Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins

Master-Slave Dialectics (in the Colonies)

Mariana Teixeira

I did a complete diagnosis of my sickness.

I wanted to be typically black – that was out of the question.

I wanted to be white – that was a joke.

And when I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me.

They proved to me that my effort was nothing but a term in the dialectic.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

 

The conservative, and even reactionary, potential of Hegel’s philosophy has been frequently brought to the foreground. It is patent that he espoused highly detrimental views towards women, African and Asian peoples for example, and his overall philosophical project is seen by some as aiming at a justification of the status quo. It is equally indisputable, however, that Hegelian thought was quite often relied upon (if not uncritically) by thinkers eager to transform the existing social order – Marx and the Marxist tradition being arguably the most remarkable case. But the critical appropriation of Hegelian philosophy is not the prerogative of advocates of a proletarian revolution. Representatives of anti-colonialism1 and feminism, for example, have also relied upon a reshaped dialectic to formulate their own approaches to social domination and resistance. Within anti-colonialism, the work of Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon provides a remarkably rich and pregnant broadening of traditional interpretations of both Hegel and Marx.

The figure of the Master-Slave (or Lord-Bondsman) relationship, as presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, holds a privileged place in this respect.2 In Hegel’s famous passage, the achievement of an independent self-consciousness is seen not only as an intersubjective process, motivated by a desire for recognition by the other, but also as an essentially conflictual one: each consciousness strives to assert its self-certainty, initially, through the exclusion and elimination of all that is other; each thus seeks the death of the other, putting at the same time its own life at stake. This struggle to the death can lead either to the complete annihilation of one consciousness (or both), whereby the process of mutual recognition will never be complete, or to one consciousness surrendering to the other in the face of fear of imminent death, thus becoming the slave (Knecht). The other becomes the master (Herr), since he showed no fear of death and thus has not degraded himself to the level of mere physical existence. The master however depends on the slave – not only for the satisfaction of his material needs, but also for his recognition as an independent being. His self-sufficiency is hence only apparent. The slave, by contrast, becomes aware of himself as an independent self-consciousness by means of the transformative, fear-propelled labouring of the natural and material world.

The fact that this passage has so often appealed to subversive, critical thinkers can be referred not least to Hegel’s assertion that the slave has a (potential) advantage over the master. While Marx did not address this specific passage in detail,3 a reading of such a figure inspired by Marx is certainly recognizable in the works of, among others, Kojève and Sartre, two key figures in the intellectual climate of post-war France – and for Fanon as well. Central to this approach is an analogy between the Hegelian slave and the worker under capitalism. If for Hegel the slave’s cultivating labour is what makes him an independent being, so the proletarian, analogously, can only free himself from class domination upon the realization that he is the real subject of production. Beyond Hegel, however, this approach requires that the proletariat act upon this realization, enforcing, through class struggle, the recognition of his independent being by the ruling class – hence leading to a classless, emancipated society.

For Fanon, however, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (Fanon 2004, 5). In line with this remark, his reading of the Master-Slave dialectic brings new elements to the foreground. The conflictual and intersubjective model of human subjectivity-formation developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit is recast by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, but the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic works in his 1952 book as a contrasting foil rather than as a model for the relation between the settler and the colonized, the white master and the black slave. And this is for at least two reasons. First, Fanon notes that the black man has been freed from slavery and recognized as a person without a struggle to the death: “The black man is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude. The white man is a master who allowed his slaves to eat at his table” (Fanon 2008, 194). The black man’s recognition is merely legal, thus formal and incomplete. Solely through struggle, in Fanon’s view, will the black man achieve real recognition. The only solution for the black man working in the sugar-cane plantations in Martinique is to fight, “because quite simply he cannot conceive his life otherwise than as a kind of combat against exploitation, poverty, and hunger” (ibid., 199). Fanon thereby gives an emancipatory twist to social struggle: for Hegel, the struggle is what posits the asymmetrical relation between the self-consciousnesses in the first place; for Fanon, on the contrary, the power asymmetry is prior to the struggle that can lead to real reciprocal recognition.

