I’m reading through The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, and the points he’s making are great… but they’re also pretty bog standard anarchist theory. What’s more, he keeps using anarchist as a pejorative, but it seems inconsistent and vague…
In the industrialized countries the peasant masses are generally the least politically conscious, the least organized as well as the most anarchistic elements. They are characterized by a series of features —individualism, lack of discipline, the love of money, fits of rage, and deep depression — defining an objectively reactionary behavior.
At the first signs of a skirmish, the leaders are quick to call them juvenile hotheads. But because these demands are neither juvenile nor hotheaded, the revolutionary elements articulating them are rapidly isolated and removed. The leaders cloaked in their experience ruthlessly reject “these upstarts, these anarchists.”
There is a brutality and contempt for subtleties and individual cases which is typically revolutionary, but there is another type of brutality with surprising resemblances to the first one which is typically counterrevolutionary, adventurist, and anarchist. If this pure, total brutality is not immediately contained it will, without fail, bring down the movement within a few weeks.
I’m not the most familiar with anarchism in Africa at that time, is this because anarchism at that time and place meant something different? Is this another impact of black anarchists taking the mantle from the syndicalists after Catalonia? Is this reactionary? Or is it something else entirely?
I’m reading through The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, and the points he’s making are great… but they’re also pretty bog standard anarchist theory. What’s more, he keeps using anarchist as a pejorative, but it seems inconsistent and vague…
Fanon wasn’t an anarchist though. He clearly thought that a vanguard party was needed to overthrow the old order and that a new revolutionary state be build by the party. What he differed was that the vanguard party would also ossify the new revolutionary state after the old order has been overthrown. He viewed the vanguard party and revolutionary state more like a ladder that could and should be discarded once it has served its purpose.
yes.
Weren’t they like libertarian socialists back then? iirc anarchist became more of a thing after the decline of the USSR when socialism became uncool
I’m not a history expert, so grain of salt, but Libertarian socialism would be more 19th century. The Wretched of the Earth would presumably be written in the 50s, which would be during the Spanish Diaspora but before the anarchist resurgence of the 1960s.
There were two major resurgences of anarchism due to the USSR losing favor. The first was in the 69s with Anarcho-Feminism and Black Anarchism, then in the 90s with anti-globalism. But anarchism was debatably the most popular during the syndicalist period before the Spanish diaspora. (Debatably because we don’t actually know how many anarchists there were / are in latin America. It might be more.)
