Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] On National Consciousness and National Culture: The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Originally aired on Nov 23, 2019 In our second installment of "The Wretched of the Earth" Alyson and Breht summarize, examine, and apply the lessons of the third and fourth chapters of Frantz Fanon's masterpiece work. 

Hey everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. Today is the second installment of us covering France Phan's The Wretched of the Earth. Last month we covered chapters one and two. Today we'll be covering chapters three, the trials and tribulations of national consciousness, and chapter four on national culture. And then, yeah, we'll finish this book out next month, finishing the last two chapters. And then entering into 2020, we can go back, as we've said from the beginning to, like, original marks and angles texts and see what tensions exist between the stuff we've read so far and exists back then and where they overlap, trajectories. I think it would just be a fascinating ride overall. But before we get into this episode, I want to give a shout out to Dave Jacobs is officially hired by Red Menace to do our video production.

So we have a brand new sort of aesthetic look, a brand new way of doing our videos that are on YouTube now. So if you haven't checked that out, the first one of Dave's like sort of production on our episodes was last month. So it's up. You can go check it out if you're listening to this right now. And then I just wanted to clarify something really quick because I saw this on Twitter. somebody was recommending our podcast Red Menace and somebody was responding wondering why a communist theory podcast

was talking about pooping joggers and it turns out that we have another podcast called The Red Menace and it's an Australian comedy podcast. They've also realized that there's two Red Menace's and had a funny little episode where they talked about it but we just wanted to clarify, like if you go and recommend our communist podcast, make sure you say

that there's an Australian comedy one with a the with a the in front of it just so people don't get too confused about what the hell is communism so yeah having those two things out of the way if you like what we do here at red menace you can learn more about us on revolutionary left radio dot com you can find our twitter and also our patreon last month the bonus episode we put out was me reading the entirety of sartras preface to wretched of the earth and then alison commenting on it and this month i think alison and i are both going to watch the Battle of Algiers, the famous film, and have a little film discussion. So, yeah, if you support us on Patreon, you will get a bonus monthly episode in addition to the

public episode that we release every month. And usually we try to keep it associated with the text. So obviously, with Rretched, we've done Sartre's Preface and Battle of Algiers, a movie that's very much in conjunction with this film. But some months we'll do like just a Q&A and stuff like that. So it's a little different every month. But thank you to everybody who does support us and hopefully some more of you will support us as well. Okay, with all of that intro out of the way, Alison, would you like to take us into part one, the summary? Definitely. So yeah, so for our first part, as always, we're going to be breaking down the chapters that we have here. So we have chapter three and chapter four of this text. Again, if you haven't listened to the first

episode, it's really worth going back and listening to that just because these chapters absolutely build on the ideas that Phenon develops in the first two chapters that we discussed previously. But assuming that you're all caught up and know everything about this, let's just go ahead and jump in. So first, we're talking about chapter three, which is titled The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness. And in this chapter, Phonon really continues to look at how the decolonial struggle plays out. And he provides some really interesting criticisms of nationalism, actually. While Fanon has defended nationalism as a progressive but sort of limited force in previous chapters, he now kind of turns to a deeper

assessment of those limits. What we start to get from Fanon in this chapter is sort of looking at what can go wrong in the project of nationalism and some of the things that can move in regressive directions as a result of it. So in this chapter, Fanon's concerned precisely with how the decolonial struggle leads to the emergence of nationhood, and he's giving special attention to the difficulties that are faced in this process. So Fanon begins very provocatively, honestly, by stating that, quote, instead of being the coordinated crystallization of the people's innermost aspirations. Instead of being the most tangible immediate product of the popular mobilization, national consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty, and fragile shell. So, Fanon here is

basically starting with the criticism of the way that a lot of the decolonial movements that he's talked about once they achieved independence ended up trying to establish a national consciousness, and the way that that consciousness didn't reflect the actual needs and feelings and desires of the masses. So Fanon explains that there's really certain limits that are created by the colonial system that weakens the possibility for a coherent national consciousness to develop. So he primarily attributes this on the one hand to the way that colonialism has sort of mutilated the colonized people and to the failures of the national bourgeoisie on the other hand. So let's elaborate a little bit here. On the first instance, we should remember that Fanon says

that there's a dehumanization to colonialism and that the decolonial process is in a sense the colonized subject reasserting their humanity. But that's a difficult thing to do, the sort of mutilation of colonialism that he talks about can hurt your ability to see yourself as human and then to establish a nation built on humanist principles. And so there's that difficulty. The other difficulty is with the national bourgeoisie, which is a term that you'll hear over and over again and basically refers to the bourgeois strata of the oppressed and colonized people themselves, as opposed to the colonizing bourgeoisie or the colonizer bourgeoisie, who are the foreign bourgeoisie who had previously occupied before the decolonial struggle.

So, according to Fanon, the national bourgeoisie are underdeveloped because they previously were crowded out by the colonial bourgeoisie. This means that in the national liberation context, the national bourgeoisie is not prepared to undertake the task of production that the new nation needs. The national bourgeoisie have the unique opportunity of playing a progressive role in this context if they would only side with the masses of the people and share their technical expertise with them, but Fanon warns that we almost never see the national bourgeoisie take this progressive role.

So because most of the industrial work and the running of the economy itself was done by a colonial bourgeoisie, there's a certain weakness to the new emergent national bourgeoisie that emerges here. So rather than adopting a progressive role, the national bourgeoisie finds itself incapable of directing an economy, which for so long had been managed by the colonizers. They demand nationalization of industry, but they have very little plans on how they'll oversee that industry. They end up setting themselves up as sort of middlemen between the new nation and between West companies, and they revel in the power that this gives them. Fanon writes that, quote, at the core of the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries, a hedonistic mentality

prevails, because on a psychological level, it identifies with the Western bourgeoisie, from which it has slurped every lesson. It mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decative aspects, without having accomplished the initial phase of exploring an invention that are the assets that the Western bourgeoisie, whatever the circumstances, end quote. So Fanon tells us that, you know, the national bourgeoisie end up appealing and catering to the colonial bourgeoisie. They build casinos and resorts in order to host Western businessmen who make the newly liberated nation into sort of a tourist location for their debauchery and mistreatment of the locals. And so you see a sort of betrayal of the nationalist movement and the decolonial struggle that happens

as the national bourgeoisie begin to ascend to power. While Fanon mostly focuses on the urban bourgeoisie, he also claims that the national landowners in the rural part of the country behave in a really similar manner. He writes that, quote, as soon as independence is proclaimed, the big farmers demand the nationalization of agricultural holdings. Through a number of schemes, they managed to lay hands on the farms once owned by the colonists, thereby reinforcing their control over the region. But they make no attempt to diversify, increase production, or integrate it into a genuinely national economy. End quote. So also with the large agrarian landowners, we see a similar sort of move to gain power in the wake of decolonization

that's not built around helping the people, but only helping their small, specific class in securing power in this newly liberated country. So after kind of going into these limits of the national bourgeoisie, Phelon really turns to this idea of African unity for a second, and the problems that began to develop with regionalism and tribalism in the decolonial context. He expresses concern that the conditions which follow independence do not really, in fact, unite Africans, but often lead to regional competition and bigotry, even though a lot of the decolonial struggles talked about pan-Africanism and a unity between the different African nations,

Vennon's really interested in the way that you started to see rivalry between these nations and between different ethnic groups and the post-colonial developments. So Fennon argues that while the national bourgeoisie is busy setting itself up as the middleman and competing with the colonial bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the artisans of this country end up finding themselves in competition with other Africans. He notes that in post-independence context, we've seen race riots against other Africans, and nationalism has sort of been transformed into bigotry and chauvinism in many instances. So in this way, national liberation can go from calls for African unity or Africanization of industry to a sort of bigoted regionalism. Vanon writes that, quote,

wherever the petty-mindedness of the national bourgeoisie and the haziness of its ideological positions have been incapable of enlightening the people or have been unable to put the people first, wherever the national bourgeoisie has proven to be incapable of expanding vision of the world, there's a return to tribalism, and we watch with a raging heart as ethnic tensions triumph. End quote. So even though there might be these incredible aspirations of unity within the decolonial movement, if the national bourgeoisie are able to control the country and seize power for themselves, the people don't have a guiding ideology of solidarity.

