Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Hegelian Marxism

Introduction

After years of being largely consigned to academic debates over difference, alterity, and postcoloniality, the specter of Frantz Fanon has returned – with a surprising resonance. The emergence of widespread protests over police abuse and racial profiling in the US, as well as the immigration crisis sweeping Europe as hundreds of thousands flee violence and poverty in North Africa and the Middle East, has led to new interest in his ideas among many anti-racist activists and theorists. The failure of US society to make progress in curbing police abuse, unemployment, and large-scale imprisonment of blacks and Latinos has sparked renewed interest in many of Fanon’s statements, some of which were reproduced in flyers at demonstrations in 2015 – one being his comment in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘They revolted … simply because it became impossible to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’ (Fanon, 2008b: 201). ¹ At the same, and perhaps ironically, the thinker that proclaimed in the same work, ‘Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world’ (Fanon, 2008b: 235), is being rediscovered by many immigrants risking their lives to get into a Europe that often denies them the most basic amenities of western ‘civilization’. Fanon’s ideas seem to have become more pertinent than ever, even though the postcolonial world we inhabit is in many respects so different from his own.

So what makes a return to Fanon’s work significant for today? The answer, in my view, is that his ideas can help reconstitute a Marxist humanist perspective that addresses the foremost theoretical challenge facing us – creating a viable alternative to all forms of capitalism. ² This task has been severely hindered by a series of intellectual and political developments over the past three decades – most notably the claim of ruling neoliberal ideology that ‘there is no alternative’ to life under capitalism. This claim would not be so powerful if it were not echoed (at least in part) by positions taken by some leftwing critics of neoliberalism. Many leftist theorists in recent years – from structuralists and poststructuralists to postcolonial theorists and Lacanians – have argued that efforts to envision a liberated future are generally ineffective and often end up reinforcing the power of the very society they seek to question. This even includes thinkers who have at times sought to defend dialectical thought. For example, Slavoj Žižek wrote after the capitulation of Syriza to the EU’s drive for austerity in the fall of 2015:

The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernable alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, it functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking to the end the deadlock of our predicament. (Žižek, 2015)

It is a sign of the power of the mind-forged manacles that define today’s crisis of the imagination that even radical theoreticians consider it a mark of ‘cowardice’ to envision a future that is beyond capitalism. But that clearly has not stopped many who are coming into the streets in support of immigrants and victims of police abuse – and who certainly cannot be accused of ‘cowardice’ in their attacks on the dominant power structures – from searching for such an alternative.

This is not to suggest that Fanon’s work can by itself answer the question of what constitutes a genuine alternative to capitalism today. Yet his work can energize our efforts to respond to this question because of his insistence – found throughout his work – on the need to envision a ‘new humanity’ from struggles against racism, colonialism, and capitalism. As he put it, ‘let us flee this stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo. Let us reexamine the question of man’ (Fanon, 2008b: 237). Without appreciating the centrality of this humanist perspective, it is impossible to discern the internal coherence of Fanon’s multifaceted work as a philosopher, revolutionary activist, and psychiatrist, as well as its relevance to today.

Most of all, without grasping this underlying humanism it becomes difficult to appreciate Fanon’s relation to Marxism. Many thinkers over the years have contended that Fanon’s heterodox views of the peasantry, the lumpenproletariat, and anticolonial struggles indicate that he stood outside of the Marxist tradition. But the issue largely hinges on what one means by ‘Marxism’. If Marxism is defined as a series of fixed conclusions about the working class, the role of economics, and the all-dominating power of capital to destroy non-capitalist social formations, it is easy to conclude that Fanon was not a Marxist. But by that measure one could just as easily conclude that Marx was not a Marxist. After all, Marx often rejected the claims of his own followers that the working class is the ‘only’ revolutionary subject and argued that the peasantry was also, in some historical contexts, no less revolutionary. ³ Moreover, he spent much of the last decade of his life arguing that the developing world was not fated to repeat the course of capitalist industrialization delineated in Volume I of Capital; indeed, he denied that his work contains a universal theory that explains the fate of all nations and peoples (Marx, 1983 [1877]: 136).

On the other hand, if ‘Marxism’ is defined as the re-creation of a revolutionary dialectic by engaging ever-shifting social realities in their concrete specificity, the situation appears quite different. Fanon himself stated in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue’ (Fanon, 2008b: xi). Slightly stretched – but by no means rejected or abandoned. This stretching is evident from as early as his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, which tackles an issue never discussed by Marx – the psychological impact of racism upon colonized peoples – while acknowledging that ‘the true disalienation of the black man implies a brutal awareness of social and economic realities’ (Fanon, 2008a: xiv).

