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Wait we’re book clubbing The Wretched of the Earth?!!? Since when?

I wish I had some notice to read. Mods should sticky this, also @Othello@hexbear.net it really helps to ping all the accounts that expressed interest, and to separate in time a deadline for reading chapter 2 and the discussion of it. That’s what we used to do for our old book clubs.

Edit: a link to one of the threads for the last book club for reference

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.

Also since I missed the last one, y’all should make sure to watch Concerning Violence: 9 Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defence (2014), it’s a documentary based on the essay On Violence (chapter one). You can stream it for free on Kanopy if you have a library card.

Another Wretched of the Earth Chapter Discussion This one is my favorite so far (which I’ll get into in at the end.) Again my breadth of analysis is a bit limited as a first-time read but here are some of my understandings based on a few of the discussion questions. All quotes have been taken from the Farrington translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth

1. Who is the lumpenproletariat? Why are the essential to a revolution, why is discounting their potential a mistake?

The Lumpenproletariat, writes Fanon, are composed of the dispossessed masses of growing rural populations, with either no physical holdings, or social ties of their own, or those who are affected by policies of colonial expropriation, and who exist within the periphery in urban centers, most often in conditions of poverty (“…that fraction of the peasant population which is blocked on the outer fringe of the urban centers, that fraction which has not yet succeeded in finding a bone to gnaw in the colonial system.”) who Fanon writes constitutes the “urban spearhead” of rebellion against colonialism. “For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.”

In what ways is the lumpenproletariat so critical as to revolution? First, as Fanon writes: “The constitution of a lumpenproletariat is a phenomenon which obeys its own logic, and neither the brimming activity of the missionaries nor the decrees of the central government can check its growth.” I think here the key word that Fanon uses here is growth. Perhaps I’m reading a bit too much from just a single word, but my understanding of land dispossession, resource expropriation, and the associating rising poverty and social alienation that follows said policies by compradors of colonial rule, are social issues that increase in both intensity and popular discontent, with a continued colonialist or neocolonialist administration.

Fanon also writes, the lumpenproletariat are a class that is unafraid of violence and action. “These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood. They won’t become reformed characters to please colonial society, fitting in with the morality of its rulers; quite on the contrary, they take for granted the impossibility of their entering the city save by hand grenades and revolvers.” Harkening back the the first chapter, “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” and the lumpenproletariat, a dispossessed class, one socially alienated from the colonial governance that they are subject to, and one that is unafraid of violence, and who, as a growing class exists at the edges of urban society constitute a potentially revolutionary portion of the urban population that plays a key role in social movements in opposition to colonial/neocolonial administration:

“The outbreak of the rebellion in the towns changes the nature of the struggle. Whereas before the colonialist troops were entirely concerned with the country districts, we now see them falling back in haste on the towns in order to ensure the safety of the town population and their property. The forces of repression spread out; danger is present everywhere; now it’s the very soil of the nation, the whole of the colony, which goes into a trance. The armed groups of peasants look on while the mailed fist loses its grip. The rising in the towns is like an unhoped-for gas balloon.”

On the other hand, why is brushing aside the lumpenproletariat as a class significant to an urban portion of resistance to colonialism or neocolonialism? Fanon writes that if the movement for national liberation does not reach out to the lumpenproletariat, than the foreign colonialists will (" If this available reserve of human effort is not immediately organized by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired soldiers side by side with the colonial troops.") He cites the recruitment of lumpenproletariats in social and military roles aiding foreign powers: by the French in Algeria, by the Portuguese in Angola, and by the Belgians in the presence of lumpenproletariat in mass-meetings in opposition to Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the former Republic of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) Fanon writes of the tenacity of the colonizers in exploiting intranational and regional conflicts to divide popular discontent in order to quash it and that they too see the potential of the lumpenproletariat as tools of violence that can be directed toward a resisting colony:

“The enemy is aware of ideological weaknesses, for he analyzes the forces of rebellion and studies more and more carefully the aggregate enemy which makes up a colonial people; he is also aware of the spiritual instability of certain layers of the population. The enemy discovers the existence, side by side with the disciplined and well-organized advance guard of rebellion, of a mass of men whose participation is constantly at the mercy of their being for too long accustomed to physiological wretchedness, humiliation, and irresponsibility. The enemy is ready to pay a high price for the services of this mass.”

