Frantz Fanon and the Crisis of Our Current Transitional Period

July 20^th 2025 was the 100^th birthday of Frantz Fanon that remarkable thinker, writer psychoanalyst and revolutionary from the Caribbean Island of Martinique. There were many celebrations of this very special milestone in many venues across the world, including the big one organized by the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) in Martinique. For me, it was a distinct pleasure to have been able to join that group of celebrants in honoring this great Caribbean thinker with our thoughts, papers, poems and other offerings. And it is another distinct pleasure to be joining yet another celebrating of Fanon’s 100^th birthday with my contribution to this special issue of the journal, Logos. This global celebrating of Fanon’s 100^th birthday reminds me very much of the 2001 celebrating of the 100^th birthday of CLR James in Trinidad that was organized by the CLR James Society before it became an integral part of the CPA.

One of the last significant achievements of the CLR James Society before it merged into the CPA was a special issue of the CLR James Journal celebrating Fanon’s 80^th birthday. It was volume 11, No.1, and it came out in 2005. It was one of the best-selling issues of the journal, which required a second printing. In short, Fanon was hot then and still is now. In my editor’s note introducing that special issue, I wrote: “more than anything else, it is Fanon’s visionary capabilities that we are very much in need of today. He saw so clearly and wrote so precisely about the neocolonial crisis that would overwhelm our postcolonial present. The grip of this crisis continues to tighten, yet we are without any clear sense of how to get out of it”.

Fanon and the Caribbean Tradition of Creative Realism

When we reflect on the distinctive thinking of the major Caribbean scholars such as CLR James, Nicolas Guillen, Sylvia Wynter, Aime Cesaire, Wilson Harris, Frantz Fanon, and most recently, Lewis Gordon, the underlying structure of their thought is an original dialectical synthesis that brings together a number of constituting factors that are usually kept apart. Thus, in the case of CLR James, his thought was founded on a dialectical synthesis that brought together a Marxist historicism, Pan Africanism, literature and the game of cricket. Most striking and memorable has been the particular synthesis that James established between cricket and theatrical drama in his classic text, Beyond A Boundary. It was this unique dialectical synthesis which brought these distinct analytical factors into mutual engagements that was the source of James’s originality and brilliance.

In the case of Sylvia Wynter, her thought is centered on a dialectical synthesis that brings together creative writing, literary criticism, a Marxist historicism that is in constant dialogue with the epistemic historicism of French poststructuralism, Pan Africanism and the biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. As in the case of James, this was an unusual synthesis. It was also very difficult for others to reproduce, and it has remained the source of Wynter’s originality and brilliance. Although very different from James’s synthesis, the latter had a very profound influence on Wynter’s dialectical synthesis and thus on her thinking.

It is a major thesis of this paper that an important key to Fanon’s thought and longevity is that his thought was also founded on another of these original and difficult to reproduce dialectical syntheses. This synthesis that grounded and informed Fanon’s thought brought together literature, a Marxist historicism, Pan Africanism, psychoanalysis and French existentialism. It was a combination that produced a dialectical synthesis like no other, and thus was able to give Fanon that originality, which we have been celebrating over the course of the year of 2025. If in the case of James, the particularly notable area of synthesis was that between theater and cricket, in the case of Fanon, it was that between a Black or Pan African Marxist historicism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. Even more specifically, it was the connections between the theories of anxiety and its outward projection into the arena of a racialized global political economy that remains one of the notable moves in Fanon’s dialectical synthesis. It was the delicate and non-dogmatic balance that Fanon was able to maintain between these major currents in his thought that made it so special and original.

We may wonder about the source and factors behind these striking dialectical syntheses that have clearly marked the Caribbean intellectual tradition and brought it worldwide attention. A very well-known aesthetic that had been developed by two of Fanon’s teachers, Rene Menil and Aime Cesaire, to capture this dialectical aspect of Caribbean thought has been magical realism. Giving this answer a more philosophical twist, I have attempted to link the production of these distinctive dialectical syntheses to an underlying ontology and the epistemic or knowledge-producing priorities it has metaphysically justified. This underlying onto-metaphysical infrastructure I have called creative realism. Its distinctive nature was probably first made explicit by the great novelist from Guyana, Wilson Harris even though he did not give it that name.