If the only way to liberation is struggle, the second sense in which Fanon departs from Hegel can help in explaining what prevents such struggle from taking place. While Hegel’s slave turns away from the master and towards the object (i.e. his creative work), the black man turns away from the object and towards the master; he wants to be like his master, which makes him even “less independent than the Hegelian slave” (ibid., 195). The colonized black subject is socialized in a world where the white man is the identification model of everything that is good, pure, and active, and thus shares the collective unconsciousness of the European. Hence, “[a]fter having been a slave of the white man, he enslaves himself” (ibid., 168). Fanon thereby introduces a psychoanalytically construed ideological dimension, that he calls ‘alienation,’ which under the social-historical circumstances of colonialism blocks the dialectical movement from developing toward the struggle that could lead to reciprocal recognition.

By pointing (1) to the structural-objective inequality between white settler and black native that exists prior to any emancipatory combat, and (2) to the ideological-subjective distortion of the black man’s sense of personhood that tends to block the very onset of social struggle and dialectical movement, can Fanon be said to have solely ‘slightly stretched’ Marx’s theory?

Fanon’s criticism of Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks encapsulates, as it were, the complex relation between anti-colonial activism and Marxism, and can shed some light on what is at stake here. In his 1948 ‘Black Orpheus,’ Sartre takes the notion of race as subjective, relative and particular, as “the weak stage of a dialectical progression” that will only resolve itself in the objective, positive and universal notion of class (Sartre apud Fanon 2008 111, 112). Fanon is left exasperated with his friend, this “born Hegelian” who “had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness” (Fanon 2008, 111). Sartre forgets moreover, says Fanon, “that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man,” adding that “[t]hough Sartre’s speculations on the existence of ‘the Other’ remain correct […], their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious because the white man is not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master, whether real or imaginary” (ibid., 117).

While in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Sartre rejects his earlier downplaying of anti-colonial activism,4 the tensions between the latter and the official Left in France grew even stronger during the Algerian War of Independence. In the conclusion of his last and most influential book, Fanon states that workers in the metropole were reticent in supporting the liberation of the colonies because they “believed they too were part of the prodigious adventure of the European Spirit.” Fanon then exhorts his fellow anti-colonial militants to – literally and metaphorically – leave Europe: “Comrades, let us flee this stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo” (Fanon 2004, 237). In this sense, Fanon is urging colonized peoples to turn their backs on their masters and to engage in an experiment of creative protagonism and radical imagination. His book’s last sentence hence reads: “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man” (ibid., 239).

It is crucial to note, however, that Fanon does not argue for the abandonment, from a particularistic perspective, of the Marxist account of dialectics and class struggle. Quite the contrary: he insists that Marxist intellectuals and activists live up to their universalistic claims, expanding their scope beyond the particular experience of the European, white working class. For this reason, Fanon cannot be considered an advocate of identity politics in any narrow sense, but rather a proponent of a strong humanist universalism, which inscribes him within the broad Left-Hegelian dialectical tradition.

In any case, more than a mere ‘slight stretch’ of hegemonic Marxism, Fanon’s oeuvre shows us that racialized colonialism is an integral, and not merely incidental, part of Western capitalism – a theoretical movement that critically destabilizes any stage-like narrative of historical development. After all, capitalism without racism or colonialism has only existed in the thought-experiments of those who forget Marx’s admonitions against purely logical abstract categories. From this perspective, to decolonize Marxism does not mean to ‘add colour’ (quite literally, in this case) to an otherwise untouched framework. It means rather to be able to see that colour has played, from the outset, a key role in the very composition of that framework.

 

 

Referenties

Arthur, Chris. 1983. “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology.” New Left Review 142: 67-75.

Bernasconi, Robert. 1998. “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti.” In Hegel After Derrida, edited by Stuart Barnett, 41-63. New York: Routledge.

Bird-Pollan, Stefan. 2012. “Fanon: Colonialism and the Critical Ideals of German Idealism.” Critical Horizons 13 (3): 377-399.

