Some quotes that I’ve highlighted in my previous reading:

The peasant who stays put defends his traditions stubbornly, and in a colonized society stands for the disciplined element whose interests lie in maintaining the social structure. It is true that this unchanging way of life, which hangs on like grim death to rigid social structures, may occasionally give birth to movements which are based on religious fanaticism or tribal wars. But in their spontaneous movements the country people as a whole remain disciplined and altruistic. The individual stands aside in favor of the community.

What is the reaction of the nationalist parties to this eruption of the peasant masses into the national struggle? We have seen that the majority of nationalist parties have not written into their propaganda the necessity for armed intervention. They do not oppose the continuing of the rebellion, but they content themselves with leaving it to the spontaneous action of the country people. As a whole they treat this new element as a sort of manna fallen from heaven, and pray to goodness that it’ll go on falling. They make the most of the manna, but do not attempt to organize the rebellion. They don’t send leaders into the countryside to educate the people politically, or to increase their awareness or put the struggle onto a higher level. All they do is to hope that, carried onward by its own momentum, the action of the people will not come to a standstill. There is no contamination of the rural movement by the urban movement; each develops according to its own dialectic.

I actually didn’t highlight a whole lot in this chapter, and part of it is because the chapter is about a process of obtaining national liberation. A lot of passages only make sense when viewed within the context of the entire chapter. Likewise, this chapter has to be read alongside the following chapter. This chapter is the “the party form is good and centralization is good actually” while the following chapter is the “the party form is bad and centralization is bad actually” chapter. This contradiction makes sense once you understand that Fanon is a dialectical thinker. The party form makes sense within a given stage of revolutionary struggle but once that stage has been passed and the party form has outlived its usefulness, it starts to become malformative. It’s like how a butterfly has to grow from a caterpillar with an intermediate pupa. A caterpillar, pupa, and butterfly all have different needs and priorities they have to fulfill. You can’t just jump from a caterpillar to a butterfly or feed a caterpillar nectar because that’s what butterflies eat. Each stage of development has to be taken on its own terms. Prefigurative politics is essentially feeding caterpillars nectar and thinking it’ll somehow become a butterfly.

There’s a reverse problem where the stages of development are taken to be immutable and must be rigidly followed. Going back to the butterfly example, the caterpillar stage has different molts called instars, and for some species, some instars can be skipped depending on material conditions. They can’t skip the entire caterpillar stage, but they can skip instars so that the caterpillar stage is fast-tracked. Whether a stage could be skipped or not can only be answered through praxis. It’s not something you can just theorycraft.