Frantz Fanon in the Present Movement

Peter Hudis

Frantz Fanon:
Combat Breathing
By Nigel Gibson
Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2024, 356 pages, $24.95 paperback.

IT IS OFTEN said that the history of a work of art, politics or philosophy is the history of its interpretation, and the same can be said of the reception of the authors who compose them. This is especially the case with Frantz Fanon, born 100 years ago on July 20, 1925.

When his works first were first translated into English in the 1960s, Fanon was heralded for his uncompromising opposition to colonialism and support for revolutionary violence, with many viewing his works as a kind of manual of Third World revolution.

By the 1980s and 1990s, when the hopes for social revolution receded, Fanon became embraced by postcolonial theorists, often at the cost of bracketing his revolutionary optimism in anointing him as a critic of nationalism, communism, and liberal humanism.

The resurgence of anti-racist struggles and movements over the past two decades in the United States and overseas has produced a fuller and more balanced assessment of Fanon’s legacy, seeing him as providing crucial insights for ongoing efforts to combat racial oppression — from defunding police and prison abolition to opposing genocidal imperialist wars and the racism that infects all levels of capitalist society.

Nigel Gibson’s Combat Breathing is a welcome addition to this growing body of work. The title is hardly accidental: He argues that Fanon’s “new humanism” — not to be confused with the old humanism that speaks of “the dignity of humanity” while slaughtering humanity wherever it finds it — is an invaluable guide to combatting conditions that have led many people of color to have their breath taken from them by the racism that is endemic to modern society.

The Meeting of Society and Psychiatry

Combat Breathing covers the full expanse of Fanon’s life and work, from his youth in racially polarized Martinique to his studies in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to his role as psychiatrist, revolutionary theorist, and activist in Algeria and sub-Sahara Africa from the mid-1950s to his death in 1961.

Although his study lacks the comprehensiveness and literary quality of Adam Shatz’s new biography, it provides detailed summaries and commentaries on Fanon’s works while situating them in their historical context. Its most important contribution consists in demonstrating the integrality of Fanon’s sociogenic critique of racism and colonialism with his work as a theoretician and practitioner of psychiatry.

Gibson persuasively argues that the primary innovation of Fanon “is to argue that a psychoanalytic approach is necessary to understand Black alienation, while emphasizing the centrality of a sociodiagnostic approach connected to fundamentally changing society.” (67) This follows from the specificity of anti-Black racism. Victims of racism are marginalized in not being truly seen, since they are viewed in terms of socially constructed notions of race that assume their inferiority.

Racial oppression thereby differs from class oppression, even if they often overlap. Workers are denied their product of labor and control over the labor process, whereas Black people are denied their very being. This zone of non-being renders their humanity invisible precisely because the epidermis is all too visible.

This lack of recognition (not in a juridical but an existential sense) often leads to a lack of self-esteem and an inferiority complex. While Fanon acknowledges that racism is grounded in socio-economic conditions, he argues that liberation entails not only political or economic emancipation but most of all ending the depersonalization of the individual.

Here is where psychiatry meets politics, and where social critique become grounded in what he called a “new humanism.” Fanon’s humanism is most of all witnessed in his focus on overcoming alienation. As he put it, “only from this zone of non-being…can an authentic liberation be born.”

Social psychiatry, like radical politics, must be the midwife to this birth. Hence, from his earliest writing, Fanon envisioned a process of disalienation that is thoroughly democratic. This is reflected in his psychiatric practice at mental hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia, in which his “humanistic psychotherapy [was] based on a fundamental belief that the patient’s self-liberation could be accomplished in a socialized setting.” (77)

Following the approach of his mentor, the Marxist activist and psychiatrist Francois Toquelles, Fanon held that “everyone (including patients) had to be involved in decision-making about every aspect of the institution, including the seemingly mundane.” (75)

His work in the clinic was no mere professional appendage to an otherwise political career — it informed it, as seen in the radically democratic social perspectives that characterized such later works as A Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth.

Debating Race and Class

A major debate concerns Fanon’s view of the relation between race and class. Did he prioritize racial consciousness at the expense of class, or did he break from the cultural nationalism and particularism found in tendencies like Négritude in favor of working-class agency?

The issue comes into focus in Fanon’s response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” an introduction to a collection of writings by those in the Négritude movement.

After praising the collection for its expose of white racism, Sartre refers to the anti-racist struggle as a “weak stage” of the dialectic since “the notion of race does not intersect with class” and that race is “concrete and particular” whereas class is “universal and abstract.” Négritude is a but a transition to the higher goal of proletarian revolution.

