Plan spills up – commitment to the vision and revolutionary optimism is key.

<In this respect at least, Fanon’s position might be better described as neo-Jacobin than as neo-Bolshevik: for Fanon, compared with Lenin, the exercise of political will is more fully independent of an ‘objective’ historical development, of the so-called laws or stages of economic development. Yes, says Fanon, ‘decolonisation is proceeding, but it is rigorously false to pretend and to believe that this decolonisation is the fruit of an objective dialectic which more or less rapidly assumes the appearance of an absolutely inevitable mechanism’. Revolutionary optimism here is not a response to an objective assessment of the situation: rather, ‘optimism in Africa is the direct product of the revolutionary action of the African masses’ (AR, 170-171), pure and simple. Ultimately, there is nothing ‘beneath’ the will of the people that might guide its course. There are no historical or economic laws to which it must conform. Fanon offers no excuse or alibi: ‘sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves’ (WE, 198). Everything depends on us, and on ‘the firmness of our commitment’ (AR, 172). This means, furthermore, that the self-determination of the will is itself a sufficient guide to action and the consequences of action. Considered in isolation and on its own terms, to will involves a ‘total’ and ‘sincere’ commitment to one’s experience, without reserve, without second-guessing, without reflection upon unconscious or ulterior motives, mitigating circumstances, etc. This is the real reason for Fanon’s famous objection, in Black Skin, to Sartre’s interpretation of negritude as a merely transitional moment in a dialectic that subsumes it. Fanon is no less convinced than Sartre himself, of course, of the essential freedom and autonomy of consciousness. But in his critique of negritude as a form of consciousness determined by its place in a logic of development, Sartre forgets that ‘a consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being’, at least if the latter are to be understood as providing a rationale for that experience which is supposedly ‘deeper’ than its own conscious self-determination.[36] On either the individual or the collective level, such ‘wilful ignorance’ is indeed an irreducible aspect of the practical primacy of the will. On either level, ‘nothing is more unwelcome than the commonplace: “You’ll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young... you’ll see, it will all pass.” The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself’ (BS, 103), just as submission to the logic of historical or economic ‘development’ drives the newly liberated nation back into the coils of necessity. Rather than submit to what is feasible, to what circumstances permit, the first duty of revolutionary activists is to commit to their vision and their will to achieve it—in Fanon’s case, ‘to turn the absurd and the impossible inside out and hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power’ (AR, 181).>