Hey all,
I’m currently developing a Marxist-Leninist analysis of settler colonialism, especially in light of the situation in Palestine, and am going to read Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai for the first time. Before I do I was just curious what other comrades think of the book and its analysis? It seems a pretty controversial text among many online Marxist groups, to whatever extent that matters, but as an Indigenous communist I feel having a clear and principled stance on the settler question is important for all serious communists. I’m not sure if I’ll agree with Sakai specifically, but since I generally agree with the opinions of y’all, I was curious as to your thoughts on the book.
I’m sure plenty of white people resist the idea of a black-led revolution for something similar to this, at least unconsciously. But a much stronger critique of the Settlers philosophy is looking at stuff like this:
And concluding that a multi-racial, anti-racist leftist coalition is necessary for victory. In such a coalition (like in any coalition), you can’t expect a large group of members to contribute without some say in leadership. Settlers implies (can’t remember if it outright states) that such a coalition is impossible, which is why many leftists read it as defeatist.
Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 has all the good parts of Settlers without this and the latter work’s other flaws.
Settlers makes pretty clear these were frequently rather successful, but the problem comes when they get co-opted or hijacked by white people. I’d personally agree that the best solution is a mixed coalition, it’s just important that white people’s interests are not prioritized. A problematic idea promoted by patsocs is that since most people on this land are white it will be our revolution ie. finders keepers rule of genocide. We must combat that by putting the interests of those to whom this land belongs first.
If you have to say “we were successful until…”, how successful were you, really? Ultimately, every leftist project in the U.S. has at most a few significant wins, and none have achieved anything resembling the success of AES states, or even that of groups like the Zapatistas. A movement’s resilience against reaction and other right deviations is a key part of its viability; I’m guessing that’s part of why most of us here are MLs.
There’s also the argument (I’m pulling from In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil, which cites Settlers repeatedly) that co-option/hijacking of potentially greater successes broke down more along ideological lines than racial lines.
It might be the most just to hand the keys of the U.S. to an indigenous government, but I don’t see any realistic way that happens. I don’t think this means you abandon the idea entirely, but I do think it means we’re going to have to choose between a less-just outcome that might be feasible or nothing.
The EZLN is an indigenous nat-lib movement, rejecting the idea that their lands can be controlled by the Mexican government. Many of the nations in the US and Canada had similarly fought with settlers and armies to maintain their lands, the reservation system is the residue of those conflicts, a suspended state of war.
This can be said for any revolution, does the collapse of the USSR deny tested praxis of the Bolsheviks? The existing parties dominated by settlers have yet to provide a theory for revolution that moves beyond somehow changing the minds of the American workers, overwhelmingly labor aristocracy and reproducing with more labor from overseas than they put in. They haven’t been able to change many minds; there are some 200k “Socialists” between the ML parties and the DSA, this is smaller than the number of Dine people and dwarfed by the number of Hawaiians who are building an alternative state in opposition to the American occupation. Dozens of millions of Americans straight up don’t engage in electoral politics yet the Communists can’t seem to make a dent there. The Fish Wars which saw collaboration with what would become the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers got real wins in forcing the states to recognize treaty law. AIM and the Panthers attracted the most brutal state oppression, not disconnected from the general value American society assigns to black and indigenous bodies, and nothing of the sort has ever been directed at the CPUSA leadership as what befell the Panthers. The CPUSA fell into revisionism and tailed the Liberal Assimilationist line of the so-called “Black Bourgeoisie” which Frazier had proven was lying about the conditions of Black people in the US for the benefit of the Imperialist Settlers. This is not to say that amount of oppression is directly associated with revolutionary-ness, but that AIM and the BP clearly upset the settler order in a way in which Communist parties lead by settlers and white-dominated trade unions never could, and that opportunism for groups capable of upholding the settler order just doesn’t exist for groups like AIM and the BP.
