Raúl Zibechi, Chiapas Support Committee
Frantz Fanon’s thinking
has returned. Five decades after his death, his books are being read again in
universities and in spaces of the organized popular sectors. Some of his
central reflections enlighten aspects of the new realities and they contribute
to the comprehension of capitalism in this stage of blood and pain for those
below.
The re-publication of
some of his works like Black Skin, White Masks (published in Spanish by Akal,
2009), with commentary from de Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Judith Butler,
Lewis R. Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Sylvia Wynter and
Walter Mignolo, has contributed to the spreading of his thinking, as well as
periodic re-publications of his principal work, The Wretched of the Earth, with
a prologue by Jean Paul Sartre. The republication of his book Sociology of a Revolution, published in 1966 by Grove Press would also be important.
Nevertheless, the renewed
interest in Fanon goes way beyond his books and writings. I believe we’re
dealing with an epochal interest, in the double sense of the current period
that our societies are crossing through and the birth of powerful anti-systemic
movements championed by diverse peoples from below. I want to say that we are
seeing a political interest more than academic or literary curiosity.
In my opinion, there are
five reasons that explain the currency of Fanon.
The first is that
capitalism in its current stage, centered on accumulation by dispossession (or
the fourth world war), produces some aspects of colonial domination. The
occupation of territorial enclaves by the multi-national corporations and the
occasional but important military occupation by the imperialisms of various
countries with the excuse of the war against terrorism, are two of those
aspects.
There are others that
it’s at least necessary to mention. The population has been converted into a
military objective, either for their control or their eventual elimination,
since it is an “obstacle” to accumulation by dispossession. The war on women,
converted into new spoils of the conquest of territories, is another aspect of
the new colonialism, as well the growing militarization of popular
neighborhoods on the peripheries of the big cities.
To the extent that
capitalism accumulates by robbing the wealth of entire peoples, it permits us
to say that we are facing neo-colonialism although, strictly, we’re dealing
with the decadence phase of the system that no longer aspires to integrate the
dominated classes, but simply, to watch them and exterminate them in case they
resist.
The second is that it is
more evident all the time that current society is divided, as Grosfoguel says
based on Fanon, into two zones: the zone of being, where the rights of persons
are respected and where violence is exceptional, and the zone of non-being,
where violence is the rule. Fanon’s thinking helps us reflect about this
reality that places so much distance between XXI Century capitalism with that
of the Welfare State.
The third is the
criticism that Fanon makes of the world’s left-of-center parties, in the sense
that their forms of work are directed exclusively at a working class elite,
setting aside the different bellows that in Marxism are disposed of as
belonging to the lumpenproletariat. To the contrary, Fanon deposits in the
common people of below his greatest hope as possible subjects of their
self-emancipation, or emancipación a secas.
In fourth place, Fanon
was not an intellectual or an academic, but rather he put his knowledge at the
service of a people in struggle like the Algerian, whose cause he served until
the day he died. This figure of the thinker-militant, or as he likes to call
himself the professional that was unconditionally committed to those from
below, is an extraordinary contribution to the struggle of the popular sectors.
In this sense, it’s worth
emphasizing the critique of Euro-centrism of the lefts, to the la pretension of
mechanically transfer proposals and analysis born in the world of being to that
of the non-being. The birth of Indian, Black and popular feminisms on our
continent is a sample of the limitations of that first (and fundamental)
European feminism that, nevertheless, needed to be reinvented among the women
of the color of the earth, based on their own traditions and realities, among
them the centrality of the family in the Latin American feminine world.
Although this brief
recapitulation leaves out various important aspects of Fanon’s work, like his
reflections on the violence of the oppressed, it seems necessary to me to
emphasize an additional aspect, which I believe is central to current critical
thought. It questions the reasons why the black man desires to lighten his skin,
the reasons the black woman desires to be blonde or get a partner as white as
possible. The dominated, Fanon says, the persecuted, don’t just seek to
recuperate the hacienda appropriated by the master, but rather want the
master’s place. It’s evident that, after the failure of the Russian and Chinese
revolutions, this consideration must occupy a central place in the
anti-capitalist struggle.
I do not share the place
that Fanon grants to the violence of those from below in this process of
converting themselves into the subjects of their lives, in their liberation
from oppression. Violence is necessary, but is not the solution, as Wallerstein
reflects in his commentary on Black skin, white masks.
I think that we must
deepen this debate. What to do to not reproduce the history in which the
oppressed repeat in one way or another the oppression of which they were
victims. The way I see it, we’re dealing with creating something new, a new
world or new realities, which are not traced and copied from the world of those
above, which may be sufficiently powerful as to make the central place that the
oppressor, the master or the boss occupies disappear from the collective
imaginary. I continue believing that the experience of the EZLN support bases
is an example in this direction.
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Originally Published in
Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas
Support Committee/Comité de Apoyo a Chiapas
Friday, September 4, 2015