For Harris, the creative/intellectual environment in which the Caribbean writer/thinker finds him or herself was one that he described as imploded and burnt out. By these descriptors, Harris was pointing to the fact that the traditions of thought inherited by the Caribbean thinker or writer have all been shattered ones, broken into now widely scattered pieces by the experiences of colonization, slavery, indenture, and industrial modernization. This is true whether we are speaking of Native Caribbean, Euro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean or Afro-Caribbean traditions of thought. None of these survived the above experiences sufficiently intact to give the thinker or writer the lived experience of creating within a wholistic integrated body of ideas and practices that were alive and thus giving vital stimuli to his or her creative projects. Rather, the experience has been one of getting dead or negative fragments out of the way or going in search of clearly missing fragments. Thus in Harris’s experience, what the writer who inherits the shattered traditions of the Caribbean experiences first or primarily is not the creative inputs or established truths of a well-functioning cultural/intellectual tradition, but the inherent creativity of human self that established the creations and truths of these traditions before they were shattered and scattered by the turbulent movements of old empires falling and new ones rising.

In other words, the starting point, the founding center of ontological writing for the Caribbean thinker is the inherent spontaneous creativity of this Caribbean self that was largely stripped of its more intact cultural clothing, forced to find many of these lost fragments, and to create new pieces of cultural clothing with which to redress itself. This, in Harris’s view, is the creativity that drives the Caribbean writer and thinker and is the source of their now well-recognized dialectical syntheses, and their originality. The ongoing encounter with this movement of the inherent creativity of the human self is experienced and theorized as being more real than any of its own new creations or any creation or piece of knowledge inherited from the imploded traditions. As such, this directly experienced inherent creativity becomes the center, the head cornerstone of this ontology of creative realism, which in my view extends and reinforces the ground under the aesthetic of magical realism.

In his acceptance speech for the 1992 Nobel prize for literature, the Caribbean poet and playwright, Derek Walcott echoed Harris’s image of the broken traditions of the Caribbean region. He used the image of a broken vase to represent the tradition with Caribbean literature as the love that has been carefully gathering the scattered pieces and putting them back together again along with the new pieces that have been created to replace those that have been permanently lost so that we can continue to meet the new and evolving challenges of our postcolonial situation. This is why the Caribbean intellectual tradition lacks the more comprehensive syntheses of the pre-modern period, while at the same time being well known for its highly creolized nature.

One of the already noted features of these less than comprehensive but dialectical Caribbean syntheses, is that their creators have remained quite skeptical about arriving at final or absolute truths. These epistemic undertakings have been labeled by Harris as “rehearsals”. Fanon’s creative realist skepticism towards final or absolute truths was very evident in the boldness with which he “stretched” Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, literature and Pan Africanism, which made it possible for him to bring these analytically distinct discourses into productive mutual engagements.  Thus, for the most part the findings and truth claims emerging from these syntheses have been given a provisional status – quasi-real or partially true – and thus are likely to be revised in the future. What is most real and closest to the truth in postcolonial Caribbean tradition of inherited cultural fragments is the lived experience of the inherent creativity of the human self. In the European tradition, the philosopher whose works compares best with these dialectical syntheses at the heart of the Caribbean intellectual tradition is Theodore Adorno, whose thinking rested on the dialectical synthesis of literature, a Marxist historicism, psychoanalysis and music.