———. 2015. Hegel, Freud and Fanon. The Dialectic of Emancipation. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Brennan, Timothy. 2014. Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Buchwalter, Andrew. 2009. “Is Hegel’s Philosophy of History Eurocentric?” In Hegel and History, edited by W. Dudley, 87-110. Albany: SUNY.

Ciccariello-Maher, George. 2006. “The Internal Limits of the European Gaze: Intellectuals and the Colonial Difference.” Radical Philosophy Review 9 (2): 139-65.

———. 2017. Decolonizing Dialectics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1996 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin.

Fanon, Frantz. 2008 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.


———. 2004 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Gibson, Nigel. 2002. “Dialectical Impasses: Turning the Table on Hegel and the Black.” Parallax 8 (2): 30-45.


Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

Güven, Ferit. 2003. “Hegel and the Dialectic of Racism.” In Proceedings of The Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 2, edited by William McBride, 51-47. Istanbul: Philosophy Documentation Center.

Harris, Henry, S. 1991. “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Religion.” In Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel, edited by J. Walker, 89-112. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

———. 1902 [1837]. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. London: George Bell and Sons.

Honneth, Axel. 1995 [1992]. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Hudis, Peter. 2017. “Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Hegelian Marxism.” Critical Sociology 43 (6): 865-873.

Hyppolite, Jean. 1974 [1946]. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1969 [1955]. Studies on Marx and Hegel. Translated by John O’Neill. New York: Harper & Row.

James, C. L. R. 1980 [1948]. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill.

Kleinberg, Ethan, 2003. “Kojève and Fanon: The Desire for Recognition and the Fact of Blackness.” In French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, edited by T. Stovall and G. van den Abbeele, 115-128. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Kojève, Alexandre. 1969 [1947]. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1954 [1941]. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

McLellan, David. 1970. Marx before Marxism. London: MacMillan.

Mowad, Nicholas. 2013. “The Place of Nationality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics and Religion: A Defense of Hegel on the Charges of National Chauvinism and Racism.” In Hegel on Religion and Politics, edited by A. Nuzzo, 157-185. Albany: SUNY.

Rabaka, Reiland. 2011. “Revolutionary Fanonism. On Fanon’s Modification of Marxism and Decolonization of Democratic Socialism.” Socialism and Democracy 25 (1): 126-145.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1956 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by H. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.

———. 1965 [1948]. “Black Orpheus.” Translated by John McCombie. The Massachusetts Review, 6 (1): 13-52.

———. 1961. “Preface.” In: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Stone, Alison. 2017. “Hegel and Colonialism.” Hegel Bulletin: 1-24.

Tibebu, Teshale. 2010. Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Further reading

Alvarez, Lina. 2016. “La conception de l’histoire et l’importance de l’espace chez F. Fanon. Une contribution décoloniale au matérialisme historique.” AUC Interpretationes: 31-54.

Agathangelou, Anna M. 2016. “Fanon on Decolonization and Revolution: Bodies and Dialectics.” Globalizations 13 (1): 110-128.

Anderson, Kevin. 2010. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry 26 (4): 821-865.

De Laurentiis, Allegra. 2014. “Race in Hegel: Text and Context.” In Philosophie Nach Kant: Neue Wege zum Verständnis von Kants Transzendental- und Moralphilosophie, edited by M. Egger, 607-639. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Dussel, Enrique, 1993. “Eurocentrism and Modernity.” Boundary 2 20 (3): 65-76.

———. 1998. “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity.” In The Cultures of Modernity, edited by Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 3-31. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gibson, Nigel. 1999. “Beyond Manicheanism. Dialectics in the thought of Frantz Fanon.” Journal of Political Ideologies 4 (3): 337-364.

———. 1999. “Radical Mutations: Fanon’s Untidy Dialectic of History.” In Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, edited by N. Gibson, 408-446. New York: Humanity Books.

Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York and London: Routledge.

Hoffheimer, Michael H. 2001. “Hegel, Race, Genocide.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 39: 35-62.

———. 2005. “Race and Law in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion.” In Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, edited by Andrew Valls, 194-215. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Honenberger, Phillip. 2007. “Le Nègre et Hegel. Fanon on Hegel, Colonialism, and the Dialectics of Recognition.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5 (3): 153-162.