Fanon is deeply offended, writing in Black Skin, White Masks, “Black consciousness claims to be an absolute density, full of itself… My Black consciousness does not claim to be a loss.”(1) He adds, “I needed to lose myself totally in Négritude.” (Black Skin, 113)

Gibson comments, “Sartre already had a conclusion waiting — class universalism — without thinking through how the wealth of Black consciousness fundamentally gives content to and changes the form of universalism.” (116)

He also (correctly in my view) rejects the claim that Fanon later came around to Sartre’s position. To be sure, by 1955 (three years after the publication of Black Skin, White Masks) Fanon was done with Négritude because of its essentialism and disavowal of revolutionary politics. And that is because Fanon was for the first time involved in an actual revolutionary movement in being part of Algeria’s Front for National Liberation (FLN).

Négritude’s cultural nationalism seemed anachronistic now that Fanon was dedicated to a national struggle against imperialism. But just as Black Skin, White Masks upholds the power of negativity immanent in Black consciousness, The Wretched of the Earth upholds the power of negativity immanent in revolutionary national consciousness.

The latter is not a “weak stage”; instead, its development provides the revolutionary force and reason that can make possible the move from national consciousness to social consciousness.

A good Hegelian, Fanon understood that “consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute.” (Black Skin, 112) For those inhabiting a zone of non-being, the absolute is imbued with negativity. This negativity drives the resistance to racial and national degradation and acts as an impetus for moving from national liberation to social revolution, without in any way leaving aside the former’s importance.

As he states in The Wretched of the Earth, “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.”(2)

From National Liberation to Socialist Revolution

Of course, it is very hard to accomplish a move from national to social transformation. Fanon was oppressively aware of the many barriers standing in its way. There was neocolonialism, which was already working to subvert the newly independent African states; the poverty and underdevelopment generated by centuries of colonialism; and the problem of the national bourgeoisie, which was too weak and unreliable to advance the interests of the peasants, workers, women and youth.

Fanon therefore insists that the stage of bourgeois nationalist rule be skipped, declaring, “We must once again come back to the Marxist formula. The triumphant middle classes are the most impetuous, the most enterprising, the most annexationist in the world.”(3)

Clearly, Fanon was raising the need for the national revolutions to achieve a transition to socialism. What else could “skipping” the bourgeoise phase of development possibly mean?

He was not exploring these issues in a vacuum. Debates raged throughout the continent at the time over the meaning of and prospects for socialism. It ranged from Leopold Senghor’s reformist quasi-socialism to the Marxist-Leninism that became predominant in several post-independent states, while others argued that Africa must define its own version of socialism without relying on European models.

One of the shortcomings of Gibson’s book is that it does not situate Fanon’s work during the last years of his life within this broader debate. Nevertheless, he properly summarizes Fanon’s basic conception of a new society:

1) The masses must have direct input in administrating the state. Citizens must have the freedom to “meet, discuss, put forward suggestions and receive instructions [and] must have the opportunity to speak, to express themselves and innovate.” (Wretched, 133)

2) The leadership must “elevate the minds of the masses” through educational initiatives that encourage them to explore theoretical issues.

3) Women must “be given equal importance to men, not in articles of a constitution, but in daily life, at the factory, in schools, in assemblies.” (Wretched, 142) Fanon proclaims, “total liberation must involve every facet of the [human] personality.” (Wretched, 233)

4) The economy must be “decentralized to the utmost.” While some nationalization is needed, “it must not take on the aspect of rigid state control.” (Wretched, 123)

5) Decentralized cooperatives should predominate.

All of this is integral to humanizing the labor process. He writes, “labor must be recovered as the humanization of man. Man, when he throws himself into work, fecundates natures, but he fecundates himself also.”(4)

One point that Gibson does not address is Fanon’s view that the African revolutions desperately need assistance from overseas. Fanon writes, “All the colonial countries that are waging the struggle today must know that the political independence that they will wring from the enemy… is only a snare and a delusion” unless “the world strategy of coalition [is taken] into account…a new humanism can be achieved only at this price.”(5)

He was not the first to make this point. Marx did so in his writings on the Russian village commune in the 1880s, as did Lenin in 1920, when he stated, “With the aid of the proletariat of the most advanced countries, the [technologically] backward countries may pass to the Soviet, and after passing through a definite stage of development, to Communism, without passing through the capitalist stage of development.”(6)

Yet Fanon could hardly count on the European workers to come to the aid of the African revolutions, since in France they were dominated by Socialist and Communist parties that supported the state’s suppression of the Algerian Revolution. Although small groups of dissident communists (such as the Trotskyist PCI) and some anarchists provided active support to the FLN (often at great personal risk to themselves), Fanon paid them little attention.