Fanon and Our Present Moment 

As we needed Fanon’s visionary capabilities at the start of the postcolonial period, we are again in need of them as the world system of global political economy into which we are all integrated is going through another of its major transitional periods. This current period of change and transition is as profound and comprehensive as the one that gave birth to the postcolonial era, with its the decline of the European empires, and the liberation of the colonies of those empires in spaces of greater political independence. This was the period of global transition that Fanon saw more clearly than most and garnered him global recognition. It is that period in which many colonies were becoming new nations that is now being pushed from the center of the historical stage. Another, barely visible at the present moment, is taking its place. We can provisionally call it the informatic phase of a postmodern world system that is leaving behind the modern industrial one theorized by Oliver Cox, Immanuel Wallerstein, Raul Prebisch, Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan and others. Its birth is showing major signs of difficulty and turmoil.

As we move deeper into this emerging era, it is the Fanonian type of vision that we, in the rapidly changing peripheral areas of our world system, will be greatly in need of as major changes in the global order continue to unfold. We have seen new centers of power, like market socialist China, emerge. Former centers like Britain, Russia and France are experiencing major declines, falling somewhere between the centers and the semi-peripheries of this changing global system. Meanwhile, semi-peripheral areas such as the oil rich Middle Eastern states are clear pushing to occupy locations closer to the centers of the system.  Further, the information and artificial intelligence technologies that will dominate this emerging informatic phase are rapidly separating it from the receding modern world system that was dominated by the industrial monopoly phase of Western capitalism. Such changes have already significantly altered patterns of trade between the countries of this system producing great wealth for some and increasing poverty for others. Within specific countries new classes are emerging while others are declining. Relations between races, gender and sexualities are also being profoundly disrupted along with the ongoing introduction of major new technologies such as artificial intelligence – making this a major period of change and transition.

In the past, the disruptive nature of major global changes such as these have turned periods of transition into eras of high anxiety as people and communities worry and panic more over their future. The period in Europe between the two world wars was one such era that ours is beginning to resemble in terms of the high levels of free-floating anxiety that people are experiencing and having to project onto others in very disturbing and destructive ways. Thus, one of the most concerning trends of our present moment has been the eruption of fascist trends in countries across the globe. We can think of Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Erdogan in Turkey or the rise in popularity of Far-Right parties in Western Europe. These eruptions of fascism, which have engulfed many of the major Western liberal democratic states, have now included the United States. These fascist turns in the major Western states and in many of the new nations of the postcolonial period have added new layers difficulty to the neocolonial crisis that continues to invade and capture our postcolonial present. It is the significant increase in difficulties of this nature why we are in such need of visionary powers like those of Fanon.

On account of his deep psycho-existential understanding of the role of racialized identities in the production of both colonial and fascist forms of domination, the current emergence of strong fascist and racist currents in the present neocolonial orders invading the Caribbean and other postcolonial societies were always very real possibilities for both Fanon and his teacher, Aime Cesaire. What in Fanon that is particularly important for us today was his ability to shine a very bright light on these psycho-existentially projected or scapegoating ways of dealing with the high levels of free-floating anxiety of major transitional periods.  These inner dynamics are often linked by both leaders and masses to those of party politics and to the crisis tendencies of national economies in very deceptive and destructive ways, thus producing some of the persistent features of fascist politics. These destructive ways of addressing and dealing with the politico-economic problems of a difficult period of transition have often taken the form of finding some convenient group to blame and thus to scapegoat. We saw it in Fascist Germany with the Jews, and we are seeing it now in the U.S. with Hispanic immigrants. Given this dangerous turn in our period of major transition, we are going to have draw inspiration from Fanon’s courageous ability to speak freedom in these times of rising authoritarianism. In short, we are also going to have to mobilize within ourselves Fanonian abilities to look at and name the darkest impulses, passions and practices that can emerge from the hidden depths of the fascist soul.

The Divided Psyche of the Fascist

One of the first things that we have learned from Fanon about fascism is the deeply divided nature of the psyche of the fascist. From the earliest of humanity’s philosophical writings, there emerged a dualistic view of the creative processes by which our psyches established our subjective identities and their correlated worldviews. However, this dualistic mode of self- and world-production has had the effect of trapping our development in dualisms such as self/other, we/they, good/evil, Spirit/matter, human/non-human, male/female, individual/collective, colonizer/colonized, state/market. For many of our ancient philosophers, inner wholeness and ethical growth required the transcending or overcoming of many of these dualities. Today, we refer to these dualities as binary oppositions and think of them as operating on us through the languages that we speak. These dualisms are also highly visible in the primary encounters of James, Harris, Wynter and other Caribbean thinkers with the inherent and spontaneous creativity of the human self. Whether we refer to them as dualities or binary oppositions, in well-known periods of fascism, there has consistently been an extreme polarizing of the differences between the concrete realities represented by these discursive dualities or linguistic binary oppositions.

