Krisis 2018, Issue 2 Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z www.krisis.eu 10 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 detri- mental views towards women, African and Asian peoples for example, and his over- all 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 ad- vocates of a proletarian revolution. Representatives of anti-colonialism 1 and femi- nism, 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 pro- vides 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 con- trast, 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 read- ing 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 class- less, 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 devel- oped in the Phenomenology of Spirit is recast by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks,