Yo I’m reading the wretched of the earth now and I’m having trouble understanding something. Fanon refers to colonizers repeatedly as “manichaean”, and I don’t understand why. The only meaning I know for that word is in reference to a now extinct central Asian religion. Are you able to help me understand better what Fanon means when he uses this term?
i cant remember specifically with fanon, but people generally use manichean to describe very black-and-white thinking about good and evil (which i guess was one of the big parts of that religion)
Good decision. Sakai’s ideas are anti-revolutionary at worst and anti social at best. He played a part in helping prevent any serious attempt at the formation of a working class party in the imperial core since the 80s
I do somewhat agree with the logic though, that the primary contradiction is colonizer vs. colonized, imperial nations vs. occupied nations, and that the proletariat in the imperial core has been thoroughly indoctrinated with bourgeois propaganda and roped into bourgeois financial assets (someone on here once told me that 40% of workers in the USA have a 401K which is technically an indirect form of owning means of production in the form of stocks). I think it gets somewhat overstated. Like the idea that white people can’t be proles despite their relationship to the means of production seems a bit excessive. Like exactly the type of narrative I would promote if I wanted to divide the proletariat in the imperial core on racial lines, and breed a lot of bitterness and bigotry between people.
the primary contradiction is colonizer vs. colonized, imperial nations vs. occupied nations
where does that leave Europe though which has nations that have imperial hold but locally don’t have any people that were displaced America and Israel are settler nations but France isn’t
yes they were colonised and France did brutal things there but the French don’t live their now while Americans displaced the natives and now live where they used to. Which is a limitation of the term settlers as the French by and large didn’t settle the lands they took beyond soldiers and administrators most of whom considered their true homes to be in France and returned there once they were done leaving another Frenchman behind to live where they used to
but they did slightly different brutal things than the Americans and for different reasons and the description of what the Americans did therefore doesn’t apply.
I get what you mean, but I don’t think the difference is slight. Like, Algeria is fucked up by the French. Billions in wealth stolen, millions killed, culture destroyed, even today French is still a main language.
But that’s no where near the degree to what happened in NA. Indigenous language barely exist, indigenous “sovereignty” is completely controlled thru the colonizers, and (obviously) most of the people in NA aren’t indigenous whereas most folks in Algeria are Algerian
More importantly, it creates a different relationship to imperialism today (hence neocolonial versus settler colonial)
the settler nature of france’s colonialism was for the large part resolved with independence in the post war period. just because economic exploitation continued through neo-colonial mechanisms doesn’t mean that the french remained settlers.
nah that i can live with, but when youve got stuff like this on literally page 2
The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left.
it really starts to feel like a ranting polemic from some student-group newspaper rather than a serious scholarly work, which is fine if you just want to be entertained by some ranting but then when he starts throwing out statistics etc its very hard not to question whether the sources were chosen because theyre the most accurate or because they align best with the story, and frankly the whole thing felt very very flimsy to me
like yeah maybe theres some unexamined ideological baggage of scholarly authority coming from a very white and classist approach to using the right words to show youre in the club, but it is literally physically impossible to read that paragraph without rolling your eyes
i read the first few pages, was completely unable to take it seriously with all the ‘amerikkka’ stuff etc, went and read wretched of the earth instead
i stand by my decision
Yo I’m reading the wretched of the earth now and I’m having trouble understanding something. Fanon refers to colonizers repeatedly as “manichaean”, and I don’t understand why. The only meaning I know for that word is in reference to a now extinct central Asian religion. Are you able to help me understand better what Fanon means when he uses this term?
i cant remember specifically with fanon, but people generally use manichean to describe very black-and-white thinking about good and evil (which i guess was one of the big parts of that religion)
Oh wow thank you! Now I have to go back and read the first few chapters again with that knowledge. It comes up a lot.
Good decision. Sakai’s ideas are anti-revolutionary at worst and anti social at best. He played a part in helping prevent any serious attempt at the formation of a working class party in the imperial core since the 80s
Wretched of the Earth by Fanon & The Darker Nations by Prashad are both good.
I’ve heard it said that Sakai isn’t even a real person because there’s no pictures of him and his books were distributed by liberal think tanks to black prisoners but that sounds like some tinfoil shit.
I do somewhat agree with the logic though, that the primary contradiction is colonizer vs. colonized, imperial nations vs. occupied nations, and that the proletariat in the imperial core has been thoroughly indoctrinated with bourgeois propaganda and roped into bourgeois financial assets (someone on here once told me that 40% of workers in the USA have a 401K which is technically an indirect form of owning means of production in the form of stocks). I think it gets somewhat overstated. Like the idea that white people can’t be proles despite their relationship to the means of production seems a bit excessive. Like exactly the type of narrative I would promote if I wanted to divide the proletariat in the imperial core on racial lines, and breed a lot of bitterness and bigotry between people.
where does that leave Europe though which has nations that have imperial hold but locally don’t have any people that were displaced America and Israel are settler nations but France isn’t
or nations like China which are liberated
Morroco, Algeria, Tunisia, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Cote D’ivoire, Burkina Faso, Benin, Madagascar, Gabon, Cameroon and others would disagree.
yes they were colonised and France did brutal things there but the French don’t live their now while Americans displaced the natives and now live where they used to. Which is a limitation of the term settlers as the French by and large didn’t settle the lands they took beyond soldiers and administrators most of whom considered their true homes to be in France and returned there once they were done leaving another Frenchman behind to live where they used to
:brow: but?
but they did slightly different brutal things than the Americans and for different reasons and the description of what the Americans did therefore doesn’t apply.
I get what you mean, but I don’t think the difference is slight. Like, Algeria is fucked up by the French. Billions in wealth stolen, millions killed, culture destroyed, even today French is still a main language.
But that’s no where near the degree to what happened in NA. Indigenous language barely exist, indigenous “sovereignty” is completely controlled thru the colonizers, and (obviously) most of the people in NA aren’t indigenous whereas most folks in Algeria are Algerian
More importantly, it creates a different relationship to imperialism today (hence neocolonial versus settler colonial)
the settler nature of france’s colonialism was for the large part resolved with independence in the post war period. just because economic exploitation continued through neo-colonial mechanisms doesn’t mean that the french remained settlers.
I hope a single k in amerika won’t stop you from reading Assata Shakur
nah that i can live with, but when youve got stuff like this on literally page 2
it really starts to feel like a ranting polemic from some student-group newspaper rather than a serious scholarly work, which is fine if you just want to be entertained by some ranting but then when he starts throwing out statistics etc its very hard not to question whether the sources were chosen because theyre the most accurate or because they align best with the story, and frankly the whole thing felt very very flimsy to me
like yeah maybe theres some unexamined ideological baggage of scholarly authority coming from a very white and classist approach to using the right words to show youre in the club, but it is literally physically impossible to read that paragraph without rolling your eyes