Key to this widening of the distances between of these dualistic categories along with the concrete realities they represent is a significantly increased polarizing of the self/other and we/they binaries. This increased polarization occurs when an individual, a community or a nation claims some privilege, advantage, or inheritance that is made into the basis for a claim of being superior to those who lack this special privilege or inheritance. The internal semiotics of these systems of binary oppositions is such that an increased polarization the above two will bring about corresponding adjustments in many of the other dualities within this semiotic system.  As a result, the differences between the realities they represent will no longer be subject to adjustments that will make room for wider and more inclusive possibilities or unities. Instead, rigid either/or relations are imposed on the concrete realities represented by these dualistic categories. Further, in periods of fascism the violence with which these dualistic boundaries are policed increases sharply.

In Fanon’s analyses of the colonial period, the particular binaries or dualities that experienced extreme polarization were the race/ethnic binaries – particularly the we/they, self/other, black/white, European/non-European ones – which were buttressed by the extreme polarization between the concrete realities represented by the human/non-human duality. Today, in the rising fascism and neocolonialism of our transitional period, we can see the increasing levels of polarization between the human and social realities represented by the we/they, citizen/immigrant, white/brown, white/black, rich/poor, male/ female, capital/labor, center/periphery binaries, their reinforcement by the environmental human/non-human duality and the increasing levels of violence required for the policing of these orders of inequality. With the observable sharp increases in the polarization of these binaries in both Europe and the U.S., there can be no doubt, from a Fanonian standpoint, that the West has entered another fascist period in its history. One of the most significant differences between this fascist period and that of the inter-war years is that the current one has engulfed the U.S. Indeed, with the unfolding of the second Trump administration and its placing of national guard troops in cities governed by the democratic party, the U.S. is emerging as the leader of this fascist turn in Western history.

How with the aid of Fanon’s dialectical synthesis can we account for the above eruptions of fascism across the globe? Further, how can we account for sharp anti-liberal, anti-social democratic and authoritarian turns in West, the deeper polarizing of underlying dualities and the more violent policing that has accompanied their rise? Given the dialectical nature of Fanon’s founding synthesis, the global rise of these fascist movements, political parties, regimes and underlying semiotic orders of binaries, must be the result of many contradictions and opposing forces maturing and coming together in this transitional period. Here, I cannot focus on all of them, but I will focus on some of the politico-economic ones and their connections to the projecting onto others of difficult- to-localize free-floating anxieties that are among the distinctive features of a Fanonian synthesis.

The Politico-Economic Factors

The politico-economic factors triggering these eruptions of fascism across the globe and contributing to the sharp increases in the polarization of underlying binaries are clearly rooted in the crises of global and national re-distribution that have overwhelmed the neoliberal policy measures that were put in place in the 1980s to contain the crises of stagflation in the Western economies of the 1970s.  These neoliberal policies marked a second major attempt by the West to experiment the principle of the self-regulating nature of markets. The first was the British-led experiment of the 1840s that collapsed in 1914 and brought with it the collapse of the gold standard for trade between nations, sharp rises in levels of economic protectionism and the start of the first World War.  Echoing the collapse of the British experiment with self-regulating markets, the early 1970s was the period during which the U.S. transitioned from being a surplus producing, creditor economy to a borrowing debtor economy that was forced to abandon in 1971 the backing of its currency by gold. This was the start of the postwar collapse of the second Western experiment with markets as self-regulating mechanisms, and also its experiment with the gold standard. These were two areas of significant collapse that lead to the rise of gold-dollar standard and to the globalization of markets that have been at the core of neoliberal reforms of the system. Further, the 1970s was a period of increased competition in industrial production as the Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese economies were experiencing robust growth, which at the same time was dependent on access to the American markets. This intensifying industrial production was also affecting several European countries like the UK and France. If these major Western economies were to keep growing a major shift in basic policies was required.

