Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961): The “We” Against the Oppressors — Toward an Anti-Capitalist Theory

As S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo writes in We Are the Third Force (2006):

“For us, the most important struggle is to be recognised as human beings. During the struggle prior to 1994 there were only two levels, two classes—the rich and the poor. Now after the election there are three classes — the poor, the middle class and the rich. The poor have been isolated from the middle class. We are becoming more poor and the rest are becoming more rich. We are on our own. We are completely on our own.”

Or as it has been written—from erasure into community, from silence into speech, from “nobody” into “we.”

This erasure—as a word of ultimate violence—resonates in the country I come from, Slovenia, within the European Union. The term “erasure” became the foundation of an act of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Slovenian state in 1992 against approximately 25,000 people, mostly from other republics of the former Yugoslavia, who lost their legal status overnight following Slovenia’s independence. Stripped of citizenship, residency, and social rights, they were rendered stateless and invisible within the new nation-state, deprived of healthcare, housing, and identity documents. Their erasure stands as one of the most striking examples of bureaucratic violence in post-socialist Europe.

This group of people came to be known as the Erased (Izbrisani in Slovenian). For decades, they lived in a paradoxical state—alive yet socially dead, stripped of all rights, money, social and health benefits, laid bare at the center of the new state, without any recognition. This is why Fanon’s thought resonates so powerfully in the Slovenian context: the Izbrisani, the Erased, embody a contemporary manifestation of the wretched of the earth within the new history of Europe (Fanon 1963). Their condition recalls what James C. Scott (1985) called the “weapons of the weak,” subtle forms of survival and resistance that emerge under systems of domination, and aligns with S’bu Zikode’s (2006) claim that “we are the third force,” a declaration of political presence from the margins.

In this sense, the Izbrisani inscribe a wound into the European project itself. This unhealed scar exposes the contradictions of its democratic self-image, echoing the poetic force of Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom (1986), where silence becomes both testimony and resistance. This is Fanon’s legacy—a thought born from below, from bodies that resist invisibility. As James Scott wrote, resistance always begins close to the ground, in the realities of everyday experience. There, in the silence of the oppressed, Fanon’s voice still echoes.

The Central Question: How is the “We” Constituted?

A critical entry point into Frantz Omar Fanon’s work is his insistence that any emancipatory politics must begin with the social production of a collective we. Fanon’s “we” remains an open category—a community of thought, creation, and resistance. It is not an opponent, but a process of emancipation.

In the spirit of Derek Walcott’s 1979 poem The Schooner Flight—“Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” This line has become iconic in postcolonial theory and literature, expressing the tension between individuality and collective identity, between personal loss and historical consciousness. Again, “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Fanon’s “we” becomes the foundation of a true human community.

Today, as we experience what Santiago López Petit defines as “postmodern fascism”— the ultimate fragmentation of contemporary capitalist societies, which exploits social atomization, identity crises, and institutional erosion while maintaining neoliberal economic structures—we must strive toward a different way of thinking that parallels those of Fanon and Walcott: “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a community.” 

This verse beautifully summarizes Fanon’s idea of the subject who, through the struggle against colonialism, is reborn as a political subject—not as an individual, but as part of a community, as a “nation.” In times of murderous and racialized nationalism, we must begin to think about community and the commons.

This “we” is not a pre-existing ethnic, racial, or national identity; it is a political formation forged through struggle.

Turbo, covert, soft, fascist, or racist nationalism has clearly shown its face, and here perhaps lies the path toward a different vision—a vision to strengthen communities of the dispossessed, racialized, and disempowered, to oppose and fight back.

For Fanon, colonialism destroys the conditions necessary for collectivities by producing atomized subjects, disciplined through violence and racial hierarchies. The task of liberation is therefore not merely to remove the colonizer but to reconstruct the conditions for political subjectivity.

The “we” emerges through:

—shared experience of dispossession under racial-colonial capitalism,  

—collective engagement in revolutionary praxis,

— and commitment to transforming the social order, not simply managing its colonial legacy.

This formulation remains significant today because it rejects both essentialism and liberal individualism. The “we” is neither given nor spontaneous – it is built, performed, and defended.

Revolutionary Thinker

Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, a French overseas territory whose colonial condition persists to this day. Growing up within the stratified racial order of the French Antilles, Fanon experienced firsthand the contradictions of French republican universalism. He fought with the Free French Forces during World War II, later studied psychiatry in Lyon, and eventually worked at the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria.

His immersion in the Algerian War of Independence profoundly shaped his thinking: he joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) and developed a radical critique of colonialism as a total structure—material, political, and psychical.

