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“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing." — Audre Lorde
Talk of revolution is in the air. Rising discontent throughout the world is met with brutal crackdowns. Wealth only accumulates upwards. Psycho-tech bros with their deathworld technologies fantasise about annihilation. All the while, the people running our governments are so clueless they sow division to distract us from their incompetence.
Is it any wonder many are thinking: bring on the revolution! But it’s easy to romanticise the idea of a revolution: people flood the streets, power crumbles, and a new world is born. We just need enough people mobilised. The reality, however, is that one world crumbling is rarely replaced by a new and better one.
The origin of the word revolution is to roll back, to go back to something that was there previously. It was initially used in reference to a planet completing a full orbit around the earth, to describe cyclical recurring changes. Over the centuries, it took on a political meaning to indicate a fundamental change, or a turn around, and later, from around 1600, it became what most of us know today as the overthrow of an established political or social system.
Revolutions don’t just happen out of the blue, however. What we don’t ask ourselves is: what is my role in the revolution? And: what is the work that needs doing for whatever comes next? Instead, what we mostly experience today is a sort of ‘please wait while the system updates’ attitude.
The way to prepare for the revolution, Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Listening, was to take an interest in the world, rather than focus on one’s problems. Becoming aware of oneself, or analysing oneself was only useful if it led to us changing our behaviours. He criticised leftist philosophers who suggested that we would become better people once the revolution came.
“That is of course plain nonsense in my opinion because after the revolution comes and nobody has changed,” he warned, “the revolution will just repeat all the misery of what has happened before. Revolution will be made by people who have no idea of what a better human life could be.”
By paying too much attention to the truly evil leaders (and blame everything on them), or the charismatic heroes (and put all our hopes on them), we absolve ourselves of getting involved, we sit on the sidelines and wait for the worst to pass. We become the people who convince themselves they didn’t know, they are good people. We usher in fascism through the front door because it looked presentable and we were too busy seeking inner peace.
This is why we should all revisit Frantz Fanon. Fanon understood that the revolution had to come from the inside. Since the Gaza genocide, many people have returned to his books and for good reason. The Martinician physician, psychiatrist and later ambassador for the Algerian revolution is yet again considered a dangerous thinker. The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, was immediately banned in France, where it was illegal to show solidarity for the Algerian war of independence. It was later banned by the South African Apartheid regime. Today, it is either being sanitised by western liberal academics uncomfortable with his stance on resistance, or it’s being minimised or attacked.
Dr. Sarah Jilani, whose own scholarly work on Fanon is being attacked by British establishment academics, explains that Fanon’s revolutionary project is so important because it extends beyond material liberation to include the transformation of consciousness. Fanon shows us how the structures of colonialism and imperialism keep producing compliant and complicit subjects. Liberation must therefore include psychic liberation.
Those interested in maintaining the imperialist core, Jilani says, “knew that reading Fanon transformed a lot of people in the past and continues to transform a lot of people’s understandings of the sources of their oppression, and that is the beginning of political action in the world.”
Fanon was concerned with the lack of ideology in people, especially our inability to envision another society. What was needed was to awaken the masses, politically, for them to open their minds, what Fanon’s mentor, Aimé Césaire called the invention of souls. This does not mean speeches, organising for elections or telling people what to think, it means to get people to understand that everything depends on them, that people need to be able to connect personal suffering to systemic causes, that we need spaces for critical dialogue, and that we need to build our capacity to act collectively.
Fanon‘s clinical work, including treating Algerians and their French torturers, influenced his politics and led to his theory of decolonisation, Professor Lou Turner, another Fanon scholar, explains. Living authentically was one of the core principles in Fanon’s psychology, which colonialism doesn’t allow you to do and revolution does. For Fanon, the work of the militant is to make revolution, but more importantly, to make a new society.
Out of the dissolution of the colonialist state, the revolution must produce a new one. This was the central theme of his 1959 book on the Algerian Revolution, A Dying Colonialism. One must show what one is for, not just against. We all know what we are against, constructing the new one is the dialectic of liberation. This is the dialectic of revolution.
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon.
The Art of Listening, Erich Fromm.
Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon.
‘Fanon's Psychopolitics & Empire's Anxiety w/ Sarah Jilani,’ Guerrilla History Podcast, 18 April, 2026. Listen here.
A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon.
‘Frantz Fanon: The Life and Works w/Lou Turner’ (AR&D Ep12), Guerrilla History. 28 November 2025. Listen here.
‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’ Gil Scott-Heron, listen here.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, edited by INCITE, Women of Color Against Violence.
‘Exterminate All the Brutes,’ miniseries directed and narrated by Raoul Peck.
‘Revolution or Tyranny.’ Chris Hedges, 1 June 2026. Read here.
‘If you want to get the West’s attention, talk about the Holocaust.’ Tony Karon, Africa is a Country, 21 April 2021. Read here.
“Sometimes I think that the artist is like a child who when he blows out a candle creates a hurricane, who when he cries causes a flood or who when he laughs illuminates this apparently incomprehensible world that adults agree to hide.” — Jaume Plensa
“The human interactions with trees and the forest are deeply embedded in our collective unconscious and cultural narratives, providing many of the fundamentals of our belief systems, folklore and endlessly inspiring literature and art.” — John Tebbs
"I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now." — James Baldwin
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilisatrice.” ― Edward W. Said
“Let each person ready themselves for the worst–and best–that is yet to come: when the Leviathan falls, it will take down as much as it can with it. Its grip will tighten more than ever, so much that any sense of individual sovereignty will almost vanish.” — Farah El-Sharif
“But if you look at insurgencies around the globe in the last 200 years, there’s not a single one that doesn’t have its poetry. Just show me a movement that doesn’t have its poetry. If you show me one, I will eat my computer.” — Robin D.G. Kelley