This period of the late 1960s and early 1970s was also one in which slowing growth rates and the increasing industrial competition was requiring basic policy changes in the peripheral economies of the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ever since Rosa Luxemburg’s classic work on the process of capital accumulation, intense theoretical debates have raged regarding the role and importance of colonies and peripheral areas in the accumulation of capital in the Western economies. In the Caribbean, scholars such as Eric Williams, Claudia Jones, Sylvia Wynter, and Caribbean dependency theorists such as Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan, Clive Thomas have been making arguments that center/periphery relations are as important as capital/labor relations within a country for understanding processes of capital accumulation. Fanon’s thinking on these issues was very much in line with the ideas of the above theorists. However, the distinctness of his contribution was the manner in which the anxiously projected dehumanization of black and other non-white workers was incorporated into the extraction of surplus value from their labor and consequently their contributions to capital accumulation in the Western economies.

The big policy shift that resulted from these debates was adoption of the major recommends of Latin American and Caribbean dependency theory by several of these countries. At the core of these recommendations was the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). In general terms, this new order called for the wider application of Keynesian principles state/private sector cooperation in the management of the global economy. Spearheading this policy shift were the Argentinian economist, Raul Prebisch and the then Jamaican Prime Minister, Michael Manley. They took it before a special meeting of the UN in 1974, where it was vetoed by the major Western powers. Countering this proposal for an NIEO was that for the Neoliberal Global Economic Order, or what we can call the NGEO. This clash between the two opposing proposals for needed economic policy shifts summed up very clearly the changing state of relations between the Western centers of the global political economy and former colonies now economic peripheries in spite of being politically independent. Hence, these tensions and shifts in center/periphery are important for a complete understanding of the rise of neoliberal order. Under the Trump administration, center/periphery relations have been further polarized with shooting of so called “drug dealers” supposedly transporting drugs from the Caribbean to the U.S., and the stationing of a U.S. aircraft carrier off the coast of Venezuela.

Today, it is crisis of this NGEO, which was instituted as an alternative to the NIEO that we are living through as an integral part of this difficult transitional phase that our global order is now going through. It is only a major crisis of the key set of policies governing the global politico-economic order that can account for the economic dislocations visible across the globe and the anxious fires of fascism that they have been triggering. It is the NGEO’s maturing contradictions which are making clear that its strategies of offshoring and turning to finance to fill the holes left by this offshoring of major sectors of industry, has in fact long outlived its usefulness. In his major work, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas Piketty analyzed another of the contradictions of the NGEO to mature and burst. He has documented with such thorough care the massive transfers of wealth from the middle and working classes of the West to a now very visible billionaire class. This so-called second gilded age points to a repeating cycle in the central capitalist economies, which has oscillated between periods of upper-class wealth production and periods of expansion in welfare institutions, as the state gets captured by elite class fragments or by mass mobilizations from below of workers and other oppressed groups. It is the movement of this central capitalist cycle too far in the direction of capital that has emerged very clearly as one of the major contradictions of the NGEO.

Also affecting the fate and sense of security of the major classes in the West is the number of “good jobs” that have been exported abroad or offshored as integral parts of the market driven neoliberal order. The maturing of this contradiction came with the exporting of way too many of these jobs, which hollowed out many middle-class communities and made the experience of “living paycheck to paycheck” one of the soundtracks of this transitional period.  In particular, this contradiction indicated another major instance of the failure of markets to self-regulate within time horizons that will avoid major human suffering. As a result, the Biden Administration found it necessary to override the functioning of the markets and to institute state-led policies of reshoring, onshoring, near-shoring and friend-shoring in order to jump start the re-industrialization of the U.S. and to address the growing concerns of labor.

