“There’s hardly humans in humanity,” Jesse Wells, Song, United Health,

In Fanon’s decisive letter of resignation as head of the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria to the Resident Minister of Algeria, he writes, “The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.”^[1] (November 1956)

The last few months in Los Angeles have been marred by ICE brutally occupying the county, abducting people at their jobs, homes, and streets. This is happening in many cities across the United States. The people are fighting back with solidarity, with open revolt. Ours is a county of 10 million people, ⅓ is foreign-born, 1/10 undocumented, with nearly one out of five county residents either being undocumented or living with an undocumented family member.^[2] Rapid response networks that patrol the community and warn folks of impending ICE operations are growing. People are supporting each other with legal and court support, hiding employees, fundraising for those affected and looking out for their kidnapped loved ones when they are in detention.

My local frutero was picked up in late June. All that was left was his empty fruit stand, half-cut watermelon slices spoiling and dripping in the summer heat. His name is Juan. We have since returned his fruit cart to his family. He remains in detention awaiting a legal process that we consider illegitimate.

We cannot underscore the trauma recent ICE kidnappings and open-air assaults have on individuals and whole communities. Fanon’s analysis is relevant to understanding capitalist-colonial structures of the day from Israel’s genocide on Gaza to the abductions of racialized people in the USA, the expansion of carceral and surveillance state through an unholy mariage between public and corporate interests and the violence of all borders. For Fanon, the colonial condition is an enduring, persistent state of trauma, not just a series of traumatic events….a miasmic slog of everyday mundane violence producing a collective trauma. Here I don’t want to suggest that we develop a callousness or ambivalence for it’s our everyday ability to still be outraged, to have empathy, grief and shock that allows us to grasp at our humanity even when it seems that there is none to be had. Indeed, Fanon resigns because of the witnessing of what he called, “systematized de-humanization,” and the on-the-ground conditions, in Algeria, as being the “ the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people.” ^[3] The colonial subject under these deplorable, unacceptable, dehumanizing conditions we currently face are what Dunayevsakaya calls, “Force and Reason” in deepening and advancing anti-colonial struggles and movements. They, like Fanon, do not accept that nothing else can be done.

 

His Marxism & Humanism

We can think of Fanon as a philosopher of racialized capital with a particular focus on colonial social relations. A true dialectician and someone who understood that when it comes to colonialism, the Marxian analysis must be stretched to deal with the colonial context. “In the colonies, the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” (WOTH) Towards this end, Fanon has important thoughts on the question of the psycho-affective dimensions of domination, the reactionary role of the national bourgeois, national consciousness over crude nationalisms, and an enduring commitment to the peasant classes and working classes (Abu-Manneh, 2021)^[4].

Fanon frames anti-colonial struggle as a dialectical relationship between collective and individual self-determination. As anti-colonial scholar Abu-Manneh notes, “He advanced the notion that a real and authentic decolonization would have to result in the emancipation of the individual” (Abu-Manneh, 2021). We can find this in places like Fanon’s Toward the African Revolution where he writes, “The liberation of the individual does not follow national liberation. An authentic liberation exists only to the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his liberation”.  For Fanon, his socialism is his revolutionary humanism. They are not separate political, philosophical or practical projects.

 

Militancy to Meet the Moment

Without a philosophy of revolution, activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for. (Dunayevskaya, 1982, p. 194)

Fanon is indeed a revolutionary philosopher whose contributions remain relevant for our current-day anti-imperial struggles.

