these racist ideas. The popular podcaster, best-selling author, and neuroscientist Sam Harris, for example, had a long podcast episode within the last year or so.

with Charles Murray, the far right-wing academic and author of The Bell Curve, which sought to prove that black people and other minorities are objectively less intelligent than white people, and the racial inequalities in our society are nothing but a natural and organic result of that basic scientific fact. Harris defended Murray as an academic, and argued in the intro to that episode that Charles Murray is unfairly stigmatized for his scientific curiosity. Now shifting away from science proper, we also see these racist tropes pop up constantly in our politics. Ronald Reagan's welfare queen tropes played on these stereotypes. Our modern prison industrial complex which keeps slavery alive in our country is disproportionately filled by people

of color, which is then used on the right as evidence of their inherent criminality and not as evidence of structural racism and inequality. The frontrunner for the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, recently had a Freudian slip during a speech where he equated poor kids with black kids and wealthy kids with white kids. Hillary Clinton back in the 1990, helped her husband expand the prison industrial complex by referring to black boys and men as super predators, playing on the subhuman and animalistic tropes of centuries past. The president of the United States today is well known for his racism, including his infamous full-page advertisements in the top four newspapers in New York City at that

time, which called for the execution of five teenage boys, ranging from ages 14 to 16, known as the Central Park Five, for crimes it was later proven they did not commit. Fox News has spent months in the past covering a totally invented knockout game and framing it as the inherent and senseless savagery of inner city youth. Now, I could go on forever here, but I hope the point is clear. In a colonial context, whether in Algeria or in the United States, white supremacy and racism constantly give rise to these exact same stereotypes about racial, religious, and ethnic minorities. Those stereotypes then shape politics and infiltrate the entire superstructure, including science itself.

But Fanon reminds us that these stereotypes are not inherent qualities of oppressed or colonized people, but rather a racist projection on the part of the white supremacist power structures and a manifestation of the very conditions created by colonialism and oppression in the first place. It's a result of the institutional dehumanization, the material oppression, the lack of community and opportunity, and the psycho-emotional devastation wrought by occupation and domination. It is, as Fanon shows us, a psychological response to poverty and oppression, a desperate attempt to find community and acceptance in colonialist societies which deprive

certain people of it, and a rage-filled reaction to an unjust hierarchical social order which loots and destroys the minds, bodies, and futures of colonized people the world over. A colonized subject refuses to work hard because he knows he toils under oppression and has nothing really to gain from working hard for his oppressor, and the colonizer calls him intrinsically lazy. A colonized subject joins a gang in an impoverished neighborhood to feel some sense of belonging in community, which he has been systematically deprived of,

and the colonizer calls him a super predator. A colonized subject lashes out and commits a crime of senseless violence because his entire emotional and mental life is structurally suffocated and suppressed by his material conditions, and the colonizer uses this to create a theory of the subject as a barbarian without a cortex. A colonized subject robs a store to pay rent for his family because he's been forced into generational poverty, and the colonizer asserts that this proves these people don't want to work for what they have. And finally, a colonized subject whose father is

in prison through racist policing and drug policies and whose mother is gone all day because she has to work three jobs to provide for her family, drops out of high school and joins a gang, and the colonizer stands behind its polished podium and worries aloud about the cultural and familial deficiencies inherent to black families. In every case, the desperate social behavior is explained by the conditions imposed by colonialist occupation, but the real cause is obscured by the colonizer. It's then weaponized as racism, and it's thrown back into the faces of the victims as some inherent deficiency of their racial or ethnic group.

Fanon shows us, step by step, how this process unfolds, and it's just as applicable to 2019 America as it was to 1960 Algeria. And this profound prescience, this powerful and deeply human analysis, and this unending relevancy of Fanon's work is why we continue to read and study him so closely to this very day. Yeah, so following that very heavy section, I just want to do some more work tying Fanon to her current situation and showing that this framework is incredibly applicable. Some of this will overlap with some of the ideas that Brett has talked about, about how

the colonial conditions in the U.S. shape and, you know, warp the reality for people who live here, especially colonized subjects. But, you know, I want to use my section to really discuss mental health in the context of capitalism and are organizing and resistance to it, and I think Fonon gives us some tools for doing that. So I think that most of us are aware of the fact that mental health is profoundly shaped by the social context in which we live. Fonon, of course, applies this to a colonial and a post-colonial context, but any oppressive society whatsoever will have its own disastrous effects on those who live within it. And furthermore, as I've really tried to insist many times before, especially covering this text, the colonial context that Fendon describes maps onto the