There is only a new sort of capitalist order imposed on them, and this creates sort of regionalisms and causes them to reemerge. So this, according to Fennon, leads to those from more resource-rich areas, beginning to see themselves as in competition with those from less resource-rich areas. And solidarity between these newly independent people is undermined. Rivalry really begins to rise up again. And this actually just allows the colonial countries to weaken the newly independent nations. Vanon writes that, quote, colonialism, which the birth of African unity had trembling at its foundations, is now back on its feet, and it now undertakes to break with the will to unify by taking advantage of every weak link

in the movement. Colonialism will attempt to rally to African people by uncovering the existence of spiritual rivalries. In Senegal, the magazine, Afrique Nouveau, secreats its weekly dose of hatred against Islam and Arabs. End quote. So again, what you see develop within this is that ethnic tensions don't just develop because of the failures of the national bourgeoisie, but because the old colonial order stokes those fires in order to weaken the newly independent nation. And by stoking these ethno-religious divides, the post-colonial nations are kept in underdevelopment, pitted against each other by their former colonial rulers when they could instead be unifying. These divisions ultimately are a result of the national bourgeoisie trying to set up control and create their own profit centers, according to Fanon.

True decolonial revolution, in contrast, will have to shirk off the national bourgeoisie and return to the masses in some way. Fanon writes that, quote, the peoples of Africa have recently discovered each other and in the name of the continent have decided to pressure the colonial regimes in a radical way. The national bourgeoisie, however, who in region after region are in a hurry to stash away a tidy sum for themselves and establish a national system of exploitation, multiply the obstacles for achieving this utopia. The national bourgeoisie perfectly clear on their objectives are determined to bar the way to this unity, this coordinated effort by 250 million people to triumph over stupidity, hunger, and inhumanity. This is why we must understand that African unity can only be achieved under pressure and through leadership by the people, i.e. with a total disregard for the interests of the bourgeoisie. End quote. And so here we see Fennon

begin to develop another vision, another way that decolonization can go if the national bourgeoisie are not allowed to establish control. This will be expanded upon further, but it's pushing back and fighting the bourgeoisie that really becomes necessary in Fanon's vision for the nationalist project to develop into a true national consciousness and not just chauvinism and bigotry. So Fanon also goes on to investigate the political incompetence of the national bourgeoisie and notes that their role tends to develop into an incompetent national dictatorship. Because the national bourgeoisie is still weak in the process of establishing its rule, it tends to establish particularly dictatorial states in which a national bourgeois party

is the only permitted political party. This leads to a particularly repressive state apparatus that secures bourgeois interests through brazen violence. This state, despite its repressive functions, remains particularly weak and precarious, however, because again, the national bourgeoisie do not have the capital that the colonizing bourgeoisie once had or the technical expertise in how to run a country. Fanon writes, quote, such a dictatorship cannot, in fact, go very far. It never stops secreting its own contradictions. Since the bourgeoisie does not have the economic means both to ensure its domination

and to hand out a few crumbs to the rest of the country, so busy in lining its own pockets not only as fast as it can, but also in the most vulgar fashion, the country seeks ever deeper into stagnation. And in order to hide the stagnation, to mask the regression, to reassure itself and give itself a cause to boost, the bourgeoisie has no other option but to erect imposing ed, in the capital and spend money on so-called prestige projects, end quote. And so these projects show the weakness of this emerging state and this emerging national bourgeoisie as they attempt to convince the masses that this project is good for them and should be a point of

national pride. So the bourgeoisie then usually abandoned the rural masses, whose militancy really made independence possible in the first place and began to focus on urban affairs. And this leads to sort of personality cults being built around specific party leaders, who despite his or her role as a genuine revolution with a genuine belief in liberation, ultimately is forced to represent the interests of the national bourgeoisie and the colonial bourgeoisie who do business with them. Speaking of the subjugation to the interests of the bourgeoisie, Vennon writes that, quote, the economic channel of the young state becomes

irreversibly mired in a neo-colonialist system. Once protected, the national economy is now literally state-controlled. The budget is funded by loans and donations. The head of states themselves or government delegations make quarterly visits to the former metropolis or elsewhere, fishing for capital, end quote. So the leader thus goes from playing a revolutionary role to a pacifying role, though he or she once drew on the militancy in the masses, they now must quell that same militancy in order to serve the new national bourgeoisie. And this all, of course, as we would expect, frustrates the militant forces who had once seen the party as a solution to their problems, and as an expression of their frustration, bureaucracy now replaces militancy,

and cadre are shifted to much more boring roles within the new state apparatus. The people who were once tasked with inciting revolt and waging armed opposition against the colonial powers are now asked to help pacify the masses and defend the national bourgeoisie's economic interests. And this frustration among the militant masses, along with the brazen manner in which the party and national bourgeoisie court and serve the interests of foreign companies, leads to an intense enmity among the masses. This puts the national bourgeoisie in an even more precarious situation, as hostile opposition begins to develop among the masses. This opposition, according to Fennon, prevents the possibility of a truly bourgeois era to develop in the post-colonial context. And thus he concludes

that, quote, the few remarks we have made concerning the national bourgeoisie lead us to an inevitable conclusion. In the underdeveloped countries, the bourgeoisie should not find conditions conductive to existence and fulfillment. In other words, the combined effort of the masses, regimented by a party, and on keenly conscious intellectuals, armed with revolutionary principles should bar the way to this useless and harmful bourgeoisie, end quote. And so having outlined the limits of bourgeois nationalism and having demonstrated the necessity for surpassing the interests of this class, Vennon turns to the need for actual revolutionary opposition to the bourgeoisie in the newly independent nations. So this opposition to the

national bourgeoisie is able to seize on the relative weakness of this class again because it lacks the money that it means and it does not have the training and running an economy that it needs. Because the national bourgeoisie don't have serious economic power, they're vulnerable to this opposition. In order to create a democratic alternative to the rule of the national bourgeoisie, the newly independent government must nationalize the tertiary industry, according to Fennon, which sort of corresponds to sort of the service industry that a lot of people would work in in this context. This nationalization cannot be based on dictatorial control by the state, but rather needs to establish democratic control over this part of the economy,

and integrating the masses themselves into its management. So this must occur alongside the politicization of the masses, of course. This can't just be a meaningless gesture of, oh, we're building a democratic economy, according to Fanon. It has to be grounded in actually moving with, educating, and politicizing the masses. Fanon writes that, quote, a government which declares its intent to politicize the people, expresses its desire to govern with the people and for the people.

It should not use language designed to camouflage a bourgeois leadership. So again, there must be a genuine class standing rooted in the masses, themselves. So it's not enough, however, to simply nationalize and democratize the economy. A newly independent country must develop a truly revolutionary party. Vanon writes that such a party is, quote, not an instrument in the hands of the government. Very much to the contrary, the party is an instrument in the hands of the people. It is the party which decides on policy enacted by the government, end quote. And thus, in a sense, Fanon is calling for the development, not of a Bouchon nationalist party, but the establishment and maintenance of a revolutionary party

that places the politics of the masses in command of the state itself. Such a party needs to extend far beyond the cities when members living among the most marginalized of the rural masses in order to keep the party grounded in the actual needs and ideas of the masses. The party must not be centralized away from them, but rather have democratic institutions across the nation. Vennon again writes that, quote, instead of delving into their diagrams and statistics,

indigenous servants and technicians should delve into the body of the population. They should not bristle every time there's mention of an assignment, to the interior. One should no longer hear young wives threaten to divorce their husbands if they cannot manage to avoid a rural posting. Hence, the party's political bureau should give priority to the disinherited regions. In an underdeveloped country, the party must be organized in such a way that is not content merely to stay in touch with the masses. The party must be the direct expression of the masses, end quote. So this grounding of the party in the masses requires being able and being willing to address the masses in simple language while simultaneously lifting the people

out of illiteracy and a lack of education. Then this allows the masses to be incorporated into the state and the party in a productive matter. This task can be undertaking concretely through the process of struggle itself. Phanon really explains how the conditions of colonialism created price increases that hurt a lot of the marginalized members of the masses who lived in rural areas during decolonization struggle. And Fanon says that this allowed militants to use the real experience of the masses. This price increases and the hoarding of goods by certain business owners, it allowed them to understand economic and political concepts in a concrete way.

He writes that, quote, on the basis of this experience, it was explained to the people how the laws of economics functioned, taking concrete examples. The accumulation of capital turned from a theory into a very real and topical mode of behavior. The people understood how one can get rich from a business and expand it. It was only then that the peasants recounted how their grocer lent them money at eucerous rates. Others recalled how he had driven them from their land and how they had gone

from being landowners to laborers. The more people understand, the more vigilant they become. The more they realize, in fact, that everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their solidarity, in recognizing the interests and identification of the enemy. End quote. So in On Violence, the first chapter of this book, Phelon told us that this process of revolutionary struggle

transforms the masses into new kinds of humans, and in these experiences, we really see that happening. The masses learned lessons that could only be learned through struggle, not through reading books, but through actually engaging in the revolutionary process of overthrowing a colonial oppressor. The humanization of the workers and peasants occurs through this process, and the education that the party brings to the masses is not learned in abstraction, but can be taught only through the process of struggle. And so, Phelon concludes this chapter by insisting that the truly revolutionary party and government must take on a truly national

character by rejecting tribalism and bigotry that comes from national bourgeois, rule. This government must ground itself in the masses of the country, wherever they are found, not only in the cities, and it must express the will of the broad masses, not of the greedy elites of the national bourgeois Z. And so with all that in mind, he very beautifully ends by writing, quote, a bourgeois leadership of the underdeveloped countries confines the national consciousness to a sterile formalism. Only the massive commitment by men and women to judicious and productive tasks gives them the form and substance to consciousness. It is then that flags and government building cease to be symbols of the nation.

