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.
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.