United States in an incredible amount of ways, even if it's a bit more complicated given the current status of oppressed nations of the United States and sort of the unique features of settler colonialism here. But let's make no mistake, we live in a settler colonial society that still has these colonial divisions occurring. So in the United States, we've seen many forms of illness that develop really directly as a result of the ongoing colonization, which occurs today. While we often spend our time discussing illnesses like PTSD in the context of soldiers who develop it, we really need to consider the ways that imperialist adventurism traumatizes people across the world as well, right? Our narrative is always on how American soldiers come back

damaged, but we never think about the trauma that our own imperial and colonial society spreads around the world. The same soldiers who suffering we lament are responsible for spreading amazing. immense suffering globally as a part of the U.S. military apparatus, and the conditions of imperialism lead to trauma that will never be treated in most of the population whose countries we invade and destroyed. That just doesn't even get figured in for us. And yet, this horrible mistreatment and the psychological damage it does continues on to this day. So when we think about the psychological aspects of imperialism, we're able to consider not just the political processes that are at play, but also how individual suffering emerges on a psychic level, and I think that

this is really crucial. But we can't stop by just thinking about overseas imperialism. That's not sufficient. We have to think about the way that settler colonialism and white supremacy here in the United States enact psychological violence and damage against people. According to a study by Robert Carter, a psychologist who teaches at Columbia University, the everyday grinding racism of anti-black microaggressions in white supremacist societies like the United States can lead to, over time, the development of symptoms associated with PTSD. The constant brage of subtle racism, often so subtle that white people are actually likely to dismiss it if it's brought up, can lead to a fear of public interaction, self-doubt

about one's own perceptions of being slighted and oppressed on a daily basis, and an overall paranoia surrounding everyday experience. In Robert Carter's work, he really isolates the way that it's not even the big traumatic acts. It's the everyday dehumanization that is invisible to those who don't face it, that leads to the development of PTSD in many instances. In a settler colonial society, like the United States, these sort of microaggressions are a constant. Each one individual aggression might not do significant harm, but the way that they blend together through constant everyday reiteration, often invisible to white people and settlers, creates a form of psychic exhaustion that can manifest

in a number of ways. And again, in our context, we see that colonial domination creates immense suffering and damage, just as Fanon noted in Algeria. Furthermore, beyond the repeated wearing down of these sort of microaggressions that happen continually and daily, we see intense, you know, acute brutality, which also occurs in the United States, especially from police enacted against colonized individuals here. Again, this is similar to what Fanon noted in his own context. Police in the U.S. are increasingly militarized. They are proving to be largely immune to real prosecution for their crimes against colonized people, and they're trained to enact violence against dissent.

Even the smallest forms of resistance can prove fatal with the police in a settler colonial contacts like the United States. So on the one hand, we can see this in violent police crackdowns of dissented protesting, but on a more daily level, we see this through police presence and communities of color, where police shootings are racially motivated and where police officers are overly represented and stationed in larger numbers. Police kill Native Americans and African Americans at staggeringly high rates, and psychotherapist Luana Gunn Williams argues that surviving, witnessing,

or just being in the basic presence of these forms of violence can lead to the development of mental trauma and related disorders. Colonial violence continues on around us to this day, and its targets who suffer the worst forms of trauma are largely from the New African Diaspora and indigenous communities in the U.S. Settler colonialism here through very similar, police forces enact the same kind of trauma that Phenon talks about. And at the same time, our capitalist society generalizes certain forms of mental distress to workers more broadly. A Rutgers

University study from 2012 noted that mental illness is highly elevated in mothers living in poverty, with generalized anxiety disorder being diagnosed at much higher rate than the general population. And when diving into the reasons for this, the study suggested that the best explanation for this was simply that being poor creates intense and unique stressors and that mothers are forced to bear the stress of their own livelihood, as well as that of their families. Being poor and having to support others on insufficient income creates mental illness in unique ways, and this suffering is ignored, not talked about, or when it's treated, it's always just to make you function in that society again. Never do we get to the underlying problem that the very structure

of our society itself produces these illnesses in the first place. Another study that, was published in 2015 and the peer-reviewed sociology of health and illness, found that deregulation and neoliberalism in the United States have actually created an increase in mental illnesses, especially for those who are working in the service sector. So this study states that, quote, the findings of the present study allude to a broader social problem that are the result of political economic arrangements of post-industrial capitalism in the developed world, characterized by deregulation, privatization, capital mobility, the dismantling of trade units

