FROM ROSA LUXEMBURG TO FRANTZ FANON

Everything can be explained to the people on condition that they really understand it.

Franz fanon

The Regional Office in Mexico of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung pays tribute to the revolutionary Frantz Fanon, more than half a century after his death, by putting in the hands of readers this set of works by and about this writer whose ideas, despite being influenced in the revolutionary thought of the 1960s and 1970s, they have been unjustly unknown, to some extent, to the history of current political theory.

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is a German political foundation close to the left-wing Die Linke party, which works around the world under the postulates of another revolutionary, from whom it takes its name. In Latin America we have three regional offices: the office in Quito, from where we work in the Andean region; the office in Sao Paulo, from where the work in the Southern Cone is handled; and our office in Mexico that works, from that country, on projects with Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Cuba.

The international work of our Foundation is aimed at political training through the analysis of society, the ideology of democratic and social emancipation, and training for political action in a concrete sense. For this reason, our fields of cooperation include social and democratic participation, conflict prevention and its peaceful resolution.

Our work commitment is directed towards social organizations and movements that, we believe, are the actors with the possibility of promoting changes in most of the countries where we work, where political parties seem to have abandoned ideologies and principles in order to achieve power. and with it the access to the businesses that it allows.

We have different work strategies: on the one hand, with national or local organizations who are part of our group of counterparts; on the other, with small projects with local actors that allow us to link to the grassroots and to the societies of our countries of action. Finally, we also have our own measures, which are initiatives that we plan, promote and execute from our office.

Within this last strategy we channel the work that, since 2012, we have carried out around the International Book Fair of Havana that allows us, each year, to bring a proposal of readings with the aim of articulating the societies of the various countries in which we work.

The proposal made by Felix Valdés to edit this book seemed to us a way of paying homage to a man who tried to explain the world from a critical, transformative, revolutionary and independent perspective. From our perspective, this may be a contribution from a left-wing foundation to keep issues that are current more than half a century after Fanon's untimely death in the debate.

Reading the texts of this writing, which are inspired by critical and revolutionary thinking, allows us today to deepen the necessary debates that problematize decolonization, Marxist thought, marginalization, social inequality, race, class conflicts , language and culture, among other topics.

Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, when the island was still a French colony, and there he experienced the racism of the French naval troops when they settled on his land, a fact that strongly influenced his thinking. He participated in World War II when, at the age of 18, he joined the French Liberation Forces and then the army, where he played a leading role, although such a circumstance would not prevent him from, along with other black companions of his regiment, was subjected to "bleaching." This meant that non-white soldiers were concentrated and segregated, somewhere in Provence. This fact marked Fanon so strongly that he wrote a letter to his parents where he acknowledges having made a mistake by assuring them that “nothing, Absolutely nothing justifies the abrupt decision I made to defend the interests of a large landowner: whether I defend him or not, he does not care ”.

At age 25, he worked hard to support the campaign of his teacher, the communist Aimé Césaire, to join the Assembly of the Fourth French Republic. In 1952, Fanon published one of his best-known works Black Skin, White Masks where he questions the subjugation of the black population and its action in front of its colonizers, a line that was a constant in his texts where he always addressed the domination of the powerful over the weak.

Looking at what has happened in the world since Fanon's death in 1961, it is worth reflecting on how realities of dispossession, injustice, marginalization, brutal colonization, domination and exploitation have been maintained throughout the planet. They have changed in appearance and form, but have been deeply deepened and perfected.

In 1959, his second book, The Year V of the Algerian Revolution, was published, where he accuses France of the massive crimes against the Algerian population fighting for their independence. In addition, the actions of the revolutionaries and all the transformations that take place within a dominated and humiliated society are questioned. This text, although it was banned in France, led to the talk of Fanon in other countries in Africa and even in Latin America.

The Damned of the Earth was the next book published by the author. After his death, his political writings were made known, published in the period between Black Skin, White Masks and The Damned of the Earth, which had seen the light mainly through the newspaper El Moudjahid. This book, under the title For the African Revolution, came out of the press in Paris, edited by François Maspero in 1964 and, a year later, it was translated and published in Mexico by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. These texts and The Damned of the Earth had repercussions on Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Agostino Neto and Nelson Mandela, faithful followers of his ideas.

Fanon was a precursor of the questioning of the colonial model, and also inspired feminism, once he raised the need to found just societies on the integral liberation of women and men. All this means that today we can define it as anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-patriarchal: three postulates that guide the actions of those who today seek the profound transformation of our unjust societies.

For the Rosa Luxemburg office in Mexico, proposing this reading and, more than that, the reflection and debate that may derive from it, seems to us a contribution to the construction of critical and transformative thinking, which is a commitment to our organization with the societies in which we work and a prevailing need to understand and work against domination. In this sense, we share Fanon's criterion of establishing that "All forms of exploitation are identical, because they apply, all equally, to the same 'object': man", and we believe that eliminating this exploitation is a historical and indisputable responsibility. on the left.

Patricia zapata

Project Coordinator for Central America and Cuba, RLS