If Fanon’s Marxism remains contested, even more so is his relation to Hegel. While his discussion of Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks is well known, less recognized is that the entire book, as well as much of The Wretched of the Earth – in which Hegel is not even mentioned – is deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectics. At issue is no scholastic matter concerning Fanon’s knowledge of or interest in Hegel. That he was not a Hegel scholar and was not the least bit interested in being one goes without saying. The issue is instead (1) is it possible to grasp the depth of Fanon’s thought without seeing it as a ‘moment’ of dialectical philosophy, and (2) is it possible to develop a viable Hegelian-Marxism for today without building upon Fanon’s insights on racial domination, internalized oppression, and the impact of racial and ethnic pride in achieving disalienation? With this in mind, I wish to re-examine some aspects of his encounter with Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon’s Critical Appropriation of Hegel’s Dialectic

But why turn to Hegel of all people, when Hegel denigrated Africans for never having experienced history and viewed white Europeans as the ne plus ultra of history? Fanon undoubtedly knew of Hegel’s misguided Eurocentrism, but that did not deter him from exploring his dialectical philosophy. If Marx considered Hegel’s dialectic to be nothing less than what Alexander Herzen called ‘the algebra of revolution’, even while sharply critiquing his shortcomings, why should Hegel not have something to teach us about how to reach a world of reciprocal recognitions?

As I detail in Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Hudis, 2015), Fanon’s debt to Hegel becomes evident from his close reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which centers on the struggle of the subject to seek recognition through myriad stages of development. The first stage is Consciousness, in which the object posits itself as absolute – as that which is independent of the subject. This is a ‘natural’ or naïve standpoint that takes it for granted that the world that confronts consciousness is cut off from consciousness by an impenetrable divide. However, this assumption soon shows itself to be inadequate, since the world that is known by consciousness is an act of consciousness itself. The view that the subject and object are cut off from each other by an impenetrable barrier becomes unsustainable.

Consciousness then gives way to the next stage, Self-Consciousness, in which external objects lose their claim to independence; they are now objects for me. I am aware of myself as a subject – but also aware of myself as a being of which others are aware. In self-consciousness the presumption that the objective world exists completely independent of the knowing subject is overcome, since I am aware of myself being aware of others – just as I am aware that others are aware of my awareness. This stage too, however, turns out to be incomplete, since the claim that I am at one with the world is contradicted by self-consciousness itself. In reflecting upon myself I also become increasingly aware of my distance from the Other, who is clearly not myself. In response, the subject is driven by a desire to negate this otherness of the external world by positing itself as absolute. The effort to negate or annihilate the other, however, soon turns out to be fruitless, since desire needs an independent object to sustain itself; if there is no Other, there is nothing to be desired. The subject learns that it can ‘achieve its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’ (Hegel, 1977 [1807]: 110). As a result, the subject now seeks recognition from the Other.

Hegel’s concept of recognition has given rise to a great many interpretations over the years, but we should note from the outset that it should not be confused with liberal theories of recognition elaborated by such thinkers as Jürgen Habermas and Alex Honneth. In stark contrast to their standpoint, Hegel does not treat recognition primarily in terms of acknowledging citizens that possess equal political rights. ⁴ Recognition, for Hegel as well as for Fanon, is about much more than acknowledging an individual’s formal equality before the law: it is instead a demand to be recognized for the dignity and worth of one’s being. In other words, I want to be recognized as absolute – and so do you.

This battle for recognition leads to the famous master/slave dialectic. The master demands recognition from the slave, but since the master sees the slave as a non-essential being he feels no need to recognize him. The slave fears the master, and this confirms, for the master, his dominance over him. Yet this situation, Hegel shows, soon turns into its opposite. This is first of all because fear makes us aware of ourselves as sentient beings. By fearing the master the slave gets to know himself as an independent, essential being. Moreover, in his work the slave becomes conscious of his essentiality, since the master can’t survive without him. The very thing that seemed to prove the independence of the master – his consumption of products made by the slave – confirms that he is a dependent being who needs the slave far more than the slave needs him. The more the slave labors under the dominance of the master, the more he becomes aware of this situation. The slave thereby develops an independent consciousness – a mind of his own – whereas the master’s consciousness lacks any self-certainty of itself as an active subject.