and other working class institutions, the withdrawal of the state from social provisions, and domestically the replacement of the manufacturing sector with the service sector, end quote. And honestly, I think this really shouldn't surprise any of us. If you're listening to this and you're a worker, you know the real kind of daily grind that's showing up to a job that doesn't pay you enough to live on, to be mistreated by customers who barely see you as a human, only to be chastised by a frustrated boss or manager, who, you know, constantly asks you to work harder and faster, that way, on you, it wears on you. I think many of us have felt the intense alienation and depression and

anxiety that can come from that. Day after day of this kind of service labor in particular is immensely damaging to the psyche. Is it any surprise then that this sort of treatment day in and day out leads to depression, anxiety disorders, and other forms of mental illness? This is the world that we're living in. This is our society and it produces its own unique pathologies as well that often we're not aware of or that we don't talk about frankly enough. So why does this matter? What does it mean for us today? On the one hand, it means that we need to understand capitalism holistically, not just as an abstract system and a set of economic exchanges, but as a social system, which really deeply impacts our own consciousness and subjectivities. And such a recognition

exists for brief moments in Marx's work, as I mentioned earlier, in concepts like alienation. But now we have begun to develop tools to understand mental health better and with more depth, and an increasing amount of data shows that capitalism is just detrimental and profoundly destructive to our mental well-being. Furthermore, this all means that we need to consider mental health in our organizing. A lot of organizer burnout that people experience isn't just from frustration with activism, but it's part of a larger problem of capitalist burnout. It is hard to work a job and deal with the constant daily stressors of that on top of organizational stressors as well. and we need to be aware that our comrades are bearing the same weight that we are

and make room for compassion and care for each other. We have to account for the psychological damage that capitalism and settler colonialism inflict upon our comrades and allies. I also, finally, and as a last thought, would, you know, want to suggest that we're in desperate need of radical psychologists of the type that Phenon was. You know, despite the massive amount of data on oppression and exploitation's relation to mental health issue, we hardly see radical psychologists trying to critique capitalism. While psychological investigation has the ability to provide, you know, a greater level of depth to

a communist criticism and analysis, too much of the everyday, on-the-ground clinical practice of psychiatry is about making us into productive citizens of a capitalist society, so that we're less disrupting and less likely to complain about the real intense forms of suffering that are derived from our exploitation. And so we need radicals with an understanding of psychology and even with a clinical practice in psychology to position themselves not as people who simply make us well by making it possible for us to bear the pain of capitalism, but who use their insights to help us better understand the horror of capitalism so that we might combat it. If we had that angle in our movements as well, we would be much more effective in helping

people understand the way that capitalism is related to these forms of suffering that really all workers are beginning to share in our deregulized and post-industrial society. And I think that it's this relationship between society and mental health that is very useful from Furfanon, and that can really help us to understand our own situation. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Incredibly well put. Two points that it made me think of while you were reading your part. One is my wife, she just got a new job. She works in the service industry, has for a long time.

She got a new job in the last couple of weeks, and she's really been liking it so far. But for the first time last night, she was forced to work in a really busy shift with the owner who she'd only like, you know, seen when she was getting interviewed, sitting across the, but never had to really work with the owner. And so it's very busy. My wife is still learning this job. Doesn't know where everything is, right? She's only been there for a week, maybe, you know, maybe five shifts, tops. The owner then comes back and starts, you know, pushing out food for the servers to take and just tears down and humiliates my wife three separate times last night on my wife not knowing where the ranch was or not knowing where the

napkin was. She would yell at her, screaming her to the point where, everybody else in the kitchen just put their heads down awkwardly and like stared into whatever they were doing so they didn't have to acknowledge the fact that this was happening and you know my wife was she's like she was like I'm so sorry you know I'll try to do that I'll go get that and she's like all night I just felt like going into a corner and fucking crying you're humiliated you you are like the way that she said it too wasn't like oh my god can you please get that it was like mocking her like you know would like laugh in her face when she said something wrong and like condescendingly walk slowly over to where the napkin was and pull them out one by one

and say, see, these are napkins. And, you know, my wife came home, and I was sitting on the couch. She came home, and she just told me this story for 30 minutes. Man, it fucking broke my heart. She's so hard to find a job that you can put up with. She finally does. And then she gets humiliated and, you know, to the point where other workers were coming up and apologizing to her on behalf of the owner.