The nation deserts the false glitter of the capital and takes refuge in the interior where it receives life and energy. The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people. It is the enlightened and coherent praxis of men and women. The collective forging of a destiny implies undertaking responsibility on a truly historic scale. Otherwise, there's anarchy, repression, the emergence of tribalized parties and federalism. etc. If the national government wants to be national, it must govern by the people and for the people, for the disinherited, and by the disinherited. No leader, whatever his worth, can replace the will of the people and the national government before concerning itself with international

prestige, must first restore dignity to all citizens, furnish their minds, fill their eyes with human things, and develop a human landscape for the sake of enlightened and sovereign inhabitants. And so we end this chapter with a call to build a truly revolutionary nationalist project, not one that immediately cedes control to the national bourgeoisie, but one that builds a party grounded in the actual struggles and meaningful, lived life of the masses. And that's how Fanon says you could get a true and not artificial national consciousness. All right. Wonderful. Okay, so moving on to chapter four entitled On National Culture.

Now, before I begin this chapter, I do want to give an overview, of what Fanon is doing in this chapter in order to help you, our listeners, follow along a bit better. So the overall thrust of this chapter is Fanon charting out the evolution of the development of a national culture, something he sees as essential to nationhood overall. And since he is tracing the development of culture, his center of focus will be on the colonized intellectual, and then toward the end of the chapter, he expands his focus to include artists as well, poets, painters, writers, jazz musicians, etc. The point is to show how the intellectual and the art artist emerge alongside the development of a national culture, as well as plenty of common

pitfalls and dead ends that the artist, the intellectual, and the culture as a whole can possibly face throughout its development. I also want to point out here that Phenon's style of interrogation and explication in this chapter, and indeed throughout the entire book, is a dialectical interplay between the objective and the subjective, between the external development of colonialism and decolonialism, as well as the internal development of colonialism and decolonialism of the psychological. One way to think about what Fanon is doing in this text is combining Marxist historical materialism with Freudian psychoanalysis and moving back and forth between the two so frequently and seamlessly that what emerges is, in my opinion, a more holistic

understanding of the entire situation. This dialectical method avoids the errors of both vulgar empiricism, which attempts to suppress the individual subjectivity out of the equation and idealism, which seeks to focus on the mind to the exclusion of the objective material conditions in which that mind is embedded. And by so doing, I think Fanon gives rise to a very potent and well-rounded analysis that one rarely finds in other works. And for my part, I think Marxists of all stripes can learn from this dialectical methodology. By incorporating and exploring the subjectivity of people going through a certain historical development alongside a properly historical materialist account of that development, we come to a more holistic

understanding, and we can then create narratives that genuinely speak to the reality of people's internal lives. Lastly, it's worth pointing out that Fanon wrote this book in 1961, the same year that he died from cancer. Fanon knew that he was dying while he was writing this book, so it really was his last chance to tie his life's work together in a fiery and comprehensive call to revolution. I think it's a properly Phononian move to at least briefly consider the psychological mindset of our author while we worked through his

masterpiece. He was a dead man and he knew it. And that lent not only a sense of urgency to this text, but also an utterly unapologetic and uncompromising tone to the work overall. He doesn't mince words. The entire point of this book is to equip all colonized people with a deeper understanding of their

situation, which was also his situation as a colonized subject himself, so that they could more effectively unleash revolutionary violence, liberate themselves from colonial oppression, and build a sort of humanist socialism. In any case, with that overview of the chapter out of the way, let's dive into the details. So Fanon starts off this chapter with one of my favorite quotes from him. He says, quote, each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it in relative obscurity, end quote. Applying this to the struggles against colonialism historically, he argues that

previous generations, though they may have ultimately failed to topple colonialism in their time, fought with the weapons and the understanding that they had at that time, and by so doing helped pave the way for the current struggles taking place. With this in mind, he cautions his colonized comrades from judging too harshly the failed efforts of their ancestors. With a properly Marxist lens, he argues that they existed in a fundamentally different time and in fundamentally different conditions. As a quick aside, Fanon, as I said, wrote this book in 1961, and that was in the wake of

the devastation of World War II. So in the wake of the devastation of World War II, the major European colonial powers were significantly weakened in every imaginable way, and thus their control over the vast territories that they had colonized over the preceding centuries was deeply compromised, and this, in part, help lead to an unprecedented explosion

of decolonial and national liberation movements across the global south. So that's just a little historical aside, but back to the text. Fanon reminds his colonized comrades that, quote, more than one colonized subject had to say, we've had enough. more than one tribe had to rebel more than one peasant revolt had to be crushed more than one demonstration had to be violently put down in order for us today to stand firm certain of our victory

for those of us who are determined to break the back of colonialism our historic mission is to authorize every revolt every desperate act and every attack aborted or drowned in blood end quote. Now after that, Fanon turns to the class of colonized intellectuals. At this period, colonialism is still occurring, and the colonized intellectual is going about the work of trying to parse out from history a national culture separate from and prior to colonialism's rule. In the face of colonialism's condescending and ever-present claim that they are saving the native people from the savagery and barbarity of their past, the colonized intellectual sets out to debunk this lie and succeeds. Even academics and specialists from the colonizing countries widely accept the

debunking of this overall lie. Fanon points out that for several decades prior to his writing the book, European researchers have rehabilitated African, Mexican, and Peruvian civilizations. But also notes that Europeans do not have to do this work and as such are often surprised at the passion with which the colonized intellectual seeks to defend the history of their culture. Since the legitimacy of French or German culture is taken for granted and goes unchallenged. Fanon then says, quote, I concede the fact that the actual existence of an Aztec civilization has done little to change the diet of today's Mexican peasant. I concede that whatever proof there is of a once mighty Songhai civilization, it does not change the fact that the Songhai

today are undernourished, illiterate, abandoned to the skies and water with a blank mind and glazed eyes. But, as we have said on several occasions, this passionate quest for a national culture prior to the colonial era can be justified by the colonized intellectual shared interest in stepping back and taking a hard look at the Western culture in which they risk becoming ensnared. Fully aware that they are in the process of losing themselves and consequently of being lost to their people, these men and women work away with raging heart and furious mind to renew contact with their people's oldest inner essence, the farthest removed from colonial times.

End quote. And here Fanon points out an essential feature of colonial domination. Namely, that it does not just impose itself on the colonized country's present and future, but importantly, it's past as well, distorting, disfiguring, and destroying it. By demeaning and brutalizing the people's history,

by reducing them to subhuman savagery before the enlightened colonizers arrived, it attempts to beat into the heads of the colonized subjects that they would devolve back into barbarism if the colonialist regime were to up and leave the population to its own devices. Fanon says, quote, at the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind-hearted mother who protects her from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free reign

to its bestial instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune, end quote. And here arises a dialectic. The colonialist distorts and ravages the indigenous people's history, and the colonized intellectual seeks to counter that distortion by not only responding with the truth of his or her people's history, but also by throwing themselves into that pre-colonial history in an attempt to find and merge with that lost past. But this journey, this psychological journey into a pre-colonial history, Fanon tells us, is not the journey into a specific national culture or specific national

history, but rather a continental one and a broadly conceived African one. This line of argumentation is crucial here, because what Fanon argues is that by ignoring a national culture in favor of a broad, continental-wide African culture, the colonized intellectual plays on the field built by colonialism. And this is really important to understand. European colonialism, in its infinite narcissism and racism, does not see an Angolan people, nor Nigerian people, nor a Kenyan people, nor an Algerian people. It sees only a black African people.