Fanon died on 6 December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of thirty-six. Despite his short life, his writings remain foundational for analyses of racism, decolonization, anticolonial revolution, and the global logics of capital. His works became foundational for postcolonial studies and profoundly influenced anticolonial movements.

Fanon’s book Les damnés de la terre (its title taken from the first line of The Internationale) is one of his most famous works, written in 1961 and translated into English in 1963. The book emerged during the Algerian struggle for independence, shortly before Fanon’s death. The Wretched of the Earth is both a political manifesto and a theoretical analysis of colonial power. Fanon, a psychiatrist, philosopher, and militant, merges psychoanalytic insight with the political practice of the Algerian liberation struggle.

Fanon’s writing raises questions about the relationship between violence, humanization, and emancipation—questions that, amid global inequalities, remain as relevant as ever. Fanon elaborates in a political context:

“We must become convinced that colonialism is incapable of procuring for the colonized peoples the material conditions which might make them forget their concern for dignity. Once colonialism has realized where its tactics of social reform are leading, we see it falling back on its old reflexes, reinforcing police effectiveness, bringing up troops, and setting a reign of terror which is better adapted to its interests and its psychology.” (Fanon 1963, 208)

The Wretched of the Earth develops this insight into a comprehensive analysis of colonial domination and the conditions for liberation. Fanon argues that colonialism is a system sustained by structural violence—military, economic, and psychological—and that this violence dehumanizes both the colonized and the colonizer.

The book examines how revolutionary struggle becomes a process of rehumanization, allowing the oppressed to reclaim agency, dignity, and political subjectivity. Fanon critiques the limitations of reform, warns against the emergence of a national bourgeoisie that reproduces colonial hierarchies after independence, and calls for a radical transformation of society that dismantles both colonial power and the capitalist structures intertwined with it.

Ultimately, The Wretched of the Earth is a study of how emancipation requires collective struggle, the creation of new social relations, and the refusal of both colonial and postcolonial forms of domination.

Fanon’s chapter “On Violence” is deliberately stark because it challenges liberal assumptions that decolonization can occur through negotiation, reform, or moral persuasion. He writes:

“National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” (Fanon 1963, 35)

By stating this, Fanon emphasizes that the colonial order was established and sustained through violence – military conquest, expropriation, forced labor, racial hierarchies, and ongoing coercion. Therefore, the liberation struggles must confront this foundational violence; violence is not inherently desirable, but it is structurally embedded in the colonial system.

Fanon does not present violence as an ethical ideal but as a historical inevitability. The colonial world is divided into two poles—the colonizer and the colonized—and the existence of the colonial structure depends on violence. Dialogue or compromise is impossible; colonialism recognizes only force. This is not a glorification of struggle but an analysis showing that, through revolutionary action, the colonized person transcends the status of object and enters the realm of subjectivity.

Fanon analyzes how the national bourgeoisie often becomes a mediator of foreign interests, thereby maintaining exploitative structures:

“After independence, the party sinks into an extraordinary lethargy. The militants are only called upon when so-called popular manifestations are afoot, or international conferences, or independence celebrations. The local party leaders are given administrative posts, the party becomes an administration, and the militants disappear into the crowd and take the empty title of citizen.” (Fanon 1963, 171)

Fanon exposes how the white supremacist system—or regime of whiteness—governs colonies. He advocates a radical break with colonial culture:

“What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.” (Fanon 1963, 98) 

What is at Stake for the Oppressed? Beyond National Independence

Fanon argues that liberation movements must confront not only colonial power but also the economic, psychological, and symbolic systems that sustain it. The oppressed seek the restoration of subjectivity, the reappropriation of land, labor, and dignity, and the creation of new forms of life. Colonialism imposes a racialized ontology that positions the colonized as non-beings. Fanon exposes how this psychic violence becomes internalized, producing alienation, self-contempt, and a disfigured relationship to the world. Liberation, therefore, requires a reestablishment of self that cannot be achieved through assimilation, but only through radical transformation.

Fanon interprets colonialism as an extractive regime embedded within global capitalism. The liberation of the colonized must include not only political sovereignty but also the redistribution of resources, the reorganization of labor, and the dismantling of racialized class structures. Fanon’s critique extends to the bourgeois national elite, which he regards as incapable of sustaining genuine liberation; instead, national independence often becomes a gateway for neocolonial capitalism. The oppressed thus struggle for a new social horizon—one that breaks with the inherited logics of the colonial state, including its gendered and racialized hierarchies. This analysis resonates across contexts: the U.S. Black radical tradition’s critique of racial capitalism, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and debates on migration, race, and capital within post-socialist Europe, including Slovenia.