1. Our support for anti-imperial projects across the globe, elevating the movement and the politics that undergird it over individual saviors. The question is how to dismantle a client-state and build a people-centered anticapitalist alternative under current fascist conditions. “If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end. A bourgeois leadership of the underdeveloped countries confines the national consciousness to a sterile formalism. Only the massive commitment by men and women to judicious and productive tasks gives form and substance to this consciousness.”  How do we not reproduce a new neo-colonialism? “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that can give us an international dimension.” As a dialectician, he understands that every stage of development relies on the very thing it is critiquing and therefore bears contradictions that have to be overcome in the next stage. With Fanon, the struggle for national consciousness possibly results in oppressive bourgeois nationalisms. We need to study and support anti-colonial movements while also understanding these pitfalls, especially as new states and formations become even more targets of new imperialisms as the western world loosens a hold on it.  In Wretched of the Earth, decolonization would create “a new people”.  People with an entirely different mindset, one suited to freedom rather than submission. Also from WOTH, we understand how mass revolt unites people across regions and tribes, it has a “cleansing force,” and beyond gaining material wins, is important in addressing that psycho-affective dimension, that inferiority complex and passivity that comes along with it for the colonized.
2. The role of the revolutionary organization, along with their other political tasks, should be to work out the philosophy of the organization. Revolutionary organizations should collaborate with other groups in this quest. What does a transition to a people/planet-centered socialism look like? What arrangements, parties, political groupings do we need to build and what will the structure of those political groups take lessons from Fanon, on unfinished revolutions and neocolonial states? Philosopher and Africanist, Achille Mbembe has called for what he calls “planetary consciousness” to address planetarization, which is a totalizing aspect of capital that includes new and endless development of digital ecosystems, making up what he calls platform capitalism. And he asks, “ to what extent can we rely on these infrastructures as parts of the Earth become inhospitable to life in the near future”. To this he suggests something in alignment with Fanon when “ nation-state to individual connection”, a so-called “principle of subsidiarity — subsidiarity in relation to the planetary and in relation to what you call the local, with the nation-state poised somewhat in the middle but reconfigured in such a way as to allow for planetary issues to be addressed planetarily, and for local issues to be resolved where they take the most dramatic form.” Here, I’m reminded of the hyper-local work happening with community self defense networks against ICE, tenants union organizing, mutual aid mobilizing and direct action work. Many involved in these groups consider their local activities to be necessary but not sufficient to build revolutionary organizations and for anti-imperial internationalism. After all, a local struggle against ICE or fences that criminalize houseless people in public is connected to international struggles against borders and state violence and the violence U.S. empire purveys on the world rebounds and is reproduced in our neighborhoods. This is an area of growth for U.S.-based organizations grappling with how to take on local-internationalist politics without centering empire politics or co-opting global majority movements.
3. We need to move beyond representational identity politics or class-first perspectives that don’t reckon with the particularity of racialization under capitalist domination. I also raise this issue because of tendencies to treat the issue of decolonization or expressions like those found in Black consciousness movements in the same way that class is treated, i.e. that present-day class society is a determined transitional stage to move through before attaining the absolute, a classless society. We do not move from the particular to the universal in a linear march. The colonial subject for Fanon can not escape the colonizer’s gaze. This situation goes beyond a self-other paradigm because the colonized is “overdetermined from the outside” and because of this,  the colonial Black subject is not another or even a no one but a nothing. From “inhabiting this zone of none-being”^[5], the colonized subject wants the recognition of the colonizer desperately to the point of taking on his attributes, values, and desiring to be “white”. The recognition never comes from the colonizer and the psychic disorder prevails. This construct has serious psychic consequences as the colonized will often accept their subjugated position as being the natural order of things and to aspire to be like the colonizer.  For Fanon, racism and colonial subjection must be fought both materially and psychically since epidermalization is experienced both psychically and economically saying that, “genuine disalienation will have been achieved when things in the materialist sense have resumed their rightful place”. There’s a caution here, though-not all aspects of these movements were/are progressive. Fanon warns negritude followers of the potential for race essentialism or even elitism, especially when it is expressed outside of material questions. These politics sometimes overshadow the project of dismantling capitalism and overcoming other systems of domination. They can also live quite comfortably and in fact, thrive within the neoliberal order, particularly if the groups seeking recognition limit their demands to matters of culture, inclusion, representation or aesthetics.  I think this warning is relevant to some of our movements captured in non-profiteering or platform capitalism that race, cultural wars advocating for reformism over transcending racialized capital.

We live in worlds where the project of anti-colonialism lies unfinished. Fanon’s conceptualizations of emancipatory humanism,  the“new human”,  a“new society” suggests that we need to place less value on predetermined political programs and more on human subjects and their ability to theoretically and practically work out their problems. Dunayevskaya’s work becomes very important here, not only because she recognized the revolutionary humanism of Fanon’s anti-racist, anti-colonial philosophy but also because she takes the activities of the masses seriously and does not rely solely on intellectuals’ positions. Our task as revolutionaries is to project better alternatives that take the everyday material conditions of folks seriously and to “recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it” (Dunayevskaya[1965] 2012:73).  As I understand it, we’re reaching beyond the politics of recognition, beyond the politics of redistribution of resources, beyond colonizers just leaving the land and for total emancipation that can not be achieved without a concerted anti-imperial people-centered life-affirming struggle overcoming the “ false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.”.

 

Other References

 

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism.Trans. Joan Pinkham. This version was published by Monthly Review Press: New York and London, 1972. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme by Éditeurs Presence Africaine, 1955.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. [1965]2012. The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse  Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, K.B.

Anderson and R. Rockwell (Eds.). Maryland: Lexington.

 

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom. Edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Translated by Steve Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

 

Haddour, Azzedine. Frantz Fanon, Gender, Torture and the Biopolitics of Colonialism. London: Pluto, 2025.

Hudis, Peter (2021). The Revolutionary Humanism of Frantz Fanon. https://imhojournal.org/articles/the-revolutionary-humanism-of-frantz-fanon/

Hudis, Peter (2022). How Frantz Fanon Was Transformed by the Algerian Revolution.

https://imhojournal.org/articles/how-frantz-fanon-was-transformed-by-the-algerian-revolution/

 

Mbembe, Achille (2022). Interview: How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness. https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/

^[1] https://monoskop.org/images/0/05/Fanon_Frantz_Toward_the_African_Revolution_1967.pdf

^[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/06/09/la-immigrants-population-demographics-protest/84114134007/

^[3] https://monoskop.org/images/0/05/Fanon_Frantz_Toward_the_African_Revolution_1967.pdf

^[4] https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/05/who-owns-frantz-fanons-legacy

^[5]  https://monoskop.org/images/a/a5/Fanon_Frantz_Black_Skin_White_Masks_1986.pdf