Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, by Irene L. Gendzier (Wildwood House paperback, £1.75)
As with Malcolm X, the ideas and writings of Frantz Fanon became much more widely known after his death in the early sixties than during his lifetime.
Fanon was born into an upper middle class family in Martinique - an island typical of the West Indies in so far as it possessed a graduated hierarchy of colour" closely relited to class divisions. At the age of 18 he involved with the "Free French" forces and by 1947 had migrated to France to purwe his studies in psychotherapy.
Although he had been politically active in Martinique, supporting, for instance, the 1946 election campaign of Aime Cesaire, one of the theoreticians of "Negritude", Fanon's commitment was essentially determined by his experiences in France and later in Algeria as doctor in charge of a mental hospital. In his final years until his death of leukaemia in 1961 he operated in Tunisia and elsewhere in a full time capacity on behalf of the Algerian FLN.
VOCATIONAL PREOCCUPATIONS Gendzier's study makes it clear how closely related was Fanon's political evolution to his vocational preoccupations as a psychiatrist. In his first book Black Skins, White Masks (1952), he was concerned to expose through a number of detailed case studies, the way in which colonialism has conditioned the consciousness of the colonised through imposing a mental disposition towards imitation, as LATIN AMERICA REVIEW OF BOOKS is a new publishing imprint, jointly sponsored by Books of Leeds and Latin America Newsletters. Our first titles are:
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Throughout his work Fanon continually retumed to psychological the mes. The fifth chapter of his last and most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, is titled "The Colonial War and Mental Disorders" and constitutes a vivid account of the way in which colonialism was a fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals"
OTHER ASPECTS To Gendzier (and also to this reviewer) it is above all Fanon's vivid portrayal of such effects of colonialism which appears to possess the most enduring value and to give his work continued topicality. Other aspects have however frequently been drawn to the TOTe In the 1972 edition of Socialist Register, for instance, Peter Worsley develops a lengthy Lumpenproletariat". In this he argues for the increasing relevance of Fanon's characterisation of the urban working class in the Third World' as possessing a privileged status which will decrease its revolutionary potential. This position led to the idealisation, developed at length in The Wretched of the Earth, of the role of the peasantry and urban "underclass" as the key factor in revolutionary movements. This particular theory is essentially misleading because it poses the working class and "lumpen" proletariat as polar opposites instead of the complementary and intermingled phenomena which they are in such countries. It is singularly inappropriate when throughout the Third World, most obviously in those areas like Latin America and Southern Africa which are subject to the most intensive exploitation by imperialism, it is increasingly the working class which is coming to the fore in struggle.
Of more enduring value was Fanon's analysis of the role of the bourgeoisie in Third World countries - one which in The Wretched of the Farth he develops into a full scale attack on the "depravation of the national middle class" and its inability to lead genuinely revolutionary struggles which would totally root out imperialist influence. While the conclusions here are essentially those of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, two things are clearly lacking from Fanon's analysis. Firstly there is never any real explanation of the objective economic circumstances which underpin this situation, making this class totally dependent servants of imperialism. Secondly, although one chapter of The Wretched of the Earth is entitled "Spontaneity, Its Strengths and Weaknesses", it does not deal in any substantial fashion with the need for party building activity. Wherever the need for centralisation of the struggle is posed more stress is laid on military than on political functions.
AMBIGUITY Such weaknesses derive from the fact, which Gendzier is at pains to point out, that in spite of his undoubted familiarity with the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Fanon never characterised himself as a marxist. Precisely this ambiguity characteristic of Fanon is seen in his latest 'biographer'. The book contains a very thorough exposition of Fanon's views on the above and other topics. It is carefully researched on the details of his life. pretensions to being a "Critical Study" are in some doubt.
In view of the continued influence of Fanon such a study written from a marxist viewpoint would clearly be of some importance. But this book fails to relate his ideas to contemporary political developments or to subject them to rigorous analysis in the light of the history of the past twelve years. Not the least indication of this weakness is that one is left after 270 pages quite uncertain about Gendzier's actual political stance. The definitive study of Fanon's work from a marxist standpoint still awaits its author. Tony Southall