Fanon says it sees only N-words, and colonialism's condemnation is thus continental in scale. And the colonized intellectuals attempt to rehabilitate her people and herself obeys the same rules of logic. Colonialism reduces the differences between black peoples and their histories into one homogenous African whole, and therefore lays down a theoretical terrain that colonized intellectuals in their attempt to fight back against their oppression tend to pick up and run with. And as Fanon argues, she is now expected to demonstrate the existence of a quote unquote Negro culture or a black culture, a pan-Africanist culture. He adds, quote, colonialism did not think it worth its while denying one national culture after the other. consequently the colonized response was immediately continental in scope end quote to help understand this point let's flip it around and create an analogy the logic of this is analogous to arguing that there is not a

german culture a french culture or a russian culture but simply a quote unquote white culture now clearly that never happens given the european hegemony over history and education we who live in colonial countries are taught the differences and nuances between these different countries and we would rightfully think it downright silly to argue that some white Silicon Valley Techbro and San Francisco has the same history and culture as a Lithuanian taxi driver or a Greek fisherman. In philosophy, for example, we are taught about French critical theory and German idealism and American pragmatism, and the distinctions between those cultures and histories are stark and obvious. Yet when it comes to Africa, these fine-grained distinctions are thrown out in favor of an absurdly reductionist, quote-unquote, African culture and history. This is made even more absurd when we reflect on the fact that

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa first and foremost, making African history more expansive temporally than European history, and that the continent of Africa itself is so geographically large that you could fit the entire continental United States, all of Western Europe, and the entire country of China, inside the borders of the African content, with room to spare. Such a large continent in both space and time makes a mockery. of any attempt to homogenize its history and cultures. As a quick aside, it's somewhat amusing to reflect on the fact that white nationalist dipshits make a similar hyper-reductionist error when they talk about, quote-unquote, Western civilization,

as if it's even a coherent concept, much less a particular culture with a particular history that's fundamentally separate from the rest of the world. Both the concepts of white Western civilization and the colonialist concept of, quote-unquote, African culture, not only make this reductionist error, but also help reify the social category of race as fundamentally biological. After all, if race is a real biological category as opposed to merely a social construct forged largely by colonialist powers as they sought to justify their pillaging of the global South, then why not understand history by lumping different races into one big group with one big

culture, right? But I digress. The point here is that the attempt on the part of the colonized intellectual to defend her people and her history often first takes the form of accepting this continental frame handed down by colonialism. Fanon is warning against falling into this trap, while also exploring how it manifests. And one way that this manifested is through the quote-unquote negritude movement. Now this was a literary movement throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, which sought to counter the claims of colonial white supremacy by asserting an African culture in

juxtaposition to a European one. In simplified terms, it was a response to the inherent anti-blackness of colonialism by asserting a pan-African blackness that stood up for itself and argued for the inherent dignity, beauty, and goodness of all black people. This is where Fanon says that the concept of the black world came into being, as black voices from America and the broader diaspora took up the call as well. The effect of this was to claim common ties between all black people around the world and to assert identical lines of thought. Now, it's important here to remember that while Fanon is showing the inherent shortcomings of this approach, he's not dismissing or downplaying its importance, he says it's a very logical response to colonialism and is an attempt

to build solidarity between black people who, wherever they are in the world, face a brutal and all-encompassing anti-blackness. But remember, Fanon is charting out and arguing for the necessity of a national culture, which will require the jettisoning, not of black solidarity, but of the concept of a homogenized black culture and history. The reason this is a problem is, in addition to the reason stated above regarding colonial racism and the continentalist logic, is that it works against the development of a truly national culture, which Fanon sees as the prerequisite to a true and healthy internationalism and the form that self-determination will take in these colonial struggles. Fanon sums it up by saying, quote, this historical obligation to racialize their

claims, to emphasize an African culture rather than a national culture, leads the African intellectuals into a dead end, end quote. And talking about black people in the United States, the United States, which Fanon pejoratively referred to throughout his life as that country of lynchers, Fanon says, quote, the blacks who lived in the United States, central and Latin America, in fact, needed a cultural matrix to cling to. The problem they were faced with was not basically any different from that of the Africans. The whites in America had not behaved any differently to them than the white colonizers had to Africans. We have seen how the whites were used to putting all Negroes in the basket. But gradually, the black Americans realized that their existential problems differed from those faced by the Africans. The only common denominator between the blacks from Chicago and the Nigerians and the Tanzanians was that they all define themselves in relation to the whites. But once the initial comparisons had been made and subjective feelings had settled down, the black Americans realized that the objective problems were fundamentally different.

End quote. So he goes on to show how these limits hit by the negritude movement, were a result of the fact that, according to Fanon, the thinkers who took part in it came to realize that every culture is first and foremost a national culture, and that the historical and contemporary issues faced by, for example, black people in America were fundamentally different than the issues faced by, say, black people in Algeria, which were different than the issues faced by black people in the Congo, etc. At the end of the day, Fanon argues that the urge on behalf of the colonized intellectual to return to his people's past is in fact a quote-unquote burning desperate return to anything.

And here Fanon seamlessly moves from the broader external realities and global movements of black people back into the internal psyche of the colonized intellectual. On an individual and psychological level, the colonized intellectual or artist tends to follow a general three-part pattern in the face of colonialism's cultural chauvinism. The first phase, as Fanon lays out, is when the intellectual or artist proves that they have assimilated the colonizer's culture. They produce works that correspond to those of their counterparts in Europe, showing that they are able to rise to the level of so-called European culture,

and thus one sees the art of Europe being replicated by the colonized. In the second phase, the colonized writer or artist has their conviction shaken and seeks to reject European models of literature and art by immersing themselves in their people's pre-colonial history. In their disavowal of colonial chauvinism, they seek to reintegrate themselves and their work in their own people's history. This takes many forms, including and especially the extolling of every last particular of their people's past. The colonized intellectual in this phase may adorn themselves in traditional

fashions from the past. They may seek to speak the language of their people instead of the colonizers' language, etc. The art that this phase produces is more authentic than in phase one, but it relies on a petrified and dead past. It looks backwards and is thus limited. Fanon says, quote, The culture with which the intellectual is preoccupied is very often nothing but an inventory of particularisms. Seeking to cling close to the people, he clings merely to a visible veneer.

The intellectual lets himself be mesmerized by these mummified fragments which, now consolidated, signify only negation, obsolescence, and fabrication. End quote. In other words, culture is not to be found in a petrified past, but in the churning of the present struggle for liberation. In the third and final stage, Fanon says that it is, quote, a combat stage where the colonized

writer, after having tried to lose himself among the people, with the people, will rouse the people. Instead of letting the people's lethargy prevail, he turns into a galvanizer of the people. Combat literature, revolutionary literature, national literature emerges, end quote. This phase can be understood as a sort of dialectical correction to the two errors made in the previous stages, namely the phases of assimilation and the phase of desperately returning to the past. The writer urges his people to action, and this is important, begins to speak to his people instead of for them to the colonizer. This is what Phelan refers to as a literature of combat.

What this final stage amounts to for the writer, intellectual, and artist, is the realization that the existence of a nation is not proven by the existence of a past culture, but rather in the present struggle of the colonized masses against the forces of occupations. occupation. Colonialism will never be put to shame, Fanon says, by exhibiting past cultural treasures under its nose. National culture, in other words, is not the revival of past customs and traditions, but is actively forged and created through the present process of a people liberating themselves from occupation and domination. Fanon says, quote, it is not enough to reunite with the people in a past where they no longer exist. We must rather reunite with them in their

recent counter move, which will suddenly call everything into question. We must focus on that zone of hidden fluctuation where the people can be found. For let there be no mistake, it is here that their souls are crystallized and their perception and respiration transfigured, end quote. When the colonized intellectual rights for his people, Fanon argues, he must use the past with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring the people into action and of fostering hope. But Fanon says, in order to secure hope, in order to give its substance, the writer must take part in the action itself and commit himself body and soul to the national strump. It is interesting to note here that this conception of combat literature, of taking part in the struggle for liberation, and of speaking

to one's own people in order to spur them into action and give them hope, is precisely what Fanon is doing in this book. The Wretched of the Earth, then, is a concrete example of exactly this sort of combat literature. Fanon himself was not merely a writer, but he's also an organizer and a fighter with the Algerian National Liberation Front. This book itself emerged, as Sartre even said, from action and process. Fanon is not only telling his people about this stuff, he is actively showing them how to do it. I think this fact must be internalized if one wants to fully understand the importance and beauty of this work. In the last few pages of the chapter, Fanon asserts that there remains one fundamental question still to be answered, and that is this. What is the relationship

between the struggle, the political or armed conflict, and culture? Is culture put on hold during the liberation struggle, or is the liberation struggle a cultural phenomenon in and of itself? To this question, Fanon answers without hesitation. Quote, we believe the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists, end quote. So not only is National Liberation a cultural phenomenon in and of itself, but according to Fanon, it is the greatest manifestation of culture. In fact, the development of the National Liberation struggle

opens up and expands the number of directions that culture can then go and hints at new cultural possibilities. So the fight for liberation simultaneously is the forging of a national culture, as well as the opening up for new forms of culture, to emerge and then blossom. Phelan goes on to say that after the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized. Dialectically speaking, the successful national liberation struggle resolves the contradiction between the colonizer and the colonized, and by so doing, eradicates those very categories.