Two things are evident in this famous section of the Phenomenology.

First, each phase of consciousness initially claims to have reached the standpoint of absolute completion and fulfillment, even though each ultimately turns out to be defective. If the subject did not posit itself as an absolute it could not endure the battle for recognition. Henry Lefebvre captured this in writing: ‘There is no moment except in so far as it embraces and aims to constitute an absolute … Liberty cannot make itself effective if it presents itself as arbitrary’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 175–6). The Peruvian philosopher Mariano Iberico made a similar point much earlier (in 1926) in El nuevo absoluto, which argued: ‘The fundamental meaning of socialism consists in the feeling that man needs to be saved, redeemed’ (Iberico, 1926: 222–3). Iberico’s work became highly influential in later indigenous consciousness movements (especially of the Aymara) in the Andean region – as did Fanon’s work in more recent years. ⁵

The absolute that is posed by the subject’s quest for freedom and recognition, we must emphasize, is not some closed ontology; it does not represent a moment of stagnation or closure. This is because the subject’s effort to move from one stage of development to another is imbued with negativity. Just as lack drives desire, negativity drives the movement from one stage to the next. The act of positing itself as absolute manifests not only the subject’s plenitude but also its incompleteness compared with further stages of development to come. The subject in Hegel – as it will later be in Marx – is always viewed in terms of a bearer of negativity.

Second, while the slave achieves a ‘mind of his own’, the effort to achieve mutual recognition, Hegel shows, turns out to be unsuccessful. The master is not overthrown at the end of the master/slave dialectic, nor does the master fully recognize the mind attained by the slave. The struggle for recognition is still unresolved. Reciprocal recognition is not broached until much later in the Phenomenology – in the chapter on morality, which discusses the Christian conception of confession and forgiveness. And it is not truly reached until we reach the very end of the book – the chapter on ‘Absolute Knowledge’. ⁶

A careful reading of Black Skin, White Masks shows that Fanon has absorbed all of these Hegelian insights. He states that recognition is about a lot more than the mere acknowledgement of political equality, for ‘his human worth and reality depends … on his recognition by Other’ (Fanon, 2008a: 191). He also emphasizes how with each stage the subject seeks to affirm itself as an absolute, writing: ‘Each consciousness of self is seeking absoluteness’ (Fanon, 2008a: 192). And he considers this dialectical process as imbued with negativity, writing: ‘We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it … But man is also negation’ (Fanon, 2008a: 197). Indeed, black people, he says, are so marginalized by white society that they ‘inhabit a zone of non-being’ (Fanon, 2008a: xii).

But Fanon is by no means merely following or summarizing Hegel’s text. He states in a crucial footnote that when the master/slave dialectic is viewed in terms of race we get a very different result from what Hegel describes. Regardless of what Hegel did or didn’t know of the history of black slavery and the revolts against it, such as the Haitian revolution, ⁷ it is clear that the historical context of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic – more correctly translated as ‘lordship and bondage’ – is the ancient and medieval world, in which slavery was not based on race. ⁸ This can hardly satisfy Fanon, since he is exploring Hegel to comprehend the lived experience of black people in the contemporary world. When the master/slave relation is viewed in terms of the additive of color, Fanon shows that it becomes clear that the master is not interested in receiving recognition from the slave – whose very humanity he denies: ‘What [the master] wants from the slave is not recognition but work.’ But since no amount of labor can earn the slave recognition from the master when the slave is black, the slave’s work fails to confirm his essentiality. ‘Therefore, he is less independent than the Hegelian slave’ (Fanon, 2008a: 195).

This has the following result: instead of gaining ‘a mind of his own’, the black initially aspires for ‘values secreted by his masters’ (Fanon, 2008a: 195). The slave fails to attain the independent consciousness delineated by Hegel. Instead, the black slave seeks to gain recognition by trying to mimic the master and become white. Fanon has here provided a dialectical explanation for one of the central problems that concerns him – the tendency of the oppressed to interiorize their oppression, fall victim to an inferiority complex, and seek acceptance from the oppressor on its terms.

