• gammison [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Yeah the use of Fanon to justify authoritarian state socialism is a hot take. I mean Fanon was a Marxist humanist. Not to mention Fanon wrote about the pitfalls of one party states and relying on centralized charismatic leaderships in decolonial movements.

    • FUCKTHEPAINTUP [any]
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      4 years ago

      The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s answer to the problem of corruption within authoritarian socialism. It worked brilliantly, but came a bit too late.

      Fanon, like Mao, uses dialectics to justify revolutionary violence. They were contemporaries. Fanon’s existentialism developed out of the surrounding Maoism. I’m fairly sure Fanon did some reading on guerrilla war. They come to very similar conclusions, but Fanon gets there through existentialism.

      ... I’m being too nice.

      Fanon has been upheld by Maoists all over the West for the last fifty years. Fanon was a Third Worldist. He’s on the Maoist Intermediate reading list in every org that I know of. What are you trying to pull?

      We’re supposed to believe that the preferred theorist of the Black Panthers was a “Marxist Humanist”!

      • gammison [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        Yes Fanon was a Marxist Humanist. His Marxist Humanism was at the center of his work. It's all over every book he wrote. Here's a good resource on it: https://www.jstor.org/stable/273824 https://books.google.com/books?id=Y6qGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=Fanon+marxist+humanism&source=bl&ots=ZFCYeqgqOj&sig=ACfU3U2Sv4XGKPVEB7oG_Fp1LlXv7ulveA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjUpeLW9qXrAhVRPK0KHep2A8YQ6AEwFHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=Fanon%20marxist%20humanism&f=false

        If you don't see the radical humanism, that is explicitly labeled as such in his work by himself, I don't what to tell you. This is a well established fact of his writing. His work on the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization are all from an explicitly radically humanist perspective. Fanon's writing on alienation is classically following from the 1844 manuscripts. He is firmly in the Marxist Humanist tradition. Dunayevskaya, the classic Marxist Humanist constantly mentioned him, and wrote forwards for later developments of his work, such as Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought.

        • FUCKTHEPAINTUP [any]
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          4 years ago

          You’re a difficult one!

          Of course Fanon is a radical humanist. So was Mao. So was uh, Shakespeare? Jesus was a radical humanist.

          Marxist-Humanism has made important contributions to the left. Subjectivity is a core component of academic Maoism and Marxist-Humanism and Structuralism and the New Left. It all overlaps.

          However, Marxist-Humanism has a dual character. There are revolutionary and counter-revolutionaries within that school of thought.

          Can we compromise and say that Fanon was a revolutionary Marxist-Humanist?