In the wake of Frantz Fanon’s 100th birthday, Sam Chian offers a close reading of The Wretched of the Earth, arguing that Fanon’s primary intervention lies in his class analysis of colonial societies. He examines his critique of the national bourgeoisie and the urban working class, and his insistence on the revolutionary potential of the rural peasantry and radical intellectuals. Chian suggest that for Fanon, the social composition of the anti-colonial struggle decisively shapes the post-colonial order, and that the socialist path he outlines remains structurally constrained but politically urgent.