It may seem that Fanon has departed radically from Hegel, and in one sense he has. However, it is worth noting that in Hegel’s account mutual recognition is not achieved at the end of the master/slave dialectic even though the slave now has a ‘mind of his own’. Hegel says that no sooner does the slave gain an independent consciousness than he becomes aware of the gap between his subjectivity and the objective world, which remains to be transformed. A ‘mind of his own’ that refrains from facing this reality, Hegel states, amounts to little more than ‘a piece of cleverness’ (Hegel, 1977 [1807]: 119). To reach mutual recognition, a longer and more complex road must still be traveled – one that does not reach its culmination until we reach Absolute Knowledge itself.

In sum, Fanon departs from Hegel in denying that the black slave necessarily achieves an independent self-consciousness through his work, but in doing so he is in accord with Hegel’s broader view that the struggle for recognition is not resolved at the rather provisional stage of the master/slave dialectic. This concept will in turn inform much of Fanon’s later work, such as his critique of the pitfalls of national consciousness and the dangers of neocolonialism in The Wretched of the Earth.

Yet what is the significance of Fanon’s contention that the master/slave dialectic radically differs from Hegel’s portrayal when viewed from the vantage point of race and racism? The implications are quite explosive – in a way that far transcends the concerns of most Hegel scholars. If the master is not interested in receiving recognition from the black slave, that can only mean that any effort to appeal to the powers that be for acknowledgement and recognition is futile and quixotic. The very structure of a class dynamic that is structured by racism renders such recognition impossible. But of course the demand to be recognized does not go away. To achieve it, the slave must turn his attention from the master to himself and those of his own kind. Only upon receiving recognition from those who likewise ‘scream against the curtain of the sky’ (Fanon, 2008a: 196) can the black subject attain the self-certainty and confidence to destroy the entire edifice of a racialized world and demand that society be reconstituted in accord with its human potential.

Fanon’s critique of Hegel points to the ‘Manichean world’ of colonialism that is discussed at length in The Wretched of the Earth. Actually, he first uses the term in Black Skin, White Masks. The colonial world is ‘Manichean’ precisely because in the racialized polarity of colonizer versus colonized there is no reciprocity; indeed, the possibility of it is foreclosed. So dehumanizing is racism, in leading the master to not even see the colonized as human, that the only way to achieve liberation is by eliminating the very possibility of the master’s existence by creating a world that puts an end to social status and self-identification that is based on epidermal considerations.

But how exactly is that to be achieved? How is such a world of mutual recognitions that puts aside race and racism to be created? Is it really possible for a new humanism to arise from the residue left by struggles against racism, and if so, how exactly is it to be achieved? Fanon’s entire book – one can even say his entire intellectual career – was driven by an effort to answer these questions, but it is spoken to most directly in his dispute with Jean Paul-Sartre in the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks entitled ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’.

Fanon writes, ‘Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known’ (Fanon, 2008a: 95). I must ‘shout my blackness’ – express pride in the very socially constructed attributes of blackness that white society denigrates (Fanon, 2008a: 101). Only by experiencing this moment of racial self-assertion and affirmation is it possible to create the conditions for a world that is ultimately free from racial classification and racism. In other words, we can get to the universal – a world of reciprocal recognitions – only by going through what Hegel called ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative’ (Hegel, 1977 [1807]: 10). And the negative subjective force, insofar as Fanon is concerned, is none other than the black subject taking pride in the very aspects of ‘blackness’ that white society takes such enormous pains to downplay, demonize and make invisible.

One would think that Fanon would have an ally here in Sartre, who wrote the introduction to one of the first collections of negritude poetry. Yet in Black Orpheus, Sartre refers to black consciousness as a ‘weak stage’ that must ultimately give way to the proletarian class struggle. For Sartre, race is a mere particular, class the universal. Fanon is shocked; he feels betrayed at this downplaying of negritude. But he does not blame Hegel for Sartre’s mistake. He instead turns Hegel against Sartre: ‘[T]his born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness needs to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness’ (Fanon, 2008a: 101). Sartre has forgotten Hegel’s most important insight – that the absolute is immanent in each phase, even though it makes it full appearance only at the end. The subject cannot endure the battle for recognition unless it posits its subjectivity as an absolute. Any effort to skip over this leads to abstract revolutionism. The subjectivity of the black subject is not a ‘weak stage’. Instead, Fanon writes, it is ‘an absolute density, full of itself’. You must ‘lose yourself’ in the particular in order to find your way to the universal. What Sartre forgot – and what many today forget – is that ‘this negativity [of the black subject] draws its value from a virtually substantial absoluity’ (Fanon, 2008a: 113).

