Assessing the Legacy of Frantz Fanon w/ Peter Hudis
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- Born in the French West Indies, Frantz Fanon is one of the most significant thinkers to emerge out of the anti-colonial struggles of the second half of the twentieth century. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon became known as an ardent critic of European colonialism and participated in the Algerian struggle for national liberation. However, his work also took a critical stance towards post-colonial elites and their stewardship of the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa. In this episode of This is Revolution, we discuss the meaning and legacy of Fanon’s works and ask what they might teach us today about the global political order.
Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and author of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Brill, 2012) and Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto, 2015). He edited The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (Monthly Review Press, 2004) and The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 2013).
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Seriously, you’re guest was great. Hope you can get him back.
Fantastic guest and great dynamics. Another job well done boys!
23:00!!!!!
Thank you for this super insightful interview. I really need to stop hoarding Fanon’s books and actually read them.
I've only read The Wretched of the Earth so far, and it it changed my life. It is probably my most underlined and highlighted book. Plus he is just an amazing writer.
lol
As always, great job. When will we be seeing your guest on MSN or CNN? Will we be reading his commentary in the editorial pages of the NYT or WaPost soon? Oh, I forgot.
Great show. Brilliant discussion. I'd like to make a case against Fanonism and other forms of race-fetishism, but before I do I want to commend Fanon for the tremendous contribution he's made to our discourse. He is must-read for Leftists. Even BSWM, which I will critique, is important in that he delineates the issue so well. WOTE is one of the important books of the 20th century.
The essence of Fanonism is that race is a thing apart from class; that in order to be properly understood, class analysis, Marxist analysis, must be abandoned or at least stretched; that economic transformation in and of itself will not end racism. Some Fanonists further argue that race is so integral to capitalism that the latter cannot be eliminated without the defeat of the former.
That is a conceit. It may be true, but now, as when Fanon wrote and perhaps ever so, it is unverifiable. There is no tenable argument in its support. In fact, The proofs advanced by CRT and the like have thus far been fantastical (although they can be entertaining). It can rightly be said that class oppression as root cause for racial oppression likewise has, as of yet, not established its bona fides. However, the class-uber-alles school of political economy, to which I belong, directionally is the right approach.
Capitalism is an inequality generation dynamo. As such, it normalizes hierarchy across all segments. Thus racial inequality comports with all the others and appears rational and natural--just another brick in the wall. However, the problem is not the bricks, it's the wall. Bricks are impotent, inconsequential things, it is not until they are constructed into a wall that they become a barrier, have being. Bricks have no power, no agency, no real independent existence apart from their potential to form a wall. It's what bricks are for.
Marx believed that "Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production...they change all social relations." This too may be a conceit, but inescapably the massive changes that socialist transformation would occasion will have effects outside the workplace. Capitalism creates precarity which begets competition which begets antagonism. Capitalism may not be the root of racism, but they are lovers. Socialism, on the other hand, requires cooperation and equality and thus provides the best conditions for the demise of racism. Socialism will change the way races and genders look at each other to at least some degree. The kind of psychological transformations in race relations Fanon (and less able race theorists) discusses cannot be achieved, imho, within a capitalist society, even if everybody desired it. Even if it were possible--and it isn't--that the emancipation of Black labor would grow anti-Blackism, socialism would still be beneficial for Afrikans in that the immense human suffering it would alleviate, by leaps and bounds, would outweigh the increase in interpersonal affronts.
But here's the rub: So what! Even if racism has a life of its own, who cares! It's not worthy of the attention we give it. At a minmum, socialism eliminates the opportunity for any race to oppress another. How can a worker oppress another worker? Those personal antipathies members of one race might feel for another might survive, but this melts into air when compared to the global racist economic system of oppression we experience today. It is obscene to obsess on the former at the expense of the latter when half the world is living on two dollars a day. What self-important, narcissistic creep cares about microagressions when the macroaggressive holocaust that is capitalism is crushing most of the people on the planet. To hell with critical race theory! If you can find a way to purge our species of all prejudice, well that would be just lovely, and I am enough of a romantic to believe that it is possible, but why are we talking about it while around the world people are starving? It is obscene to prioritize race. Those sectarian impulses which might, unfortunately, survive the destruction of capitalism may be ineradicable, and as such a waste of time for leftists, but even if they are vanquishable, it is a matter for post-capitalist discussion. Until then, It's the wall that demands our attention, not the sundry bricks in it.