Moreover, the dialectic between a national culture and a broad continental African culture is actually also resolved, for as Fanon puts it, quote, birth of national consciousness in Africa strictly correlates with an African consciousness. The responsibility of the African towards his national culture is also a responsibility toward, quote-unquote, black African culture, because any independent nation in an Africa where colonialism still lingers is a nation surrounded, vulnerable, and in permanent danger, end quote. And as we wrap up chapter four of this book, it becomes clear what Fanon's political vision is for these new nations, and that is a sort of humanist socialism, one that, one

grounded by its own national consciousness and freed from the shackles of colonialist occupation and with a new blossoming national culture can properly enter the stage of history via its own self-determination. And though it may sound paradoxical at first, Fennon ends this chapter by arguing that, quote, it is at the heart of national consciousness, which is importantly not the same thing as nationalism, that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives. And this dual emergence, in fact, is the unique focus of all cultures. culture. End quote. And that is how Fanon ends chapter four of the book. So after doing chapters three and four, summarizing them, we're now ready to move into the discussion question part of our

episode. I'll ask the first question if that's okay with you, Allison. Sounds good. All right. So my question to you is many left communists and anarchists claim Fanon as an anti-nationalist figure. And it's easy to see how Fanon might be read as an anti-nationalist here. Is this, however, a correct reading in your opinion? So yeah, this is where Fanon is interesting, and I think we get a chance to talk about how dialectical he is in sort of his thinking, and how he probably dodges easy categorization as a nationalist or an anti-nationalist. So I think one of the interesting things about Fanon's legacy is that when it comes to contemporary debates of nationalism, you really do see him cited by both sides, people who don't believe in nationalism or national liberation projects

from a Marxist perspective will often cite Fanon's criticisms of nationalism, which again, we've talked about. There are strong criticisms he makes of that. And then people who want to argue for the centrality of national liberation and nationalism in a contemporary political context will also cite the same exact book in the moments where Fanon talks about the more positive components and progressive aspects of nationalism. So we're left then asking, is Fanon a nationalist? And that's a really difficult question to answer. So for one, I think that Fennon denies a sort of binary between nationalism or anti-nationalism. Just blanket nationalism or blanket anti-nationalism both don't really fit within the framework

that he lays out. Because again, Fennon looks at the limits of nationalist movements as they play out, especially bourgeois nationalism, and the way that he says that a bourgeois nationalist party cannot get you to real decolonization. But on the other hand, the solution to that isn't to reject the revitalization of a national conscious or a national culture that is shaped through struggle, it's rather to understand the limits of bourgeois nationalism and the need for a nationalism which can turn into an internationalism. So again, in the fourth chapter of this text, you really see this a lot,

where this idea that national culture will eventually yield to an international culture. And Fanon seems to consistently insist that national liberation is necessary as part of a broader internationalist movement. You see this throughout all of these chapters. So in a sense, Fanon is both endorsing nationalism critically and endorsing internationalism. There's a dialectical relationship between these two things that ultimately will lead to an internationalist politics someday, but national liberation is a necessary prerequisite for that. And in that sense, Fanon really is operating within sort of the Marxist view of nationalism and national liberation, as Lenin and Stalin both laid out.

The need for national liberation is a prerequisite for the overthrow of capitalism in many ways. And in order to really combat imperialism and colonialism, you need to give nations the right to secede and defend their status as an independent nation against colonizers. So there's a lot that's jiving here with what we've previously seen from Marx-Lenin and Stalin. But there's an extra level of sort of depth that we see here that doesn't come up so much as when we discussed nationalism in the context of the foundations of Leninism, for example, where Fennon is now starting to pick apart the different forms that nationalism can take. and he really is criticizing very strongly this idea that the national bourgeoisie is a particularly

progressive force and should be given control in a national liberation context. Now, admittedly, this is a controversial topic, and Marxist split on how progressive the role of the national bourgeoisie can be, but Fanon really is pushing this line that says that they need to be overcome. So there's a form of nationalism that really is precluded by Fanon's analysis, But it's replaced with an actual sort of revolutionary nationalism, where in the interest of the peasants and the masses are centered, not the national bourgeoisie, who can't, in fact, speak for the nation. And in fact, in Fanon's criticism of the national bourgeoisie and their sort of iteration of nationalism, he argues not only that it has negative political projects, but that it creates a fake national consciousness, that it creates an artificial national consciousness that can't actually be truly grounded in the life of the nation. And so in that, there's not a rejection of nationalism on the whole. There's sort of a critique of false nationalism, which moves away from the masses and precludes internationalism.

And here we see a very dialectical view of this issue. There are multiple parties at play with contradictions between them, and Fanon is trying to navigate it to understand what higher synthesized form can come out of that. And that is a revolutionary nationalism that gives way to an internationalism. So is Fanon a nationalist or an anti-nationalist, the question kind of misses the point. He's criticizing both of those positions to various degrees, and he is arguing that nationalism can play a progressive role, but we have to understand the drawbacks and the setbacks that it can develop

if we don't adequately center the masses in our nationalist movements. Fascinating. Yeah, that really lined up with my take on it as well, and I think that the dialectic approach really does make sense of it, but I was really excited to hear your answer on that to see how well it lined up, and that was really well said, perfectly said. I can't really add anything to that I agree. But let's go ahead and move from one controversy to a number, to another. So you want to ask the next question? Sure. So yeah, the next question, this is one I just saw

a lot of people arguing about, actually. So it's very timely. Just quite simply, was Fanon a Marxist? Okay. So this is obviously very contested area. It's not as straightforward as some may think. I'll explain that in a second. But to answer the question straightforwardly, and I'm not just saying this as a Marxist, right? I'll defend this throughout this answer. But yes, I would argue that Fanon is fundamentally a Marxist, and as many good Marxists often do, Fanon both challenges the tradition and expands it. In other words, I think it's fair to think of him as a figure of continuity and rupture within the Marxist tradition. One way he challenges and updates Marxism is to be found in the following quote. Fanon says, quote, in the colonies, the economic infrastructure is also

a superstructure. The cause is effect. You are rich because you are white. You are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue, end quote. So, I mean, right there, he's saying a lot. Part of what he's saying is he's doing a Marxist analysis, right? He's like, yes, the Marxist analysis should be stretched a bit, but this is fundamentally Marxist sort of paradigm that I'm using. And here, Fanon is also arguing that, well, he's arguing that in the colonial context specifically, racial inequality is not the super structural product of economic inequality, as the Orthodox Marxist position would argue, but rather the fundamental division is racial. The division the colonist makes between colonized

and colonizer. Economic inequality is based on racial inequality, not the other way around. Here, I think Fanon is correct. He's applying Marxist analysis really creatively and interestingly to the colonial context, and I think he gets it right. If you think through, I mean, just the very notions of whiteness are really forged in this colonial expedition out of Europe to colonize other areas. And in order to, in part, justify that colonial plundering and occupation and domination and violence, there becomes a sort of racial hierarchy that's constructed in order to justify treating people lower on that hierarchy as subhuman. So I just think that's an important thing to think about. And I like how Fanon sort of puts that on its head a little bit,

the more orthodox Marxist take on its head a bit. But as actually a quick aside, it's interesting to reflect on Fanon's quote there when he says you are rich because you're white and you are white because you are rich because in relation to one of actually Joe Biden's recent Freudian slips Joe Biden said in like a recent thing he said poor kids are just as bright as white kids if anybody remembers that and I think this is funny because Joe actually tells on himself a lot through Freudian slips that he slipped up and called Bernie

Mr. President once he slipped up and called Cory Booker Obama And last debate, he Freudian slipped and he said, I will eliminate the capital gains tax. I mean, I will double the capital gains tax. And if we take this idea of Freudian slips seriously, then it's revealing because the Freudian slip says something slips out that is actually meant, is actually like is what the person really means, but the person trying to suppress that and give some other answer. So, you know, those just really shows where like just intrinsic racism of Joe Biden and just interesting to think about how Freudian slips reveal that.

but anyways, I just encourage listeners to keep an ear out for more of them in the next debate because they're quite revealing and Joe Biden never stops doing it. So, anyways, back to the main point. So if we think of Lenin, and this is sort of what I was thinking of, if we think of Lenin as like the key Marxist thinker in the era of imperialism, I think it's roughly analogous to say that Fanon is the key Marxist thinker in the era of decolonization. Now, of course, colonialism is a form of imperialism.

