The Wretched of the Earth is Fanon's clearest discussion of national liberation movements. It was written in haste, following his diagnosis with leukemia, his friends wrote it down as he paced back and forth dictating. The text bears the imprint of this urgency, which seeps through into his passionate demand for self-liberation.
In Wrteched it is Fanon's discussion and defence of the oppressed use of violence that is most often discussed. Violence for Fanon, is not only a requirement to overthrow the colonial powers, but it is also necessary to cleanse and shape those fighting for liberation: "For [the native] knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he beings to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory". Later he continues:
During the struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed. The native's back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals): he will no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life - the forces of colonialism. And the youth of a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, amy well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancetors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the dijnns who rush into your body whie you yawn. The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.
Here Fanon echoes Marx's argument that the revolution will cleanse the worker of the "muck of ages", removing the old ideas of racism, oppression and subservience. Fanon however is not a Marxist, though Marx is important to him. You get the impression that Fanon has imbibed Marx's writings but not taken them to heart: "Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem." This is perhaps most true of Fanon's writing on class, particualrly those parts of Wretched where he discusses the role of workers in the Global North (the colonial powers) and the role of workers in the colonised countries.
In fact, Fanon goes so far as to argue that workers' in the colonial countries are bought off by the system and can play a limited role in liberation movements:
It cannot be too strongly stressed that in the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime... In capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have evrything to gain. In the colonial countries the working class has everythign to lose.
But in South Africa and in India, it was working class movements that proved most crucial to overthrowing colonial rule and apartheid. Think of the strikers by black workers, or the mass movements and strikes by workers that made it impossible for the British to control India. In fact Fanon himself is ambiguous on the question of workers. Some pages after the above quote he can declare that "during the colonial phase, the nationalist trade-union organisations constitute and impressive striking power. In the towns, the trade unionist can bring to a standstill... the colonialist economy". But then go on to argue that the "unions become candidates for governmental power" after colonialism has been uprooted. What Fanon does is to identify trade unionists with their leader - obscuring the potential power for self-emancipation that is represented by the collective organisation of workers.
Partly I think Fanon makes this mistake because he is trying to warn and understand the way that revoluitonary struggles against colonialism risk constructing new chains for ordinary people.
The militant who faces the colonialist war machine with the bare minimum of arms realises that while he is breaking down colonial oppresion he is building up automatically yet another system of exploiation... The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilers the senses. The people find out that the iniquitous fact of expoitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of 'Treason!' But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry 'Stop thief!'.
He points out that the "national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West". The national bourgeoisie then must be resolutely opposed, and a new vision of development fought for that doesn't try to copy the Western states. But I think it's fair to say that Fanon doesn't really answer what this might look like. Though he offers some interesting hints, they tend to be general and focus on culture, rather than wider economic and social institutions.
The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man.
This is why, of course, the workers movement against colonialism is so important - but must be tied to a theory of workers' emancipation that goes beyond opposing colonialism and then fighting for social and economic equality. It is why the writings of revolutionaries like Lenin remain so important, and the Marxst tradition so crucial, for national liberation movements today. But against this project, Fanon essential sets a different system of struggle - violence.
Violence alone, violence committeed by the people, violence organised and educated by its leaders, makes it possible fotr the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there's nothing byt a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpeets.. a few reforms at the top... and down there at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking time.
This of course, poses a question of what Fanon means by "violence". Quotes like the above are often used to paint him as a bloodthirsty revolutionary. And, to be sure, Fanon refuses on principle, to condemn the violence of the oppressed against the oppressor. Indeed many of the leftists and pacifists who currently bemoan the "violence on both sides" in the Middle East, ought to read Fanon whose robust defence of the right to resist arises directly from his involvement in the struggle for liberation of Algeria, and brokers no cowardly refusal to take sides.
But I think that Fanon's "violence" is less about the actual violence itself, but more a substitute for the process of the overthrow of oppressive relations and institutions, which Fanon understands won't happen peacefully. This is, of course, far more revolutionary than many in liberation movements would like, and his repeated denunciation of those who would simply place themselves into new "national" positions of power emphasises this. So Fanon's work remains crucial, directly relevant, and inspiring. But it cannot be read on its own, as his focus on the peasantry instead of the working class, will not lead to the sort of liberation he wants and that oppressed people need. Nonetheless, his vision for change is, at times, intoxicating:
We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste not time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.
Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1961 and Frantz Fanon died the same year. One can only wonder what he would have learnt from, and thought of, the mass movements that exploded in France a few years later, which had an insurgent working class at their heart.
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