James, C. L. R. 1989 [1938]. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage.

López, Alfred J. 2013. “Occupying Reality: Fanon Reading Hegel.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (1): 71-78.

Lovato, Brian. 2015. Democracy, Dialectics, and Difference: Hegel, Marx, and 21st Century Social Movements. London: Routledge.

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Marasco, Robyn. 2015. The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel. New York: Columbia University Press.

Monahan, Michael ed. 2017. Creolizing Hegel. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Parris, LaRose T. 2011. “Frantz Fanon. Existentialist, Dialectician, and Revolutionary.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4 (7): 4-23.

Purtschert, Patricia. 2010. “On the Limit of Spirit: Hegel’s Racism Revisited.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (9): 1039-1051.

Robinson, Cedric. 2000 [1983]. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Sekyi-Otu, Ato. 1997. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2014. “Fanon Reading Hegel.” In Readings, 28-66. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Turner, Lou. 1989. “Frantz Fanon’s Journey into Hegel’s ‘Night of the Absolute’.” Quarterly Journal of Ideology 13 (4): 47-63.

———. 1996. “On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited by L. Gordon, T. Sharpley-Whiting, and R. White, 134-151. Oxford: Blackwell.


Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000 [1979]. “Fanon and the Revolutionary Class.” In The Essential Wallerstein, 14-32. New York: New Press.

Noten

1] I use the term ‘anti-colonialism’ to refer to the various critical approaches towards racialized colonialism, including post- and de-colonial theories.

2] While some argue that Hegel’s explicit racism in his philosophy of world history (Hegel 1902) cannot be separated from the remainder of his oeuvre – dialectics itself being a colonial method (Güven 2003), based on a racist anthropology (Bernasconi 1998; Tibebu 2010) –, others attempt to show either that Hegel’s philosophy, and even his Weltgeschichte, are not inherently Eurocentric (Buchwalter 2009, Mowad 2013) or that his Eurocentrism can be excused due to the historical circumstances under which Hegel penned his considerations towards Africa, Asia and ‘The New World’ (Harris 1991). Stone (2017) provides a welcome balanced stance towards this issue. Several authors have recently stressed the fertility, regardless of Hegel’s original intention, of Hegelian and Left-Hegelian dialectics for anti-colonial concerns (e.g. Bird-Pollan 2012 and 2015; Brennan 2014; Ciccariello-Maher 2017; Gibson 2002; Hudis 2017; Kleinberg 2003; Rabaka 2011). Besides Fanon, C.L.R. James (1980), W.E.B. du Bois (1996), and Paul Gilroy (1993) have also famously engaged with the Hegelian or Left-Hegelian dialectical tradition with a critical, anti-colonial intent.

3] Few topics in Marx’s oeuvre are consensually interpreted, thus escaping controversy. The role of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic is no exception. Besides Sartre (1956) and Kojève (1969), other prominent authors – such as Marcuse (1954), Hyppolite (1974, 1969), and more recently Honneth (1995) –, as well as an extensive secondary literature, seem to take it for granted that Marx was profoundly influenced by it. Others have tried to counter what they see as a gross misinterpretation by pointing out that Marx hardly mentions that famous passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit, let alone gives it a central place (cf. Arthur 1983, McLellan 1971). Putting to one side the question of whether the author of Capital really took the Master-Slave relationship as a pivotal figure in his theoretical framework, the very fact that this (‘mis’)interpretation could be so widespread suggests that the Master-Slave dialectic has at least a considerable affinity with Marx’s thought.

4] Sartre now regards decolonization movements (rather than class struggle) as “the last stage of the dialectic” (Sartre 1961, lxii; cf. also Ciccariello-Maher 2006).

Biografie

Mariana Teixeira

Mariana Teixeira is Associate Researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, in São Paulo, and was a Visiting Researcher at the Free University-Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Campinas (Brazil) with a dissertation on social pathologies, suffering, and resistance in the work of Axel Honneth. Mariana has published on critical theory, Marxism, post-colonialism, and feminism, and is a member of the editorial board of the academic journals Ideias and Dissonancia: Critical Theory Journal.