But the owner has no accountability. If it was a coworker, you go above them and say, hey, you know, this coworker's treating me like shit. But when you're in a small business and you have that tyranny of a small business, owner, there's no recourse. And so my wife is a loving, wonderful human being a great mother, great comrade, a great friend. She does so much for other people. And just to think about her having to be dressed down and humiliated like that, it infuriates me. But that's common for people all across the whatever industry you work in, but specifically, of course, the service industry.

And the second thing that your wonderful points made me think about, you know, thinking about all the trauma, the generational trauma of colonized people here. the U.S. specifically, you know, how does our society deal with it? Well, it doesn't. If you go to any major city in this country, you will have blocks upon blocks full of homeless people. And if you care to stick around for more than one second, you will see that a huge chunk of those homeless people have untreated mental illness, untreated trauma, untreated psychological afflictions. And our society, instead of, you know, maybe expanding health care to include everybody, just pushes those people out onto the street. And when mental

health is addressed, it's never ever addressed as a product of social conditions, as you alluded to, Allison. It's always framed as an individual problem or a biological problem. And, you know, who benefits from this broad state of affair where you have mentally ill people being homeless and where you have mental health not being tied to social conditions where a bunch of people benefit, but specifically that jump to my mind, the pharmaceutical company, because if you can not tie mental illness to social conditions, but you can tie it simply to the individual's biology, then the treatment is always medicine. It's never an alteration in the material conditions which give rise of these problems in the first place. And by not treating the underlying

problem, the symptoms will continue reoccurring. And this is just big bucks for anybody selling medications at inflated prices. And then, of course, private prisons benefit enormously from mental health crisis and a homelessness crisis because anytime any of those people become too inconvenient for the society at large. Those people are arrested, pumped into the prison system where then they can be exploited for slave labor and these companies, these private prison companies, can then benefit.

So this is how American society deals with the trauma and depravity that it inflicts on other people. It still treats them like trash before, during, and after the dehumanizing process. And it just, yeah, it's just heartbreaking to think about it in those terms. Yeah, no, I mean, it's honestly absolutely horrific. And I think so much of what you're getting at of the individualized account of mental illness is like so dangerous, this idea that it's inside of you and that nothing outside needs to change.

I think, you know, just for me in the context of having a therapist for a time who was willing to recognize, like, some of this we can't totally fix because it's about being a worker. And the way that that treats you is so much more of what we need to see in practice with this. Because, yeah, I mean, there just is a truth to it that a lot of it comes from the society we live in, and that society has to change for the individual experience to change. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that wraps up our entire three-episode series on The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon. For me, one of the most important and best books that I've ever read, reading it so in-depth because I had to present it, really gave it a whole new

dimension. You know, you barely read books this intensely. It's been an incredibly gratifying and developmental process for me to engage with this writer and engage with these ideas. And going forward, it's never going to leave me. It's now, like, Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth has a huge part in my sort of politics and my understanding of these situations and decolonization and all of that.

So I just absolutely love this text. Alison, do you have any last words on the text before we end this series? Yeah, no, I mean, same thing. I had read parts of it before, but I never really dived so deep into it. I mean, we've talked about this some, But doing a podcast about specific text is a great way to read with a level of depth that is, you know, hard to do.

And I think this is a text that has impacted my view of Marxism. It has impacted my understanding of dialectics more broadly and deepened my understanding of decolonization. This is a text that, you know, we've said it before. There is no excuse if you're a revolutionary not to study. It is so fundamental in so many ways. And I really hope that if you've been listening along with us, you will also be reading along. Yeah, exactly. And that's what we wanted to do.

it can be a challenging book in a lot of ways. And so hopefully these three episodes, if you haven't read it yet, can act as a way to really guide you and reflect on what you're reading and help you understand it. And better understanding of this book will really pay dividends. Before we go, I just wanted to say that, you know, we've always talked about this trajectory that we're taking in the show where we're doing a lot of Leninist and Maoist sort of thinkers in that general realm.

And then we're going to go back to original marks. And the year is up. So that's what we're going to start doing in 2020. and the first text that we're going to dive into from Marx himself is the Civil War in France. We think that'll be a good bridge to connect what we've talked about in the Maoist and Leninist tradition so far with the earlier Marx and talk about a historical event that most of us are somewhat familiar with the Paris Commium. So that will be what we start our episodes out with in 2020 and we'll see where it goes from there.