 Intellectual Environments and the Reception of Fanon

Upon its release, the French government censored The Wretched of the Earth, which is why critics often note that it was in the United States—the “land of lynching,” as Fanon called it—that his works achieved global recognition. There he found his first and last home: born in the Caribbean, he died in an American hospital, and was “reborn” in the revolutionary movements of the 1960s.

David Macey, in his biography Fanon: A Life (2000), described Fanon’s knowledge of the United States as minimal, based mainly on literary sources. Homi K. Bhabha took a similar approach in his foreword to the 2004 edition of The Wretched of the Earth, dismissing Fanon’s revolutionary humanism as anachronistic.

The two English translations of Fanon’s work—Constance Farrington (1963) and Richard Philcox (2004)—show that translation is not neutral; translators make political and cultural choices.

Macey and Bhabha, shaped by structuralism and post-structuralism, often found Fanon “naive” or “banal” because his writing was direct and rooted in political urgency rather than abstraction. Yet this immediacy is precisely why Fanon remains powerful.

In 1995, French-Algerian director Cheikh Djemai produced Frantz Fanon: His Life, His Struggle, His Work. The film draws on archival materials to highlight Fanon’s role in the Algerian revolution.

Fanon became the voice of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism. Disillusioned by racism in the French army, he embraced radical politics, existentialism, and Négritude. His Black Skin, White Masks (1952) remains one of the most powerful analyses of racism and internalized subordination.

In Algeria, Fanon treated victims and perpetrators of violence. After his expulsion in 1956, he moved to Tunis, where he wrote for El Moudjahid and founded the first psychiatric clinic in Africa.

His books L’an 5 de la révolution algérienne (1959) and Les damnés de la terre (1961) were effectively “spoken works”—dictated, then transcribed.

He was criticized by elements of the French left for his analyses of Algeria, Islam, and the countryside, but he remained influential.

Nigel C. Gibson (2011) emphasized that Fanon’s thought remains vital—from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo.

In the United States, Fanon’s writings fueled Black Power, anti-war movements, and the rise of Black Studies.

At Blida-Joinville hospital, Fanon developed sociotherapy grounded in community life but soon confronted a society pathologized by colonial rule. In 2024, Abdenour Zahzah’s True Chronicles of the Psychiatric Hospital Blida-Joinville dramatized this period.

Recruited by Ramdane Abane, Fanon envisioned a democratic Algeria based on citizenship rather than ethnicity or religion.

In the 1960s, The Wretched of the Earth became required reading for the Black Panther Party. Kathleen Cleaver wrote that Fanon legitimized the uprisings of the oppressed.

Fanon’s “we” remains an open category—resonating across struggles.

Afterlives of Fanon’s Thought: Transnational Resonances

Fanon’s theories articulate the structural bonds between racism, colonialism, and capitalism. His work has shaped:

—Algerian revolutionary movements, where psychiatry and politics intersected;

—U.S. Black Power and abolitionist movements;

—South African anti-apartheid struggles, especially through Black Consciousness;

—contemporary European debates on migration, borders, and neocolonial state formations.

Across these contexts, Fanon’s “we”—a political force confronting structural oppression—remains one of the most potent tools for articulating collective agency.

Conclusion

Fanon reminded us that liberation is a process of rehumanization. His famous statement remains relevant:

“Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” (Fanon 1963, 206)

To “actualize” Fanon means confronting contemporary forms of colonial violence—border regimes, economic inequalities, racialized policing, and digital surveillance.

This requires building a situated and coalitional “we.” No single group can face global crises alone; solidarity across struggles is essential. In Europe, we must confront how the continent continues to reproduce colonial hierarchies. To speak of “we” is an ethical and political commitment – to join the ongoing struggle for rehumanization and to assume our place in the long arc of liberation that Fanon envisioned.

*A version of this text was presented at the roundtable marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frantz Fanon, organized by Zavod Divja misel at Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 22 October 2025. A version in the Slovenian language is published  in Mešanec (contributing to a common),  Ljubljana, Slovenia, a critical online magazine edited by Kristina Božič. https://mesanec.si/brati-frantza-fanona-danes-nujnost/

Dr. Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theoretician, and artist from Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a prominent contemporary theoretical and critical figure in Slovenia. Since 1993, she has been employed at the Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts.  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4703-4390

References

Bhabha, Homi K. “Foreword.” In The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
 Gibson, Nigel C. “50 years later: Fanon’s legacy,” Pambazuka, 21.12.2011.
 Macey, David. Fanon: A Life. London: Verso, 2000.
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
 Walcott, Derek. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.
 Zikode, S’bu. “We Are the Third Force.” Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2006.