So it's safe to say Fanon is still writing firmly within the quote-unquote high stage of capitalism, namely the imperialist stage, as opposed to implying this represents a new stage of capitalism, which it definitely does not. But unlike Lenin, Fanon is bringing more traditions to the table and mixing them with Marxism, which is to say Fanon is not merely a Marxist. The two big traditions he combines with Marxism in this text are Sartrean existentialism and Freudian psychoanalysis. I think Freudian psychoanalysis can be brought into Marxism with a bit more ease than existentialism can for various reasons, which obviously escape the confines of this question. but it is important to note that Sartre did write a critique of Marxism from a Marxist position

and an existentialist one, if I understand correctly, entitled Critique of Dialectical Reason, where he attempts to develop an existentialist Marxism and resolve or explore the tensions between the two traditions. That text was, as far as I can tell, very influential for Fennon. I have not read that yet, and I was even like, I'll be like, damn, that's a good book to read in the future because I'm just interested in what Sart had to critique about dialectical reasoning. But in any case, yes, I think Fanon is a Marxist, and some things that he does that are very Marxist is that he employs a historical materialist analysis. He analyzes the colonial situation as one shaped fundamentally by capitalist class society. He upholds a truly revolutionary strategy,

and he employs dialectics expertly, and ultimately his goal is socialism. So in these fundamental ways, I think you can definitely call Fanon a Marxist and working within the Marxist tradition. simultaneously challenging it and expanding it. But let's get into why this claim might be controversial in some quarters. Because Fanon has been credited with creating post-colonial studies as an academic field with this book, and as such he has often been taken up by many liberal academics in this context as fundamentally a theorist of identity and not primarily as a Marxist revolutionary. So if we entertain the idea for a moment that he was not a Marxist, then what was he exactly?

Well, it's crystal clear to me that Fanon was definitely not a liberal. His criticisms of European colonialism cut to the core of liberal ideology and values, and his rejection of free market capitalism is a rejection of core tenets of liberal philosophy. He certainly was not a reactionary of any type, which is self-evident, and he was also not an anarchist by any stretch of the imagination. His ideas surrounding national consciousness and the state alone preclude him from being taken up as an anarchist thinker. And he also uses the term anarchic in this text as a pejorative against spontaneity,

in the same way, interestingly, that Fred Hampton would often use the term anarchism or anarchistic in the pejorative sense as well. So with all of these other options off the table, I find it hard to imagine what else Fennon could be called politically, if not a Marxist. One reason for the confusion, though, I think, is that in academia, Fanon is often lumped in with Edward Said, the author of Orientalism. And it's not hard to see how they both fit into a post-colonial category, but their politics were actually pretty different. I've not read Orientalism yet, which I plan on correcting at some point soon, but I have read Said's book about intellectuals, and in that book at least, it's quite clear that Saeed is not only not a Marxist, but at times comes off as a rather rabid anti-Marxist critic, at least in the book of his that I did read.

So while Saeed may comfortably be called a left liberal, Fanon cannot. At the end of the day, it really boils down to what you think qualifies someone to be called a Marxist. If it's the embrace of the Marxist critique of capitalism and the use of the Marxist to historical materialist methodology is central to his analysis, and especially if we consider Jean-Paul Sartre to be a Marxist, then of course Fanon is a Marxist. But if by Marxist, we mean some set of dogmas or orthodox doctrine, if in other words we see Marxism not as a living and breathing open-ended method, but as a rigid set of things Marx himself said in thought, which is an error many liberals

often make, then sure, you can deny that Fanon is a Marxist. But I think it's clear what the better approach here is. It is true that Fanon's work drew criticism. from more orthodox Marxist of his time, specifically for his de-emphasis on the middle-class industrial proletariat in favor of the lump in proletarian peasant masses as the primary revolutionary force. But if this excludes him from the realm of Marxism, it also excludes Mao.

So, you know, that's laughable. And on top of all of that, throw in the fact that the famous sort of left liberal theorist, Hannah Arendt, condemned Phenon and Sartre for their position on revolutionary political violence. They argued that it wasn't only necessary to like buck off the, the yoke of oppression, but they're arguing that it's fundamentally legitimate in its own right and actually existentially therapeutic and dignified, which is interesting. So the idea that Fanon

was more of a liberal than a Marxist, once you think about this Hannah Arendt critique of him, then that recedes even farther into the realm of absurdity. So, you know, in conclusion, while he challenges certain Marxist orthodoxies, combines a Marxist analysis with existential and psychoanalytic analyses, and shares a certain critique of Marxism with Sartra, he is still firmly within the Marxist tradition, in my opinion. And in fact, I would even argue one of its most important thinkers. So that's my take. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think I agree very broadly with a lot of what you said. I mean, I was thinking about this question as I was reading the chapter that I covered because, like, that whole chapter is articulated as class struggle in a very serious sense. It is the need to combat the national bourgeois Z. And like, he's using a dialectical materialist analysis there. He's looking at how allowing the solidific. in the national bourgeoisie as a class, produces a certain kind of consciousness, produces a certain kind of state, produces a certain kind of culture. And so really there is

kind of this underlying, not necessarily explicitly stated, but theory of a superstructure that emerges from that class basis in a post-colonial context. And that just to me seems obviously to be an instance of dialectical materialism. Obviously, there's some more difficulties that can emerge with it. I think that probably like you brought up, the one point that people would contest is sort of the de-emphasizing of the proletariat as the revolutionary class. You don't really get the proletariat as the central revolutionary subject in Fanon. And again, you know, that has happened in other Marxist movements as well. Although I would suggest that more contemporary Maoist movements still, while seeing the

Lumpin and the peasants as potentially revolutionary classes, still include the proletariat as a revolutionary role more than Fanon does. I think Fanon seems very concerned about the proletariat because of its urban status, aligning itself with the national bourgeoisie in a way that causes some de-emphasis of their revolutionary potential, that I could see that being a place where people want to push back on the idea that Fanon is a Marxist, but that he's using dialectical materialism as his method, and that he's one of the most dialectical thinkers I've ever read, I think, is very obvious. So there's that part of it. The other thing that I think I want to just emphasize is that, again, regardless of whether or not Fanon is a Marxist, which might devolve into a semantic,

debate at a certain level. Fanon is essential study for Marxists either way. Because our job as Marxists is to look at the revolutions around the world, which are attacking imperialism and capitalism and to study them and to learn from them and to figure out what lessons can be gained from them. And Fanon is doing a really incredible job of summarizing those lessons for us. And if we might sometimes disagree with some of where he takes it on a Marxist basis, that doesn't mean that we should throw out the entirety of Fanon's project. I mean, one thing that I found very striking about this text is how much, again, a lot of his ideas of how the party should function and relate to the masses really is strikingly

similar to Maoism, but he doesn't call it that and he doesn't even frame it in an explicitly Marxist-Leninist way. But when we see those overlaps, we should recognize that even if for some reason we want to say, Phenon is not a Marxist, he's coming to realizations through revolutionary struggle that are in line with Marxism and that are necessary for us to study one way or another. So I think that it's very important that no matter where we fall on this particular debate, which again, I think, can become semantic at a certain level. We don't dismiss Phenon's contributions and really the absolute incredible value of his work because it is well worth studying regardless of whether or not you want to label him a Marxist. And if you are a

Marxist who is not internalizing and learning how to apply the ideas in this text, you have a huge hole in your analysis that cannot be filled. Yeah, yeah. No, I totally agree with all of that. I do, I do agree that it's like largely semantic and it depends what level you want to like raise the standard of what constitutes a Marxist. But in any case, you and I both totally agree that Marxists need to, this is like essential reading for Marxists, especially when we talk, there's so much talk about decolonization, but so little substance behind the buzzword. And here, this text alone, if you're a Marxist really genuinely concerned about decolonization, then this cannot be skipped over. This is a must read. And in that sense, it's Marxist and that Marxist absolutely need to. to engage with it. Absolutely. Okay, so last question of this section, and I will toss this question

towards you. How do we prevent national liberation struggles from taking on a bourgeois positionality? What do demands for decolonization look like when paired with opposition to bourgeois nationalists? Yeah, so again, this is a central theme in a lot of this text, is not allowing sort of the bourgeois class to reinstate control in a decolonial context. And Fidon gives us some idea, about how that would look like, but I think it's really worth focusing on it, maybe in more of a practical contemporary context, because one of the sort of reasons that opponents of decolonization, who consider that some Marxists will cite for their opposition to decolonization, is this idea of like, well, you're just propping up the bourgeoisie of the colonized nation instead of the masses

of the colonized nation. And that's a criticism that you'll hear a lot. And I think Fonon gives us the ability to parse that a little bit. And what I think is interesting, in this text is that for Fanon, what prevents the bourgeois from taking over, what prevents the bourgeoisie from creating their own nationalism, is really creating a party that is a mass party grounded in the life and the struggle of the most oppressed and marginalized. Really, the struggle against allowing the bourgeoisie to take over decolonial movement begins before the revolution has even started in the political formations that are being developed and which classes they are grounding themselves in. This is really central for