Under the second Trump administration this abandoning of the now crisis-ridden NGEO increased sharply. Abandoning market principles and the authority of liberal, free market institutions like the WTO and the World Bank, Trump has imposed a high degree of authoritarian control over the American economy through the tariffication of its trade. Tariffs have been imposed on countries that were supposedly taking advantage of the U.S. because they had a trade surplus with America. But the case of Brazil made it clear that there were other power motives involved as it did not have a trade surplus with the U.S. Unfortunately for the administration, this authoritarian tariffication of American trade policy has not been working. It has contributed to rising prices at home and thus adding to the woes and anxious concerns of many middle and working-class Americans. Further, because of the high levels of borrowing to finance AI and other investment projects, careful Wall Street watchers like Andrew Ross Sorkin are very concerned about a huge bubble in the economy that could pop with disruptive consequences that call to mind the Great Recession of 2008 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still further, the American labor market has been tightening, inflation has been quite stubborn at around 3%, rather than the 2% desired by the Federal Reserve Bank. Hence, we have Trump’s fight with Bank Chair, Jerome Powell, along with his authoritarian push to compromise the independence of this central bank. Abroad, Trump’s authoritarian policies have only further polarized center/periphery relations, as in the case with Venezuela, and disturbed relations with long-standing allies like Canada and the UK.

In the midst of failing policies and politico-economic changes of this nature and magnitude there can be little doubt regarding the increased levels of anxiety and concern for the future that they are generating. The evidence of increased levels of fearful anxiety being displaced onto others just cannot be denied. Trump’s arbitrary imposing of tariffs is a classic example of how the socio-economic distance between we/they binary can be increased while generating other increased polarizations down the chain of connected binaries. As result of moves like these, practices of scapegoating are definitely up, along with the violent attempts to put down the scapegoated groups who are perceived to be taking away the jobs and engaging in practices of white replacement. It is in times like these that we get statements such as President Trump’s reports of Haitian immigrants eating the cats and dogs of good Americans. The attack on black voting rights achieved through the courageous and progressive struggles of the African American Civil Rights Movement is very much a part of this comprehensive countermovement to shore up and preserve the already collapsing neoliberal order and the power of those billionaires who have benefited so well from it. The shocking and very disturbing display of state violence against Hispanic communities even though their members are not illegal immigrants is truly one of the defining features of this period of American fascism.

What is to Be Done?  

Our Fanonian analysis of the dangerous currents in our present period of major transition pointed our attention to three crucial areas. First was the possibility of a global crisis of capital accumulation with sources in multiple nations such as the crisis of the NGEO. Second, our Fanonian analysis directed our attention to the disruptions and dislocations in the lives of individuals and communities produced by this neoliberal restructuring of global capital, such as the excessive offshoring of the good jobs needed for good lives. Third and finally, it directed our attention to the increased levels of anxiety produced by these dislocations that have been projected onto others in the forms of dehumanizing practices of racist, sexist, and fascist forms of scapegoating. Having clearly identified these realities hypothesized by our Fanonian analysis, our next move must be to take up the famous Leninist question: “What is to Be Done?”

Because our new post-neoliberal global order is still emerging and thus barely visible, one of the first things that we can do is to compare its birth pangs with those of other periods of major transition that emerged from global economic crises and wildly burning fascist fires. When we have found such comparative periods, we need to look carefully at how their economic crises and their fascist fires got started and how they were eventually put out. Such lessons and guides from the past may give us important clues about our economic crisis, its fires, how to put them out, and so emerge into the sunlight of the new and hopefully better politico-economic order; one with more equitable capital/labor, center/periphery relations, lower levels of free-floating anxieties and more equality between the races and genders.

With these concerns in mind, I have been hinting that our current period of major transition compares best to the transitional period between the two world wars, which gave us the monopoly phase of Western capitalism with its distinct sets of capital/labor, center/periphery, capitalist/socialist, and race-ethnic relations. Unfortunately, the passage from the older and more liberal-competitive phase to the monopoly one included a major war, which involved several nations and took the lives of millions of people. Let us hope that this won’t be the case with our present transition even though the fires of smaller wars are burning all around us.