So how to proceed, given that the only other source of aid seemed to be the superpowers, with agendas of their own?

This is a very difficult issue — one that has bedeviled every revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America since at least the 1940s. Fanon takes a tentative stab in The Wretched of the Earth: “The basic issue with which we are faced is not the unequivocal choice between socialism and capitalism such as they have been defined by men from different continents.” (Wretched, 55)

Africa must define its own version of socialism without taking sides between “East” and “West”: it should aim to receive “generous investments and technical aid” from the latter while accepting whatever support it can expect from the former. (Wretched, 61)

Dialectics of Organization

Fanon prophetically proclaimed that if national consciousness “does not very quickly turn into social and political consciousness, into humanism, it leads to a dead end.” (Wretched, 144)

What especially worried him was the problem of organization. Although he supported a single party or front, such as the FLN, in leading the struggle for independence, he viewed it as a danger following the attainment of national independence.

He writes, “The single party is the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship — stripped of mask, makeup, and scruples, cynical in every respect.” (Wretched, 111) Sooner or later the single party “skips the parliamentary phase and chooses a national-socialist-type dictatorship.” (Wretched, 116)

Gibson comments on this as follows: “By 1961, pan-Africanists like Nkrumah and Toure were also calling for a single party, and Fanon was withering in his criticism…each saw decision-making coming down from the top and carried out by the ranks.” (273-4)

This may well be true of them, but nowhere does Fanon criticize them in The Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961. Nor does he criticize the FLN, even though it was a hierarchical organization that physically crushed internal dissent, as seen in its murder of Ramdane Abane, the secular socialist who was Fanon’s political mentor in the FLN.

Gibson is right that the logic of Fanon’s argument applies to all of them. But that leaves unanswered the question, why did he subsume any open criticism of their organizational forms and practices when they were at variance with his principles?

The answer is hardly mysterious. Fanon was completely devoted to the FLN (and closely allied with Nkrumah and Touré) because they were at the vanguard of the African revolutions and he knew any criticism of them would be used by the imperialists to divide and harm the movement. That simply was not an option for him. As he put it:

“There are no clean hands, no innocent bystanders. We are all in the process of dirtying our hands in the quagmire of our soil and the terrifying void of our minds. Any bystander is a coward or a traitor.’” (Wretched, 140)

Given the contradiction confronting him, Fanon can hardly be condemned for acting as he did. But that cannot be used to pretend that the contradiction didn’t exist.

There is no dialectic of organization without contradiction — and the contradiction that has confronted many revolutionaries when it comes to organization is staying true to spontaneous forms of self-activity, while affirming the need for an organization or party of some kind that can give their action a direction.

After all, a vision of a transition to socialism that embodies the kind of humanist principles enunciated by Fanon does not simply arise through spontaneous action. And this Fanon well knew, since he clearly upheld the need for both spontaneity and organization.

Nevertheless, it can hardly be claimed that Fanon resolved the problem of dialectics of organization; he was rather caught up within its antinomies. Gibson glides over this contradiction, with the result that his discussion falls short of addressing a critical issue that continues to plague radical activists today.

What we can affirm today, after 100 years of aborted and unfinished revolutions, is that socialism without humanism leads to a dead end — a humanist perspective which does not explicitly embrace a socialist alternative to capitalism remains an abstraction.

At the book’s beginning Gibson writes:

“Radical Humanism calls not only for political organization, but also, crucially, for an image of a future society based on human foundations that must be worked out and discussed with the people…involved in the struggle for liberation.” (xii)

It can be argued that an image of a future society cannot be worked out with those actively involved in the struggle unless political organizations define their central and overriding task as helping to provide one.

Achieving that goal may remain an untrodden path — radical parties rarely define their role as developing a philosophically grounded vision of an alternative to capitalism — but exploring Fanon’s life and work anew can assist the effort to work it out today.

Notes

1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), 113-114.
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2. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 179.
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3. Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 187.
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4. Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, eds. Jean Khalfa and J.C. Young (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 530.

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5. Toward the African Revolution, 125-6.
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6. V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: International Publishers, 1943), 243.
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September-October 2025, ATC 238