the development of a movement that won't be taken over by the bourgeois Z. And more importantly, I think Fanon proves that it is possible to create a decolonial movement that isn't just a mask for bourgeois nationalism. It simply requires being aware of the dangers of bourgeois nationalism and having a way to combat them, i.e. through specific organizational forms of the party. Now, we can really get into this one way or another to some extent, but I really do think that what Fanon is describing in terms of the party's relationship to the masses is almost a prototypical version of the mass line. It's not quite the mass line as explained by Mao,

but it has remarkable similarities of how the party has to relate to the masses, hear their ideas, and bring those ideas back to the masses with actual political theory. In the case of the mass line, that is a Marxist theory explicitly. And when Fanon talks about the party cadre going to the masses, talking with them about their experiences, of their landlord screwing them over, of their grocer lending them money, and then using that as a dialectical back and forth through which they're taught political and economic theory, we see an organizational form that can build Kodra and build a party with a militant mass base,

that when the national bourgeoisie tries to maintain control or to take control, can be opposed militantly because that party has structures of accountability to the masses. And so even though he doesn't use the term mass line himself, I really do think that what we can take from Phenon for the answer of how do we prevent the national liberation struggle from taking on a bourgeois nature, and how do we have demands for decolonization that don't just become bourgeois nationalism,

is to ground decolonization in the mass line as a method of organizing. And I really think that at the end of this text, that's what I'm coming away with. That's the way that we can avoid those mistakes. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely great. I love that. I love that idea in those connections. All right, well, I'm ready to move on to part three if you are. Awesome.

Sounds good. So for part three, we're going to go ahead and move on to sort of our application of this theory, trying to not just talk about what this theory means in the abstract, but what it means concretely for us as Marxists. So really, I think that a concrete idea that's present within Fanon's work is recognition that within progressive movements, there's still many internal contradictions at play. And I mean, again, this really shouldn't surprise us. Mao explained clearly in on-contradiction how even the communist movement itself has internal contradictions that have to be accounted for and that can become a site of ideological struggle. In Fanon's work, we see what these contradictions

look like within a decolonial context. And in trials and tribulations of national consciousness, we really see what happens if we ignore these contradictions. So in earlier chapters, we've seen that in a colonial context, the nationalist parties, which were mostly supported by the urban national bourgeoisie, can have a progressive role in stirring up revolt, even if they ultimately end up trying to pacify militancy and placate the anger of the masses. You can think back to On Violence, the first chapter, where he talks about just the rhetoric of the nationalist parties can create the beginnings of a revolutionary consciousness, even if those parties themselves are not moving in a truly revolutionary direction. So while Fanon clearly sees the peasantry and parts of

the Wump and Proletariat as the revolutionary base for decolonial struggle, he also sees them as part of a broader movement that, for better or worse, includes urban nationalist parties and their bourgeois class interests. And so we see from the very beginning that the movement for decolonization, a progressive movement against imperialism and capitalism, is full of internal contradictions, not represented merely through abstract ideological disagreements, but actually concretely by the competing class interests of the masses and the national bourgeoisie. And here we can see that more abstract principles elucidated by Mao are being applied in a decolonial context. And even more importantly, Fanon warns us that if we ignore these contradictions

in favor of some sort of anti-ideological or apolitical nationalism, will ultimately allow the national bourgeoisie to cease power and undo the gains of the mass. from the revolution. The national bourgeoisie makes appeals to the nation and appeals to a great decolonial leader in order to obscure the fact that their interests are inherently at odds with the interests of the masses. Fidon warns us that the national bourgeoisie, if unsupposed, even turns the revolutionary cadre of the party into a repressive state apparatus used to keep the masses silent and pacified through ideology or violence, all the while exporting the nation's resources to foreign companies. Thus, not only do we see that these contradictions exist within progressive movements,

but we see that they can't be ignored. They must be a sight of struggle. And so Fennon tells us that at the moment of revolutionary victory, at the moment of independence, those loyal to the masses must act within, he says, mere hours of the revolution to counteract the national bourgeoisie. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the masses might have been non- antagonistic during the time in which both had to fight their colonizers, but once that time ends, the progressive elements of the movement

have to act decisively to take power from the national bourgeoisie and to democratize the economy in the hands of the masses. And we have seen this through decolonial movements all over the world, even in the context of China, the nationalists working together with the communists in order to fight the Japanese, and that contradiction turned immediately antagonistic as soon as the threat of the Japanese had been dealt with. So Fanon shows us that the status of contradictions in terms of antagonism and non-antagonism change, and that we need to face them head on. and be willing to act antagonistically when such contradictions do, in fact, become antagonistic. And again, these ideas that we have already covered, but Fanon shows us that these ideas can take on a

specific practical form and struggle. So, what does this mean for us today? In our organizing, we can find ourselves dealing with similar contradictions, which need to be navigated very carefully, and Fanon can give us some insights into that navigation. So, for example, in struggling around homelessness issue, myself and others I know who've worked around this, have found ourselves having to sort of leverage the goodwill of actually progressive local petty boudoir business owners who were sort of willing to distance themselves and occasionally even denounce more reactionary business owners who were pushing anti-homelessness measures. And so in this context, a broader coalition around the issue of homelessness was formed between organizers, the homeless themselves,

and between some members of the petty bouchozy who were in a more progressive situation. And that coalition contained within it obviously very concrete contradictions that were at play with competing class interests. And what was important to realize is that while the interests of a particular small business owner and the masses aligned momentarily for strategic ends in the anti-homelessness struggle, for example, that convergence almost always is temporary and competing interests can't be ignored in favor of some apolitical issue. The contradiction has to be understood in materialist terms of class interests, and the organizers that were involved in that struggle had to realized that those diverging interests met that in the context of that contradiction could

likely be antagonistic and require decisive action. These kinds of contradictions come up in all sorts of organizing projects, whereas Marxists we seek to unite progressive elements while subjecting all interests to proletarian interests. An understanding of the dangers of ignoring these contradictions is crucial, and Fanon gives us a stunning warning of what can go wrong as a result of a mistake. We need to make coalitions with other classes and members of other classes who are willing to act in concordance with what the masses need. But that doesn't mean we set aside struggle for the sake of a false unity. We have to always be aware that that contradiction is there and always be able to respond to that contradiction taking an antagonistic

form. And we definitely need to understand Fanon's approach to internal contradictions. We also have to recognize that the ability to act decisively on these contradictions doesn't materialize out of nowhere at moments of revolutionary success. Fanon explains that in order to act against the national bourgeoisie, the party must have a certain form in a certain relationship to the masses, which I brought up a little bit earlier. For Fanon, it's crucial for the party to not simply claim to represent the masses, but to actually act as the will of the masses in organized political form. This requires Codra to prioritize the masses themselves instead of personal advancement. Fanon insists that Codra ought to feel honored to be assigned to go live in the most rural and

impoverished areas of the nation, because it's by living there that they can educate the masses and political ideology, and make sure that the will of all the masses is represented in the work of the party, not just a rhetorical, you know, nod to the masses. This structure of mass support away from the enclave of the national bourgeoisie serves to ensure that the party is accountable, not to the would-be industrialists of the colony, but to those who suffer most from repression. And the eventual decisive act against the national bourgeoisie can't be achieved if they totally control the party. Rather, the party must be controlled by the masses, and the interests of the

national bourgeoisie must be subjected to their will and controlled by them. And this is why Fanon says that in a truly revolutionary context, the government really is subjected to the will of the party. And this is really important for us to grasp because those of us organizing now are hopefully laying the groundwork for the development of a party someday. And the form that our organization takes will be really important in whether or not that party can beat the other non-progressive factions that will inevitably emerge within it. So again, this has immediate and concrete importance.

All too often, when you look at our organizational projects today, we're focused on protests or tenants unions, which are good things, without necessarily actually stopping and determine who makes up the base of our organization. So all too often, the actual cadre of revolutionary organizations are made up of students in the United States, and this goes back all the way to the new left. And we often see an organization primarily around other students. Occasionally, you'll see more progressive petty bourgeois academics,

who will unify with revolutionary forces and provide some ideological line to our organizations. But that's the most common form that the left it takes today. It's young, it's mostly highly educated, it mostly comes from a student subjectivity. And so we have to ask ourselves, how many organizations today can say that their cadre actually live with the most oppressed of the masses and learn from them instead of merely trying to organize them in the name of some abstract line that the masses have no relation to? I honestly think that if we look at at concretely, that going among the people that Fanon talks about, the answer is that very few of our organizations live up to that. It is good to do concrete organizing work, and it's good to have

political education, but that's imposed on the masses by members of other classes. Then we set ourselves up to build a party that won't be able to act at the interest of the masses at key decisive moments. So the other lesson that I think we should take from Fanon is that our organizing has to be actually grounded in the masses themselves. And this means subjecting our personal desires as cadre to the needs of the masses. This means getting to know the people you want to organize. It means hearing their needs and their desires and taking them seriously. It means taking you and your Congress' understanding of Marxism and working dialectically with the masses to find a solution to their problems based in the ideas infused with Marxist insights. And unless we build an

organization which operates in this manner, we're not going to be able to act on internal contradictions properly. And regressive elements will be able to take control during decisive moments. Phenon has a lot to teach us on this subject, even if the context in which he discusses it seems to be very far from our own. And his work is really well we're studying for those who take organizing the masses seriously. So fascinating and so well said. I love that application point. I have a question for you really quick. You know, it's interesting because there's this certain formation on the U.S. left that, you know, it's been said that they treat non-antagonistic contradictions as antagonistic ones.

