A psychiatrist. In the French colony of Algeria. In the middle of revolution. Frantz Fanon treated patients — colonizers and colonized — and in their symptoms he saw colonialism as a psychological structure. Not just an economic system. Not just political domination. A way of being that colonialism produced in the bodies and minds of everyone it touched.
The colony doesn’t just extract wealth. It produces a particular kind of human being — and then requires that person’s cooperation in their own subjection.
The impossible bind
The colonizer builds an image of the colonized: lazy, irrational, primitive, naturally suited to subjection. The colonized person is then trapped in an impossible bind. The colonizer says “this is what you are” and uses violence to make that image stick. Resist and you confirm that you’re violent and irrational. Comply and you confirm that you’re suited to subjection. There is no position within the structure from which you can refute the image, because the structure determines which kinds of refutation are legible.
What Fanon documents in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is not just the injustice of this arrangement. It is the way colonialism reaches into the colonized person’s self-understanding and forces them to collaborate in the structure that’s destroying them. Not through belief — the colonized person does not need to accept the colonizer’s classification to be shaped by it. They need only to live in a world where that classification has material consequences, where the options available to them are organized by it, where every attempt to move through the world confirms it.
Fanon was writing from clinical experience. The symptoms he documented — anxiety disorders, depression, psychosomatic illness, violence, dissociation — were not individual pathologies. They were the psychological consequences of being placed, permanently, in a category that denies your humanity. The clinic was a political space. The pathology was social, not individual.
The alibi and the mirror
The alibi — the story the colonizer tells — is that the classification reflects an actual difference in human nature. The colonized are naturally suited to subjection. They are not ready for self-governance. Civilization must be extended to them from outside. The violence is unfortunate but necessary.
The mirror — what Fanon sees — is that the colonizer is looking at themselves. The violence, the irrationality, the inability to be human under these conditions — these are all produced by colonialism itself, and then attributed to the colonized as proof that colonialism is justified. The colonizer projects their own violence onto the colonized as nature. The mirror shows it back: it was always the colonizer’s reflection.
This is the structure Gramsci identified as hegemony, operating at the extreme. The colonized are not just being told the arrangement is natural. They are being shaped — psychologically, institutionally, materially — to confirm it. The difference from metropolitan hegemony is the explicitness and the violence. But the structure is the same: the existing arrangement is maintained not just by force but by producing the conditions under which it appears to be the only possible arrangement.
Fanon’s contribution is to insist that liberation, under these conditions, is not just a political project. It is a psychological one. The colonized person must break free of the need for the colonizer’s recognition — must become human not by proving it to the colonizer, but by taking freedom, by building something new in which different categories apply. The form of this rupture matters: for Fanon, it is necessarily violent, because violence is the only register in which the colonizer has acknowledged the colonized as an agent at all.
This is one of the most contested claims in the postcolonial tradition. What is not contested is the diagnosis: colonialism produces subjects who cooperate in their own subjection, and liberation requires building new institutions — new categories, new social relationships, new frameworks for what it means to be human — that make the old subjection structurally impossible.
Who gets to die
Achille Mbembe extended Foucault’s concept of biopower into territory Foucault didn’t fully go. Foucault had shown how modern power works not primarily through killing but through managing life — regulating health, sexuality, productivity, population. The modern state is a life-managing apparatus.
Mbembe’s question: what happens in the spaces where that management breaks down? Or — more precisely — where the management of life requires deciding which lives are worth managing?
He called this necropolitics. Not biopower’s positive face — the administration of life — but its shadow: the sovereign power to decide who is exposed to death. Not necessarily who is killed directly, but who is left without protection, without infrastructure, without the legal and political recognition that makes survival possible.
The colony is the original space of necropolitics. In the colony, the management of life that applies in the metropolis does not apply. Populations can be displaced without the legal protections that apply elsewhere. Violence can be used without the justifications that legitimacy requires elsewhere. People can be exposed to death in ways that the state claims not to intend but systematically produces.
Mbembe argues this is not an exception to the modern state. It is the foundation. The sovereign right that underlies modern political order is not, finally, the right to manage life. It is the right to decide whose death is acceptable. Everything else — the rule of law, the protections of citizenship, the infrastructure of social provision — is built on this foundation. And the foundation is visible wherever the protections are suspended: in the colony, in the occupied territory, in the camp, in the prison, in the poorest neighborhoods of the richest cities.
The structural reading
What Fanon and Mbembe together produce is a structural account of why certain people end up exposed — psychologically, politically, physically — in ways that others are not. It is not about individual cruelty or particular institutional failure. It is about the categories that determine whose life counts as a life worth protecting.
This connects directly to the commons analysis. The commons is, at its foundation, a different answer to the question of who counts. It begins with the question of who depends on the resource — not who is recognized as fully human, not who has legal standing, not whose claims the existing categories can accommodate. The commons has no outside, in the sense that there is no category of person who can be excluded from governance rights on the grounds of their classification.
Building commons governance in conditions of necropolitics — in the colony, in the occupied territory, in the structurally abandoned neighborhood — is not just an economic project. It is a claim on the right to exist. The Zapatista governance system, Rojava’s commune structure, the survival networks of the Black radical tradition: these are all built in exactly the spaces Mbembe identifies as the spaces where sovereign power has decided that exposure to death is acceptable. Building the commons there is the refusal of that decision.
That refusal — not a petition for inclusion in the existing order, but the construction of a different order in the space the existing one has abandoned — is what the next section of the book is about.