Resisting alienation

Rousseau, Marx, Fanon and St. Paul

In Keith Hart, Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022) I argue that we can only be fully human if self and society reinforce each other.  Achieving this is a real, but largely unconscious need for most people. Chapter 3 anchors this judgment in a discussion of the anti-colonial intellectuals—three pan-Africanists: W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Franz Fanon (included here), plus the greatest spokesman for this project, Mohandas K. Gandhi—who practised thinking about new worlds when seeking to mobilize the masses to embrace a democratic non-racist global future beyond Western colonial empire. Profound obstacles stand in its way. In this brief note, I extend this claim to the eighteenth and nineteenth century; and further to the New Testament.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Frantz Fanon each grappled with the problem. Like most revolutionaries, they each started out as lower middle class, between the workers and the high bourgeoisie. They lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries respectively. All three believed that unequal society corrupts human nature. Yet human beings have the potential for redemption. We can become whole again by tackling the root causes of unequal society together. For Rousseau, it meant abolishing the arbitrary class divisions of agrarian civilization, for Marx the class structure of industrial capitalism, for Fanon it was the racism of colonial empires. All of these made people only part-human. Most people were denied the chance to be whole persons in society.

Alienation means separation from something that belongs to us—land, work, personal integrity. It could mean the attribution of agency to forces beyond our control—the gods, the weather or just “them”. Madness is the extreme form of alienation from oneself. In different degrees, the unity of self and society is weakened. The Enlightenment's achievement was to challenge religious alienation by overcoming inhibitions imposed by spiritual beings or rather their mediators. Rather than hoping for redemption in the afterlife, they focused attention on the here and now—“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

In his Discourse on Inequality,

“Rousseau summons men to hear for the first time their history as a species. Man was born free, equal, self-sufficient, unprejudiced, and whole; now, at the end of history, he is in chains (ruled by other men or by laws he did not make), defined by relations of inequality (rich or poor, noble or commoner, master or slave), dependent, full of false opinions or superstitions, and divided between his inclinations and his duties. Nature made man a brute, but happy and good. History—and man is the only animal with a history—by the development of his faculties and the progress of his mind has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. History is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption.”[1]

This vision launched what I call “the anthropology of unequal society”. Its main proponents include Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf, Jack Goody, and David Graeber. Rousseau was not concerned with individual variations in natural endowments, which we can do little about, but with the conventional inequalities of wealth, honour and the capacity to command obedience that can be changed. He imagines a pre-social state of nature, a hominid phase of human evolution where men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all free and equal. This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal. Original human beings had free will, they were not subject to rules of any kind and they had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to what Rousseau calls “nascent society”, a prolonged period whose economic base was hunter-gathering with huts. This second phase represents his ideal of life in society close to nature.

The rot set in with the invention of agriculture or, as Rousseau puts it, wheat and iron. Here he contradicted Hobbes for whom civil order (the state) was preceded by a primeval war of all against all marked by the absence of law. Rousseau claimed this was the result of social development, not an original condition. Cultivation of the land led to incipient property institutions. These contained the seeds of entrenched inequality. Their culmination led to political society. This new social contract was arrived at by consensus. But it was a fraudulent one in that the rich gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity. Political society then usually moved, via revolutions, through three stages:

“The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus, the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead.”[2]

One-man-rule closes the circle. “It is here that all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, here where subjects have no longer any law but the will of the master”.[3] New revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy.

The growth of inequality was only one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency. His parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality. “It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined…that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities.”[4]

Karl Marx captured the essence of Victorian capitalism in Capital.[5] A section of the first chapter of Volume 1, “The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof,” is his deepest reflection on alienation there. In capitalist society most people must work under conditions imposed by the owners. They are estranged from their own humanity. To be human is to realize our intentions by producing objects with social value. But capitalism makes that impossible. In a system of private property, a worker is a tool, not a person. Products are designed neither by workers nor consumers, but by capitalists who keep most of the market returns. Work consists of repetitive, often meaningless acts. We cannot fight religious alienation since spirits are mental fabrications. But capitalist production is palpable; we can do something about that. Workers overcome their servitude by understanding the causes of their alienation. Revolution restores the unity of self and society we have lost. It brings money, machines and the workplace under social management.

Frantz Fanon joined the Algerian war of independence and became a leading figure in the Pan-African movement. He approached damaged humanity through the critique of racism.[6] The last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth reports on Fanon’s psychiatric work with patients in the war.[7] His case studies include two 12-year-old Algerian boys who killed a European schoolmate. A young French soldier was driven mad by memories of torturing insurgents. Fanon concludes that, for the victims and victimizers on both sides, violence is impossible to live with. His death from cancer at 36 years old was probably induced by the stress he faced working for both sides of that genocidal war.

Race defined two unequal and separate worlds in colonial society. Dehumanization as an inferior race under capitalism was an explosive combination. Fanon used psychiatry to rehabilitate individuals. But he believed that oppressed peoples could win emancipation. This is important. Many assume that the passivity of subordinate classes perpetuates alienation. Fanon thought colonized people possessed a drive for freedom. Resistance to alienation would defeat alienation itself. Classes whose humanity was denied by colonial racism offered proof of the drive for self-emancipation. How do we overcome alienation? This is a main theme of my book. Partial answers are scattered throughout.

Humanity needs to develop social forms that secure our survival as a species. But we often feel disabled and lost. We are parts, not wholes. St. Paul put it this way:

“Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity (my italics).”[8]

“Charity” (Greek kharitas) in Christian theology is love directed toward God, but also toward oneself and others as objects of God’s love. It is love of humanity. Paul says that we make do with knowing little about people and guess the rest. It is usually wrong. We don’t understand ourselves and we project our own dark side onto others. One day, when we meet face to face, as world citizens, not through the cracked mirror of identity politics, we will recognize the humanity in everyone. Humanity is a historical project for our species. What will it take to succeed? Belief, hope and love.

This message is universally human. It is also an ethnographer’s charter: when we interact with others, we want to see and be seen as we really are, not as a dissembling crook or white oppressor. Perhaps we will all find our way to humanity; but now we are only part-human.

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[1] Allan Bloom, Introduction to Rousseau’s Emile: On Education in English (1979:344).

[2] Rousseau 1984:131

[3] Ibid: 134

[4] Ibid: 137

[5] Capital: The critique of political economy (Volume 1, 1867).

[6] The first volume of his collected writings, Alienation and Freedom (2017), provides early reflections on this.

[7]  Fanon (1961, English translation 1963)

[8] 1 Corinthians 13: 8-13, The New Testament (King James version).