It may seem that Fanon is saying two different things at the same time. On the one hand, he wants us to create a world in which race no longer bears social significance; he reaches for a future defined by the death of race. Yet to get there, he affirms the necessity for the black subject to take pride in itself in order to overcome the inferiority complex and self-denial that is so integral to racism. But does this emphasis on reaching the universal through the particular not carry some risks? Is it not possible that the black subject will become fixated in its racial pride to the point of holding onto the very socially-constructed attributes of ‘blackness’ that Fanon wants to see ultimately overcome? Black pride can easily become an end-in-itself, just as can having pride in being a proletarian – even though the aim of human emancipation is to make both the proletariat and ‘blackness’ superfluous. The ease with which many victims of discrimination fall prey to narrow nationalism – a tendency that has afflicted virtually all efforts at national self-determination – surely indicates that this is an objective problem that has to be seriously considered.

Conclusion

Fanon’s most important contribution, it seems to me, lies precisely in his profound sensitivity to this problematic. In contrast to Sartre, he understands the futility of trying to get to the universal by leaping too quickly over the mediating term in the dialectic – in this case, the potency of the lived experience and struggles of the colonized subject. Simply reaffirming one’s allegiances to the proletariat as the universal class fails to get to the critical point – how is a human world to be created so long as the struggle against racism is viewed as a secondary or peripheral issue? Fanon’s critique of the failure of the European working classes to come to the support of the African revolutions in The Wretched of the Earth is a clear marker of the importance with which he viewed this matter. At the same time, however, Fanon is no less aware of what he calls ‘the pitfalls of national consciousness’ – the tendency to become fixated in one’s subjectivity even while fighting fixation. Nothing is easier than for a revolutionary subject to become impatient with the seemingly endless stages of negation it must suffer through and affirm a false positivity as a shortcut to the ‘new society’. Yet if that false positivity turns out to be a nationalism that denigrates others for being different than itself, it becomes impossible for a world of mutual recognitions to ever arise.

Fanon posits black subjectivity as the mediating term in the movement to the universal, even in face of the risks that it entails, because otherwise it is not possible to obtain the recognition that victims of racism aspire for. You cannot ask to be accepted on ‘equal’ terms with white society irrespective of race when this society has structured its very mode of seeing in racial terms. Fanon’s insight that racism is a product of specific social relations that take on a life of their own is inseparable from his insistence that it is impossible to get to the ‘universal’ – a world of genuine intersubjectivity – unless the particular is embraced and asserted without reservation, as an absolute. Yet the critical point is that this ‘absolute’ is not closed – it is not an end-in-itself. That is because the ‘substantial absoluity’ that Fanon speaks of is imbued with negativity. By grappling with the negativity found in your subordinate position it becomes possible to discover the energizing force that takes you simultaneously into yourself and out of yourself. That is, by getting in touch with the negativity that inheres in you by virtue of being a demeaned and degraded subject, it becomes possible to experience absolute negativity. Absolute negativity subjects everything to criticism – not just the Other but also your response to the Other. Partial negativity (which Hegel refers to as ‘first’ or ‘abstract’ negativity) concerns itself with the external barriers to emancipation – while leaving the limitations of the self untouched. But by opening yourself up to the negativity that inheres in your status as an oppressed subject, it becomes possible to become critical not just of the external enemy but also of your initial efforts to overcome it. Negativity ‘in general’ is directed against external barriers; but absolute negativity calls into question the internal ones posited by your own subjectivity. This, it seems to me, is the kind of negativity Fanon wants us to experience.

The journey from the particular to the universal is difficult to navigate, but it is the only way to break the chains of racism (with its accompanying tendencies toward self-hatred and self-denigration) and connect to the freedom struggles of others. As Fanon put it in his last book: ‘National consciousness that is not nationalism is the only thing that will give us an international dimension’ (Fanon, 2008b: 179).

The quest for the absolute explored by Fanon is no pursuit of a disembodied abstraction. It is the pursuit of what is most innermost to humanity – our human potential – which capitalism has alienated us from. What makes Fanon our contemporary is his understanding that any freedom struggle that does not posit a new humanism leads to a dead end – and the same is true of any effort to reach such a goal by skipping over the particular demands, struggles and subjectivities of specific forces of revolt. All the more reason to turn anew to the dialectic, posit ourselves as an element of the contradiction, and navigate the difficult road that leads from the affirmation of the particular to the achievement of a new humanism.