At the end of the Second World War, the revolutionary movement faced an unexpected situation.i The bureaucratic Soviet regime had not only survived the war, but appeared to be expanding in Eastern Europe. Capitalism, out of breath in the 1930s, seemed to be regaining strength.
As a motto to the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon quotes Marx: ‘In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead.’ The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.i Hence, a descent to roots and a return to the source are not the solution. The existence of a black civilisation that disappeared in the 15th century does not grant black people ‘a badge of humanity’: ‘I am not a man of any past.
With Roman Rosdolsky, who passed away in 1967 in Detroit in the United States, the last surviving founding member of the communist movement in western Ukraine and one of the most remarkable Marxists of recent decades passed away.
The fate of Rosdolsky is characteristic of an entire generation of European revolutionaries. His peculiarity was that he survived the successive persecutions by local fascism as well as Nazism and Stalinism.
Our new book, a biography of the famous revolutionary Michel 'Pablo' Raptis is now available.
