Fanon: Absorption and Coloniality

Fanon’s significance to the present moment seems to me to hinge in large part on his identification of the lumpenproletariat as revolutionary subject, an identification that was anathema then (and largely remains so now) to traditional Marxism. Surely all remember Marx’s magnificent litany in the Eighteenth Brumaire of “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass,” subject to the sway of whoever held the day, notably Bonaparte, “chief of the Paris lumpen proletariat” (Marx 2003, 170–71).

We could treat Marx’s assessment of the structural position of the lumpenproletariat as a historical invariant, as some have, meaning that Fanon must cleave from Marx’s understanding of class. Or we could consider that the situation surveyed by Fanon in 1961, extending from the Caribbean to Africa, Maghreb and Mashreq—a situation of racialized colonization—was still capitalism but one sufficiently distinct that we could allow him such a claim about the lumpen then and there, while recognizing that this claim would have little purchase in the “developed” nations in Europe, say, or the United States. That is to say, we could have a historical rather than static approach to the contours of class.

Once we have allowed this, we are able to admit of present debates, particularly those endeavoring to rethink the relation between capitalism and colonization in both in the former First World and at the level of the world-system, including the brace of recent “new histories of capitalism” attentive to the role of slavery in capitalism’s formation. We might ask, on behalf of the West’s purveyors of an orthodox socialist class politics and particularly those possessors of a faith in a renewed workers’ party and/or advocates of what is presently called by the awkward post-dialectical term of anti-anti-racism—we might ask the question of whether the world of the capitalist core might now more resemble Fanon’s than it once did, and what that might tell us. My suspicion is that, here in the West, we are closer to Fanon than ever before.

Fanon took the historical violence of colonization to descend from a kind of speciation, “the organization of a Manichaean world” wherein no détente is possible (2004, 43). For the colonized, “There is no question for them of competing with the colonist. They want to take his place” (23). Here already we have a distance between colonial and conventionally western capitalist scenarios, the latter understood as presupposing class competition, both inter and intra, as a driver of development and of accumulation premised on exploitation. In Fanon’s Africa, the lumpen—we shall modulate that name before the end—are excluded rather than exploited. Shanty-town dwellers make their way toward economic centers, condemned nonetheless to “circle the towns tirelessly, hoping that one day or another they will be let in” (81). But they are the lumpen because this does not and cannot happen; the colonized will not be absorbed into the ranks of free labor.

As Fanon points out, “under-developed” nations, upon throwing off formal colonization, often try to develop their way out of this situation toward an absorptive capitalism, premised on the ceaseless gains in productivity that characterize “developed” nations.

The political leader of an underdeveloped country is terror-stricken at the prospect of the long road that lies ahead. He appeals to the people and tells them: “Let us roll up our sleeves and get to work.” Gripped in a kind of creative frenzy the nation plunges into action of a hugely disproportionate nature. The agenda is not only to pull through but to catch up with the other nations as best one can. There is a widespread belief that the European nations have reached their present stage of development as a result of their labors. Let us prove therefore to the world and ourselves that we are capable of the same achievements.

(Fanon 2004, 52)

Shortly they discover their position in the world-system...