This was one of your best shows! This show just keeps getting better!
Amazing conversation
As much as I appreciate your podcast, I cannot but notice an irony or contradiction in how the hosts who are delightfully non-academics always bring on an academic, a professor at a US university of standing, for a topic like Fanon- commentary on Fanon or the need to think about his legacy remains relevant to many thinkers and people around the world outside the US & outside academia and many of them speak English moderately well enough for an interview.
why?
This was really great, definitely want to hear more from this guy. Thanks for introducing him to me! ✌️
Wonderful discussion as always.
Good guest! Thanks.
I always learn from this show
Supremely excellent as always. A personal note, I took a course from Cedric Robinson when I was studying theoretical marxism at UCSB in the early 80s. It was the only class I ever routinely fell asleep during. A side note; Cedric's student and co-founder of a radio show, Corey Dubin, was a friend of mine. Corey died years later from a bad blood transfusion. He spent his last years as an AIDS activist.
Good interview. Disagree on the role of the Soviet Union. The very existence of the Soviet Union forced a number of developments in the north in favor of the workers: either we make the concessions or the hut is on fire. And in the second step also with regard to the south.
In general, Pascal's position is much closer to me. Yes, the Stalinist project had to produce contradictions that were difficult to overcome. But in the historical context, it was very likely that development had to happen that way. I have an alphabetic population that I somehow have to educate within twenty years. To do this, I have to build a heavy industry. And all of this should then also enable victory in an unavoidable world war.
What is more often overlooked is the dynamic between leadership and the population. I have a poorly educated population from which the majority of the numerous small leadership figures are recruited. Their ideas of democracy are inevitably rather archaic. At the same time, the memory of the previous states is quite fresh, which contrasts with the new possibilities. There is little interest in individual rights or grace for real or perceived enemies. We have already seen this in the course of the French Revolution.
I fû€king LOVED that segment on Majority Report on Friday, Jason. For real, that was one of the best segments on the show in a while, and I look forward reading that piece! Also, I know it’s “Gen X shit”, but I’m not Gen X (I was born Feb 23, 1987, the day after Warhol died), and you were touching on stuff myself and my elder millennial and younger Gen X friends have discussed many times. I’m just saying, it’s too limiting to just make it a Gen X conversation imo.
Also, you need to write a shorter piece arguing the *fact that “grunge” is NOT a genre of music,* but rather an aesthetic, and/or scene, and/or marketing term/tool! I recently left a comment about this on a thread for a music channel I like, and pretty much every time I do I get people who consider themselves big fans of “grunge music” pushing back, asking me what my credentials are, or mocking me, etc… I don’t care for the most, they’re obviously wrong, but it would be nice to have an actual essay from a longtime musician that goes hard on that point!
Anyway, just a suggestion. (Do it, or I’ll unsubscribe from Patreon!) ✌️❤️🏴♾
Great episode!
theorizing on defeat, would he consider survival during slavery theorizing on defeat? it simply goes hand in hand with being patient for the victory that may not be in one’s lifetime
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Maddone this was a heady one.
19:41
By August 1947 the French Communist Party had set the new course. Now the Ho Chi Minh government became the "First Democracy in Asia," and the Indo-China issue became rapidly involved in the broadening rift between the Soviet Union and the West following the creation of the Marshall Plan and the beginning of American military aid to Greece under the Truman "containment policy." As the battlelines began to form in what now became the "cold war" the P.C.F. line rapidly took on consistency and found the desirable black-white focus. In December 1947 the war in Vietnam now had definitely become an “imperialist" war and the Soviet Union apparently had now become the leading champion of the "anti-imperialists."
The "Peace Offensive" which began in late 1948 and reached full-blown proportions in 1949 merely broadened the front of Communist attacks against French governmental action in Vietnam. Now in addition to being "imperialistic," "anti-democratic" and "Washington-inspired," the war became a "dirty war" (sale guerre), for it was waged against the "forces of peace." Indo-China was a pawn on the international checkerboard of the "struggle for peace" and the preparation of "Western aggression" against the U.S.S.R... the prosecution of the war in Vietnam is integrated in the plans of the imperialist camp to oppress peoples and to prepare war against the Country of Socialism.