I was just hoping that you can maybe talk about that error, like what that error results in and why it should be avoided. Yeah. So this is something that I've talked about a little bit recently. I think to be fair, this error runs both ways. And I want to be clear with that up front. I think that while there are some forces that move in an adventurous direction and treat contradictions that are non-intagonistic as antagonistic, we also kind of see the other side of that. I think that there are many reformists and revisionists who are all too happy to work with the U.S. government to treat active service members as a unproblematically progressive faction to be organized without looking at the fact that imperialism and the role of the government in imperialism creates an

antagonistic contradiction that should be treated as antagonistic. So I think the error goes both ways. But in the context that you talk about it, yes, I think that oftentimes we see people who move towards antagonism in contradictions within the left. I think that the left is young today. And given how young it is, there is a need for us to leave room for political development that doesn't happen perfectly along perfect lines. And attacking people who are still developing is not necessarily useful. Now, that said, you know, revisionist and reformist factions within the left have often been very, very dangerous to revolutionaries. I mean, we can think back to the classic, you know, the Democratic Socialists killed Rosa meme, but there's a truth

to that. That contradiction has been antagonistic at times. And it's a question of deciding when it is or is not. Right now, I don't see the majority of sort of naive Democratic socialist reformists in the U.S. actively cooperating with state repression of other communists. And so I don't think that that contradiction is antagonistic, but I think it would be wrong to deny that it has been in the past and can be again in many instances. And as always, there's just no cookie-cut answers when you're a Marxist. You actually have to analyze each individual contradiction and do really serious, difficult work figuring it out from a materialist perspective. So errors will occur along the way, but I think that it's important to make a really serious

investigation into the contradictions we see now and their antagonistic or non-intaginistic statuses. Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. I urge listeners to rewind and play that again and listen to it a few times to really internalize those points because I think that shit is so important. But, okay, I'll do the last application point for the episode. So from my application point, I want to talk about the claims to universality that are inherent in liberal bourgeois philosophy and how universality is a false promise of liberalism whose falseness is betray. trade by liberalism's sort of inherent structural racism. Sartre put it succinctly when he said, quote,

one of the functions of racism is to compensate the latent universalism of bourgeois liberalism. Since all human beings have the same rights, the colonized subject or victim of racism will be made a subhuman, end quote. Sartre is saying here that liberalism conceives of itself as extending its political and social rights, and in fact its very conception of humanity to everyone universally. This fact about liberalism's self-conception can be easily understood when reading like Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence, which is often glorified by liberals as a high point of their political project, when he writes, quote, all men are created equal

and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among these are life, liberty, in the pursuit of happiness. This really does sum up liberalism's claim to universality very well. But as we all know, the central hypocrisy of this claim, its central paradox, is also embodied in Thomas Jefferson, namely as someone who bought, sold, and owned slaves. This hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson is the hypocrisy at the heart of liberalism. So instead of living up to its claims of universality and truly crafting a global order built on the inherent equality and dignity of all human beings, which would require it in

the final analysis to jettison capitalism and its international expressions in colonialism and imperialism, it instead simply reduces the victims of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism to the level of subhuman. After all, liberals believe that all men are created equal, so instead of actually pursuing the implications of that structurally, they simply downgrade certain people from the level of full personhood. This, of course, doesn't happen explicitly through proclamations by liberals, but rather it happens structurally via the natural machinations of bourgeois society and institutions. From this move, we can understand all of Western liberalism's history as a failure of the promises of the Enlightenment and as inexorably racist and

colonialist project rooted in the ruling class's attempts to own and dominate the world. In other words, the ideology of liberalism pretends to be one thing, while the materialist machinations of liberalism in the real world prove it to be the exact opposite of what it proclaims itself to be. It's amusing then when liberals claim that Marxism is helplessly Eurocentric as if liberalism is not. And while Marxism certainly has been and still can be Eurocentric in the past and present, its very nature as an open-ended science allows that initial Eurocentrism to be challenged, deconstructed, and purged within the Marxist tradition itself, often through thinkers like Phenon, whereas liberalism, a closed system of proclaimed universal values and ideas is unable to do

the same. Thus, it is liberalism and not Marxism, which is helplessly Eurocentric and racist to the core. One way that this dehumanizing process within liberalism manifests is in the psychology of the colonized individual. Fanon himself talked about how he, growing up in Martinique, a Caribbean island and French colony, conceived of himself not as a black person, but as a Martinique national. However, when he went to France, he was devastated to realize that, in the eyes of the white French, he was nothing but a black man. People were scared of him when they saw him, and he became self-conscious of that fact and began to see himself through the gaze of white people. This resulted in what W.E.B. Du Bois calls double consciousness,

whereby one sense of self is internally divided, preventing the formation of a unified identity. We see this all around us in our Western liberal societies to this very day. Code switching, the ability for people of color to pick up and put down different dialects depending on the race of the person they're interacting with or the social pressures of a given situation is nothing but a manifestation of this divided identity. And in fact, it's a defense mechanism crafted in the face of centuries of brutal white supremacist violence. As a white man, I can never, ever fully understand just how deep and pervasive this is for people of color, but I do get a sense of it whenever I see a person of color enter a predominantly white room at a

social gathering, or when I see a store clerk look past me to suspiciously focus on a black dude as he does his shopping. The stab of self-consciousness of having to apprehend yourself through the macabreism of the white gaze, often in order to try and keep yourself safe from white supremacist's violence of one sort or another, is an indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy, and it makes a mockery of liberal pretensions to universality. Fennon, in his other major work entitled Black-Skin White Masks, drives this point home when he says, quote, the black person, a free French citizen from an overseas department of the Republic is assailed on a public thoroughfare in Lyon or Paris. He is forced to inhabit an alienated and fragmented reality as soon as the white

man's eyes calls forth this other being who is battered down by the white conception of Tom Tom's cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, and racial defects, end quote. In the face of liberalism's abject failure to universalize its proclaimed values and rights, And the need for liberalism to paper over this central deception through institutional acts of dehumanization, Fanon seems to be seeking out a true universalism rooted in a new humanism, which is anchored in socialism. For if the liberal claims to universalism are systematically undermined by the material operations of its very own economic model of free market capitalism, then there is no hope of achieving a real universal humanism in the Fanonian sense, unless capitalism itself is dismantled and transcended.

says at one point, quote, let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving, end quote. And when we reflect on what decolonization means, when we think of our own indigenous and black and brown brothers and sisters here in North America, and when we strategize about the sort of world we want to create, I think one modest metric we can use to measure our progress is precisely this. Are we creating a world where the very emergence of double consciousness is prevented, and the core crimes and hypocrisies of bourgeois society are being unmasked, dismantled, and overcome? Or are we merely replicating the worst impulses and deceptions within liberalism and smugly calling it socialism? Phenom points us in the right direction

when he says, quote, decolonization is truly the creation of new men and women, but such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural force. The thing colonized becomes a full person through the very process of liberation. And I will leave you with that. So that is our episode on chapters three and four of France Phan's The Wretched of the Earth. Next month we'll be covering chapters five and six, which is the conclusion. And then we'll move on from there.

So yeah, Alison, any last words before we part? Not too much to say. Really happy with how this went. And I really hope people are reading this text along. I mean, really, we can give you some understanding of this. But Phenon is just honestly such a beautiful writer. If you are not also following along, you're really missing out on the just incredible intensity of this text. And as Brett brought up, the attention to sort of the subjective experience of these phenomena that we're talking about.

You really get that when you read it. So I strongly encourage you to be reading along as we do through this text. Absolutely. All right. Thank you to all of our patrons. Thank you to Dave Jacobs for producing our video. And thank you, Allison, for doing this with me. I'll see you again next month.

Totally. All right. Good night, everybody. Thank you. Southern trees There are a strange brood Blood on the leaves And blood at the road

Black body swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Pastoral scene of the gallant suns gallon sound The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth Sin of magnolia

Sweet and fresh Then the sudden smell Of burning flesh fruit, for the crows to plug, for the rain together, for the wind to suck, for the sun to wrap, for the tree to drop. and vintage crumb

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