2. Who are the urban proletariat? what kind of positions do they have? why do they represent the “bourgeoisie fraction of the colonized population”?

Fanon writes that the urban proletariat as a class within a colonized state differs in comparison the the urban proletariat within the Western capitalist state. Specifically, Fanon writes that the small, growing urban proletariat (described within the text as “embryonic”) are key members within the colonized populace that allows the administration by colonizers to function smoothly, and that within the colonized population, they are a class “which has been most pampered by the colonial regime” as potential compradors. Some of the roles that this urban proletariat include key occupations that allow for resource extraction and expropriation (in text examples of “dockers,” “miners”) occupations that maintains the functioning infrastructure within these urban centers ( in text as “tram conductors” “taxi drivers” “nurses”) as well as occupations that directly deal with the colonialists themselves (in text as “interpreters.”) The urban proletariat within a colonized nation, as the beneficiaries of the scraps given by foreign corporations and colonizing governments, are the ones most amenable Western ideology: “Their way of thinking is already marked in many points by the comparatively well-to-do class, distinguished by technical advances, that they spring from. Here ‘modern ideas’ reign.”

The rural populace is distrustful of the urban proletariat, writes Fanon: they think of the urban proletariat as without morals, who adopts Europeans conventions, their ideology, their clothing, their language, as traitors to national heritage and values and who get along with occupying powers and make do within the framework of a colonial system. Fanon writes that this is not the classic rural-urban divide, that colonialism creates a new tension: “Here, we are not dealing with the old antagonism between town and country; it is the antagonism which exists between the native who is excluded from the advantages of colonialism and his counterpart who manages to turn colonial exploitation to his account.” This tension is not lost on colonizing powers, who seeks to make use of this conflict to further divide the rural and urban population to quash resistance to colonial rule.

1.Who is the lumpenproletariat? Why are they essential to a revolution, why is discounting their potential a mistake? The lumpenproletariat are a subclass within the peasant masses that live in the city and have been separated from their rural land. The lumpenproletariat are the unemployed, sexworkers, and transents. Who are the urban proletariat? what kind of positions do they have? why do they represent the “bourgeoisie fraction of the colonized population”? The urban proletariat is the most privileged group of the colonized. They are technicians, manual workers, intellectuals,m and tradespeople mainly living in town who Fanon identifies as the main clientele of the nationalist parties.

Who are the rural masses, why are they often a hindrance to revolutions in the past, why are they also crucial? What role do witch doctors and tribal chief play in the lives of the rural masses? The rural masses are those who live outside of urban centers, and tend to be ruled by tradition. The rural masses are impoverished and marginalized, who tend not to respect outside authority in colonized countries. Local chieftans and witch doctors can be bribed to lead the rural masses astray and have their own incentives to prevent revolutionary action that would challenge their power. The influence of this rural elite presents a challenge to revolution as they tend to collaborate with colonial powers.

Where will the political education of the masses come from? Why is it important? Fanon argues that the revolutionary minority within urban centers, after having been driven out of the cities, will find their way out of the urban centers and to rural areas. Fanon argues that this revolutionary minority will educate the rural masses and that these revolutionaries will educate the rural masses, completing the dialectic that governs the development of an armed struggle. This dynamic personally reminds me of the Cuban revolution, as most of the revolutionaries had tried to work within the system before being pushed out through political violence and often had to hide and retreat into rural areas. What is the weakness of spontaneity? Spontaneity, Fanon argues, is unable to provide a coherent and sustained strategy for revolution. The colonized people are so used to being treated as dirt that any concession by the colonial government is often treated like a victory. The militant has to be there to talk to the people so that they are not led astray by the smallest of concessions.