From now on, the Party advocated a "hard line," including sabotage and subversion, as clearly expressed in the official organ of the Central Executive Committee in September 1949. The writer first proceeded to restate the historical "fact" that it was "the blows struck by the U.S.S.R. in Manchuria" against the faltering Japanese in the last six days of World War II "which made possible the national insurrection" in Vietnam, and that as it was a "war of national liberation" it was "a just war."
To stop the war, acts are needed. This requires that the whole Party consider the Vietnam war from a Communist viewpoint. . . . By such effective actions the French working class will win the confidence and esteem of the colonial peoples. ... Thus it strengthens its own struggle for freedom, national independence and peace. Official reports, such as the once top-secret Revers Report (written by France's former chief of staff, General Revers, after an inspection tour of Indo-China), show that such statements were not empty threats. In fact, the Revers Report explicitly states that 40 percent of the French equipment that went to Indo-China in 1949 was sabotaged. French trucks for Indo-China arrived with their tires slashed, tanks with loose bolts in their gear-boxes.
Communist sources in Eastern Europe even boasted that one of France's biggest transport ships on the Indo-China run, the Pasteur, smuggled weapons and equipment for the Viet-Minh while it carried reinforcements for the French Army, and even that equipment directly shipped from the United States had arrived in sabotaged condition in Indo-China. Not only did the French Communist Party advocate the perpetration of such acts but it openly admitted the authorship of them.
This was clearly stated by a Communist member of the French Union Assembly, replying to an accusation that subversive acts were committed by the P.C.F.: The war in Vietnam being against the Constitution, any act which tends to stop it is legal. (Applause to the extreme left).
In less than three years the party line of the P.C.F. had gone full circle.
Source* Tribulations of a Party Line: The French Communists and Indo-China by Bernard B. Fall 1955 Council on Foreign Relations
Fanon was a groundbreaking thinker who recognized race and class interactions and who rejected essentialism, as did Malcolm X in his most developed incarnation. Disalienation via negritude has it's limitations, played out in cultural nationalism. Fanon recognized this. A healthy national culture was the ultimate transfotmative factor identified by Fanon by which the collective and the individual recreate themselves. The ultimate destination was a new human condition. Good luck with that. Somebody better get the wheel away from the Captain of the Titanic before he smashes it against the iceberg. And hurry up about it bc you have "a new Captain Bly on a new Ship of Fools", to quote the great Gil Scott Herron, and hes drunk on racial capitalism. Fanon is to racial capitalism what Freud is to Euro Victorian repression. Both men forced us to confront our collective and individual contradictions and blind spots. If only we would heed their words.
Why call it “racial capitalism” when Fanon wasnt talking ab 1950s USA but 1950s Africa and the word is “Colonialism”, you are not Africa Americans..
17:55
Once entrenched in power Nkrumah gradually edged the Gold Coast towards independence while being very careful to do nothing that would frighten the British or force a confrontation between the masses and the imperialists. Nkrumah proved himself to be a “responsible” and “trustworthy” subject of the British in 1953 when at their urging he launched a crack down upon “suspected communists” in the colony. Nkrumah, whose anti-colonial ideological perspective was founded on the work of Marx and Lenin, who had been closely associated with leading Marxist revolutionaries in the US and Britain, and who had been arrested with a blank membership card of the British Communist Party now launched a McCarthyite style purge against the left wing of the CPP and the trade unions in order to placate the colonial authorities and to prove to them that he and the CPP were not planning to rock the boat too much. As Yuri Smertin notes:
he [Nkrumah] announced in the Legislative Assembly that proven communists would be ineligible for jobs in government offices, the police and the army. It was declared illegal to bring "Communist" literature into the country or to distribute publications from the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and other progressive international organizations. Many trade union leaders who were known for their radical views were dismissed."
1947 members of the newly formed United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the leading nationalist organization of the region at that time, invited him (Nkrumah) to take up a key leadership position within their organization. The UGCC was made up of the upper crust of the national bourgeoisie in the Gold Coast, and lobbied Britain to transfer the running of the colony to them as leaders of an independent yet pliant neo-colonial entity.
“In 1951 Nkrumah became “leader of government business” of the Gold Coast and formed a government with the CPP that existed while the British still ran the Gold Coast as a colony and controlled the all important departments of the government including the finances, armed forces, foreign policy and office of the attorney general.” I wonder why Stalin would say such a thing?
Source: A Critical Analysis of The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah by Tom Keefer
thanks for introducing me to this guy! this was really good
Great conversation.