Alison, would you like to give some thank yous and then send us out? Yeah, so just some thank you for our top. patrons whose support, as always, means the absolute world to us. It really helps us be able to devote the amount of time to this show that we devote to it. So your support is really, really deeply appreciated. So thank you to Chris, Seth Walker, Anton Peneckowick, let's see, Giordano, Giorina, Jacob Sparks, Jarlal Marks, and as always, Comrade Garlic Jr. Your support means quite a lot to us. We are thankful for your continued ongoing contribution, and it really helps. Exactly.

So here we are just going to read the concluding chapter directly from the Wretch of the Earth by France Fanon. The idea here is that the conclusion is only like three pages. It really puts an exclamation point on the entire book. So instead of trying to summarize it or talk about it, we're just going to read it. And then we'll end the episode and the three episode series on France Fanon with France's own words. Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night, which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened, and resolute.

We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time and useless laments or sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe, which never stops talking of man, yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. For centuries Europe has brought the progress. of other men to a halt and enslave them for its own purposes and glory. For centuries, it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the name of so-called spiritual adventure. Look at it now, teetering between atomic destruction and spiritual disintegration. And yet nobody can deny its achievements at home have not been crowned with success.

Europe has taken over leadership of the world with fervor, cynicism, and violence. And look how the shadow of its monuments spreads and multiplies. Every movement Europe makes Burst the boundaries of space and thought Europe has denied itself Not only humility and modesty But also solicitude and tenderness Its only show of miserliness

Has been toward man Only toward man has it shown itself To be niggardly and murderously Carnivorous So my brothers How could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow in that Europe's footsteps This Europe which never stopped talking of man

which never stopped proclaiming its sole concern was man, we know now the price of suffering humanity has paid for every one of its spiritual victories. Calm, comrades, the European game is finally over. We must look for something else. We can do anything today, provided we do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe. Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum

that it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves, as quickly as possible. It is all too true, however, that we need a model, schemas, and examples. For many of us, the European model is the most elating. But we have seen in the preceding pages how misleading such an imitation can be. European achievements, European technology, and European lifestyles must stop tempting us and leading us astray.

When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology, I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders. Man's condition, his projects and collaboration with others on tasks that strengthen man's totality are new issues which require genuine inspiration. Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving. Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of America has become a,

monster, where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions. Comrades, have we have nothing else to do but create a third Europe? The West saw itself on a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimized the slavery in which it held four-fifths of humanity. Yes, the European spirit is built on strange foundations. The whole of European thought developed in places that were increasingly arid and increasingly inaccessible. Consequently, it was natural that the chances of encountering man became less and less frequent. A permanent dialogue with self, an increasingly obnoxious narcissism, inevitably paved the way for a

virtual delirium, where intellectual thought turns into agony, since the reality of man as a living, working, self-made being, is replaced by words, an assemblage of words and the tensions generated by their meanings. There were Europeans, however, who urged the European workers to smash this narcissism and break with this denial of reality. Generally speaking, the European workers did not respond to the call. The fact was that the workers believed they too were part of the prodigious adventure of the European spirit. All the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time or another in European thought, but the Europeans did not act on the mission that was designated them,

and which consisted of virulently pondering these elements, modifying their configuration, their being, of changing them and finally taking the problem of man to an infinitely higher plane. Today we are witnessing a stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee the stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo.

Let us re-examine the question of man. Let us re-examine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified, and whose communications must be humanized again. Come, brothers, we have far too much work on our hands to revel in outmoded games.

Europe has done what it had to do, and all things considered, it has done a good job. Let us stop accusing it. But let us say to it firmly it must stop putting on such a show. We no longer have reason to fear it. Let us stop then envying it. The third world is today facing Europe

as one colossal mass whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe was incapable of finding the answers to. But what matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates, no, it is not a question of back to nature. It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhingent. The notion of catching him, the notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. But what we want is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times. It is not a question

of stringing the caravan out, where groups are spaced so far apart they cannot see the one in front, and men who no longer recognize each other, meet less and less and talk to each other less The third world must start over a new history of man, which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious thesis maintained by Europe, but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological dismembering of his functions, and the erosion of his unity, and in the context of the community, the fracture, the stratification, and the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally on the immense scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, exploitation, and above all, the bloodless genocide, whereby one and a half billion men have been written off. So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it. Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and generally obscene emulation. If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries to the Europeans.

They will do a better job than the best of us. But if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level, then the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate. We must be pioneers. If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe.

Moreover, if we want to respond to the expectations of the Europeans, we must not send them back a reflection, however ideal, of their society and their thought that periodically sickens even them. For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.