Regarding the lessons from the transition to the monopoly phase of Western capitalism, one of the first is that we must stand up and resist these turns to fascism as bravely as Fanon did. He joined the French military in their fight against German fascism. However, in that military outfit, in addition to learning about German fascism Fanon also encountered directly the projecting onto him of French anti-black racism. Solidarity with the protest and resistance movements to both the NGEO and its fascist offsprings that have erupted and are still erupting is thus extremely vital. So, as we recall with hope the seven million people who took to the streets in the “No Kings” demonstrations of November 2025 in the U.S., let us also bring to mind the 2009 44-day uprising against the neoliberal order in Fanon’s home country of Martinique and its sister- Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe. For the Caribbean, this was a very important political upsurge from below as it brought to the surface the persisting ideals of democratic socialism, pan African racial equality, popular democracy, popular control of the media and other cultural establishments – ideals that had been smothered and sidelined by the rise of neoliberalism. This uprising was not a classic Fanonian revolutionary upsurge like the ones that Fanon described and analyzed so brilliantly in The Wretched of the Earth. Rather, it was very much an insurrection of the type which James has described as the masses writing their own books in the streets using the performative language of collective action. The importance of insurrectionary upsurges like this one is that they let us know that, appearances to the contrary, many of our postcolonial ideals of freedom, racial and class equality, the NIEO, the mixed economy and others are still very much alive and have not been neo-colonized to death by the NGEO and its structural adjustment packages. Also worthy of note here is the fact that this French Caribbean insurrection provided major stimulus to the 2018-2020 Yellow Vests protests of workers in France. In short, solidarity among existing anti-fascist groups must be a vital political strategy during our complex and difficult transition period.

Second, we must now look even more closely and honestly at what went wrong with our economic alternatives to the neoliberal order, particularly our NIEO proposals for restructuring the global order and our mixed economy proposals for addressing the persistent development challenges confronting our postcolonial economies. Consistent with our principles of creative realism, the truth claims that we have attached to these proposals have made them at best Harrisian rehearsals. They are not final truths or final performances. Self-criticism and self-testing in these key economic areas must also be a top priority for us now. We need to know as accurately as possible what areas of our political economy discourses are good and should be kept and what areas are in need of improving, revising, or throwing out. This is and must be a time of serious politico-economic thinking as the global parameters of national economies are changing and changing rapidly. Is there a post-Lewisian phase for Caribbean economies that will take us beyond the practices of dependent investment and development by foreign capital? Is there an emerging phase in which we will achieve greater ownership and control of the major tourist, offshore banking and mineral sectors of our regional economy? These are vital concerns that will determine how we in the Caribbean will experience this transition and what our life will be like in the emerging new and possibly informatic order. In short, we also have serious intellectual work to do.

Third and finally, our Fanonian analysis will require of us that we observe very carefully how we on the progressive Left are experiencing the heightened levels of anxiety that are inherent in our transitional period. We don’t have complete control over how our psyches deal with anxieties that are difficult to localize and own. The dehumanizing projection of such anxieties are not primarily conscious operations. To realize this, all we have to do is to reflect on how the polarizing of self/other and we/they binaries contributed to the decline of major political upsurges such as the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements. In short, as good Fanonians we will have to make every effort to be highly aware of how these two binary oppositions are operating within us as we join with others like us and those who may not be like us on this journey into the next phase of our global system of political economy.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz, 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press

Fanon, Frantz, 1968. The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press

Harris, Wilson, 1973. Tradition, the Writer and Society, London: New Beacon Press

Piketty, Thomas, 2017. Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Ross Sorkin, Andrew, 2025. 1929, New York: Penguin Random House

Walcott, Derek, 1993. The Antilles, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux

Wynter, Sylvia, 1984. “The Ceremony Must be Found”, Boundary 2, No.12