Frantz Fanon

From MarxWiki

(1925-1961) Psychiatrist, revolutionary, and author of numerous books on the subject of liberation philosophy, including Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1952) Black Skin, White Masks (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Toward the African Revolution (1964).

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, a former colony of the French empire, in 1925. After fighting in the guerilla movement against pro-Vichy and Nazi supporters, Fanon traveled to Paris and Lyon to study medicine and psychiatry. In 1952 he moved to Algeria to practice psychiatry and became involved in the liberation movement to overthrow French rule. During this time he founded the first psychiatric clinic in Algeria, an element that would surface in many of his works.

Fanon believed that violent revolution was the only means to liberation for the Third World. He espoused the use of force to overthrow colonizers and what he viewed was a perversion of rationalist Enlightenment thought. While living in Algeria he visited guerilla camps, trained fighters and nurses, and was severely wounded in 1959 on the Algerian-Moroccan border. His book The Wretched of the Earth was hailed as the “handbook for black revolution” and was based on Fanon’s experiences fighting and working at his clinic. Using the philosophical discourse of Marxism, Fanon examined class relations, hegemony, and nationalism to produce what Jean-Paul Sartre called a clinical diagnosis of what was wrong with the West and colonialism. In this work Fanon warned of replacing colonizers with native governments trained by Europeans. These leaders, Fanon stated, would utilize effectively the same class structure that had existed before the revolution, whose sole aim was to maintain hegemony and repress the masses .

The book became a huge success and inspired a great number of thinkers in the Liberation movement as well as the civil rights movement. Fanon diverges from other schools of Marxist thought such as Leninism and Maoism in that he does not believe that the Communist Party will be the instrument of revolution. Instead, Fanon writes that those who have been pushed to the bottom of the barrel, the lumpenproletariat, will be the agents of change in a dominated society.