Indigenous protests have been at the vanguard of the environmental “movement” and indigenous lands have almost all of the biodiversity on the continent and indigenous nations are at the fore-front of conservation and environmental science. Black people are at the fore-front of politics surrounding police and have mobilized the largest protests in US history. We focus on black and indigenous people (with special attention towards Latinx and migrant workers given their super-exploitation) because these groups are most readily organized on an anti-Colonial basis. More than half of the settlers frankly live good and have little interest in unsettling the colonial order. This is why our direction needs to build up the most oppressed spectrum of workers in solidarity with those who do not fit in settler-society for one reason or another, push these community building movements into direct conflict with the settler order and stress the contradictions of settler-colonial Imperialism, like what the Palestinian Resistance is doing as we speak, and what the EFF is pushing to do in South Africa, the forms of our struggles differ by conditions but the dynamics are the same, a (class) war of national liberation for decolonization. We just won’t see the level of organization from settlers in reaction required to defend themselves from us, our prediction is similar to that of what we are seeing in “Israel”, the settlers will run and hide while their society collapses under its own contradictions. We will be there for the refugee settlers who wish to experience a different road.
Settlers as a book just shows actually existing history of the labor movement and choices made by settlers. Today we can see a deep lack in investigation of conditions from the “Communists” here. We will work with settlers who are sympathetic towards us but we will not rely on their assistance, with our without them we will fight.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The USSR ultimately failed, yes. This doesn’t mean their contributions were worthless, but it does mean we should be generous with our criticisms and that we shouldn’t hold them up as a model to copy step-by-step. We should do the same with movements that achieved far less than the USSR, too.
Yes and we can and should compare movements of some classes compared to others. The settler class has proven itself incapable of resisting opportunism. MLs in the core need to focus on the classes with revolutionary outlook. Far too many do zero study of the conditions here.
Class is not an immutable characteristic. It’s determined by material conditions, and consciousness of one’s class is a function of that and the ideas they’re exposed to.
The settler class is no different. If the proletariat class can grow and proletarian consciousness can be developed, the settler class can shrink and settler consciousness can be destroyed.
Settler class only leaves when settler colonialism does. Decolonization takes a long time so settlers will remain. Like in SA the settlers can hand over state power and remain settlers while keeping their stolen property. We won’t make that same mistake and tbh that mistake only happened because the US exists, for our turn it won’t.
The settler identity is clearly less mutable than property relation to production. One does not simply change nationality, nor their “race”.
In colonialism there are oppressed and oppressor nations. Whether ruling or working within the nation a colonized worker remains lower than the colonizer worker and same with owner. I doubt you’d venture to say an “Israeli” worker is the same as a Palestinian worker. It’s the same here, the foundation of the US of A is settler colonialism and that has not been changed. The contradiction between colonized and colonizer can only be solved by a war of national liberation.
There is a nothing patsoc tendency I see in you, the aversion to sounding radical. They don’t want to be seen as extreme they just want healthcare and to be seen as reasonable by regular (read: white) working people. But as Gramsci reminds us, “What is to be done? Nothing more than to destroy the present form of civilization.” Our aims are in to totally restructure society, we are not going to compromise on the solution of the primary contradiction. The total abolition of private property is undeniably a radical goal and people will be afraid of it at first. After that, who’s going to care if the communal land (which no one lives on) is cared for by the people to whom this land belongs? We know that to solve climate change we will need to drastically cut imperial core consumption of electricity and meat. Is landback really a stretch too far? Indigenous stewardship also plays a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems considering 80% of the world’s biodiversity is on native land. I and many (white) people I know would support landback. If we are going to convince the masses of communism how harder can it be to add decolonial thought? (Harder than it should considering MWM exists, but still, settlers will join the movement l)
Edit: sources added
We can’t think in terms of “what will people think after we’ve already won,” because to get to that point we have to win first. That means taking the world as it is today and moving it towards our ideal, not theorizing from a point where the ideal is already in place.
As for who cares about land they don’t live on, all sorts of people do! One of your links breaks out agricultural land as and where no one actually lives, but anyone with an interest in food production has an interest in agricultural land. The land immediately outside of any currently lived-on land is usually of interest to the people living next door; the first place you’re going to grow is often there. Tons of people use land for various recreational purposes. Any sort of post-capitalist economic planner will be interested in the mineral wealth of land where no one lives.
There is a real problem here: anything short of “we should turn all American land over to the indigenous” is saying you can, to a large extent, get away with genocide if you do it thoroughly enough and long enough. But leftism isn’t the absolute pursuit of perfect justice over everything else (there are police and prison abolition arguments that go quite far in this direction). And accepting nothing less than perfect justice here would mean we do nothing, and would perpetually criticize any AES state that too accepts less than perfect justice, which is too close to ultra-leftism for my taste.
Well bickering over AES is what settler Communists do best, because they don’t study conditions. We colonized Communists are just being up front in saying that we don’t believe a majoritarian revolution that settlers think must happen will ever happen, and that the revolution will come from the bottom segments of the masses and that most of the settler population will go where the wind blows. Why do we think this? Because the average settler worker in the US is not a productive laborer and is actually staffing the Imperialist distribution network. The White Proletariat? article covers this in the 80s and 90s but the situation has not significantly changed besides even more workers being white collar. First things first we will destroy the American and later the Canadian, and Mexican states and we will not allow the settlers to rebuild a state. The JDPON will necessarily be built by the nat-lib struggles and Americans will never have a sovereign state again. These are facts that cannot be overcome because allowing Americans a state is a reformation rather than a revolution.
The primary contradiction is settler colonialism, if this is not tackled then we have not succeeded in revolution. So we know what goals are mandatory, we don’t expect perfection, but we will hold settlers to high standards before they touch revolutionary power.
I mean, you’re free to develop a theory for how settlers can achieve socialism, but again we do not wait around and our theory does not rely on their support. We have yet to see one come out of the settler (or Imperialist European) working class for its 300 year existence. If somehow America becomes socialist we still fight them for Land Back, that’s not gonna stop, we are building our revolution and the standards are not to be defined by settlers. Assimilation is genocide and our revolution is to stop genocide, so reformed America is not enough.
This Haywood piece, while I find much lacking, tackles the root of MLism applied to Turtle Island. The USA is a settler state and the bastion of Imperialism, outside of fleeing and fighting on the side of 3rd world workers, there isn’t much Communists here can do besides fight the US from inside. There are specific on continent forces that uphold global Imperialism and allow the US to behave the way it does, and indigenous people are at the fore-front of contesting US, Canadian, and Mexican monopoly extraction that fuels empire. So even from a tactical standpoint, Communists are failing the climate and the victims of imperialism by ignoring contests at home and not supporting indigenous nations. Africans in the US like natives are subject to genocide, and have a historical orientation against the settler state. Like Haywood says an African contest in the western continents will shred America to pieces, giving our comrades around the world a chance to breathe, build up, and assist us in defeating empire. The CPUSA failed to vanguard the 50s and 60s and the root of this is revisionism that started in the early 50s. By tailing the Liberal Assimilationists on the Negro Question the CPUSA had in actuality supported the slow genocide of African cultures for the safety of Imperialism, since then where have we found ourselves? Mass institutionalization of Africans, mass sterilization, mass homelessness, mass displacement, and our leaders murdered, just as Haywood predicted. The counter revolution against Africans during the second Red Scare ushered in the uni-polar world, we must see that the failures of socalled vanguards here had global consequences.
With what numbers? With what resources? Why is now different than the last 500 years, when indigenous movements in better situations lost? The lack of answers to these questions is why writing off the majority of the U.S. population is interpreted as defeatist.
You’re right, we are in uncharted territory here with no clear historical precedent. Whatever you propose is just as theoretical as whatever I propose.
To me, it would be easier to destroy the imperial machine with more people on our side, not less. As material conditions continue to deteriorate the long-entrenched mass defenses of the machine (the settler ideology in white Americans) matter less and less.
There are more prisoners than people in the military. There are 40 million Africans in the US alone, and we have the historical impetus in national liberation, so do the indigenous nations who also outnumber the US military. The class structure of the military also places most of the colonially sourced soldiers as the majority of enlistees. The US military shipped disabled black men to Vietnam because they couldn’t field white middle class men. Settlers just won’t fight and if we use Indigenous examples against the US we can see many battles won by smaller indigenous armies than their European opposition. From this history we also see rapid class struggle and alliances within the indigenous peoples and the largest ones had defeated the settlers multiple times with the settlers resorting to ecocide and slaughtering camps of women and children. 40 million buffalo killed to defeat the Oceti Sakowin, this would blowback as the dust bow btw.
As we see in Palestine, settlers only feel powerful when they can shoot children, whether IDF soldier, a US cop, or someone like Zimmerman. Mass support from settlers is that variable we shall not seek “perfection” of. They will join us when they can see the writing on the wall. For now we move building our own communities up on the basis of trust and cooperation. Which btw, native nations are already providing services and jobs to settlers and the BP fed kids of any color. We focus on the most oppressed segments of society and the ones with historical impetus for fighting against Imperialism, something Labor Aristocracy doesn’t have until the conditions strip them of that title. We focus on youth of any background as well, as youth always have the opportunity to change the world for the better.
We just won’t make the mistakes of relying on settlers again. Even in the wars of the past there were settler allies who betrayed us, so we prepare our revolution for such events. Simple as.
Lol, you didn’t read the links or understand my point about decolonization being better than normal communist aims in addition to being more beneficial to all, while not being any more difficult to attain than the normal communist aims. Also:
I referenced one of your links in my reply. Just because you post something doesn’t mean everyone has to agree with it, and disagreeing doesn’t mean someone didn’t understand what you wrote.
This is what I disagree with. I see no rationale here, and I explained why (we have to start from where we are, not where we would like to end up, and tons of people have legitimate interests in land they don’t live on in the most literal sense of the word).
I saw where you referenced the link. Average people don’t own any land so it’s only the bourgeois that will have reason to complain. Recall the part of the communist manifesto where Marx clarifies that private property is already abolished for 99% of people so abolition of private property would bring nothing but good to the masses. Decolonization does not mean they will cut off our food supply or slaughter us. Recall it was they who welcomed the first settlers before they got stabbed in the back. Settlers are the genocidal ones. They do not want to genocide us back. It’s annoying how settlers constantly assume this and decolonial Marxists have to clarify this point. Never have I heard an unironic call for white genocide. For land, decolonization will mean a lot of rewilding according to indigenous stuardship. There will be drastic cuts in animal agriculture as it takes up a great amount of land and emissions, but that would happen whether socialism is with indigenous leadership or not if we want to survive climate change. Great swaths of industrial monocrops are grown solely for the purpose of feeding animals. For settlers this black and native leadership would simply mean adopting healthier plant based diets and improved wildlife and environment for settlers. It also means public transportation instead of cars, which is necessary but may be hard at first. We will have workers democracy internally and some representation, but we are lucky to be allowed any seat at the table after what our people has done.
As you should be able to tell this is normal socialism but we are making sure the land goes to whom it belongs. It should be no harder to convince people of if not easier as it appeals far more to those who are specially oppressed under Amerikkkan capitalism.
Also, on the bit about everything having failed so we’re practically back at square one. The Black Panthers were about the closest we’ve gotten to revolution and they failed because new counter intelligence tactics were used. We know how to combat those better now. We also can take advantage of new advances in the Palestinian and South African struggles. The US will be at its weakest in a while in the coming years as it’s economy is based on imperialism while the periphery drifts away. We have a chance at decolonial socialism here, and frankly it may be our only shot at avoiding total barbarism.