Not surprising, FRSO has shown to be consistently inconsistent in their theoretical understanding, I’ve mentioned in another thread how the closest chapter to me backed a lib local “progressive” candidate in the most recent elections.

As for this piece, an effort post:

This ought to be contrasted with the Marxist-Leninist view, which sees the United States as an advanced imperialist country.

I think it’s important to note that basing your theoretical knowledge on what people on the other side of the world thought about the US decades ago means you’ve already lost the plot. The settler-colonial context is a specific one and rare among colonialism, most colonial projects were not settler in nature. The context of settler-colonialism is quite different, and we understand it best now in hindsight as modern people as more information has become available about the nature of how settler-colonialism functioned in the US, how it formed the base of the US economy, and how it has continued and built off that base since then. Capitalism developed and had certain qualities out of european Colonialism which was, for the most part, not settler-colonial in nature. capitalism was perfected through the settler-colony of the US, which is how global imperialism developed and neo-colonialism after it.

I think the flaw is that these people take Marx as gospel, and while he did well to create the framework for analysis of any context, he was a european man in europe a long time ago and was actually wrong sometimes, go figure. Just because Marx said he thought the principle contradiction was Capitalism, just because Lenin provided a foundation of analysis on the nature of imperialism, doesn’t mean that either of them had any context of settler-colonialism as the true base of the base, if you will. This explains why Marx was wrong about the proletariat being a revolutionary force in Europe and the US, and why Lenin had to have an analysis of Imperialism in the first place, and Fanon with colonialism after that and Rodney with neo-colonialism. The US was able to become the top capitalist, top imperialist, top neo-colonialist, because of the basis in settler-colonialism.

These are all different material circumstances, in relation to each other and everything else, and they have particular qualities which produce specific outcomes. In a society at the Imperialist stage, the proletariat is willing to take a cut of the super-exploitation of workers and resources abroad in exchange for their complicity. In a settler-colonial context, the proletariat is willing to commit genocide to clear out anyone who they see as in the way. People are a commodity that can be shipped in from outside the colony to follow the colonial standards, why deal with having an antagonistic relationship with a colonized subject if you have to live next to them? Imperialists want your slave labor, but settler-colonialists want your total destruction, because they aim to replace you.

This is a fundamentally different relationship, and while both produce terrible affects on the psyche of the oppressor, there are varying degrees of how likely someone is to break out of this stupor and join the oppressed- with settler workers being the least likely to have a come to Allah moment and think “you know what, I will give up all of my comforts and return the land to Indigenous nations that represent less than 1% of the population,” and that’s with groups that they do agree constitute a nation of some sort, unlike New Afrikans who I would assume the vast majority of Americans couldn’t fathom as a legitimate nation, despite their legitimate material basis as a colonized nation.

To deny that this is the cultural, psychological landscape of the average settler is easily refuted by opening your eyes and looking around. We genocide and enslave Black people who are kept in ghettos and prisons, we genocide and enslave Indigenous people who are kept in ghettos and prisons, we genocide disabled and elderly people, we genocide and enslave non-men. This is not a simple worker vs boss relationship. There are regular mass killings and enslavement of people committed with the permission of the settlers who benefit from it. This is a particular context that a majority of US workers of all backgrounds participate in and allow unquestioningly. Their retirement plans and access to good healthcare and nice housing depend on it. Not to mention the treats.

To reduce that to a simple worker vs boss relationship is hilarious, especially saying things like this:

This is metaphysical thinking. While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. Dialectical materialism understands that the nature of a thing is defined by the contradictions inherent to it. Things aren’t fixed, but always changing and developing according to these contradictions.

Oh, so things change over time, therefore what Marx said one hundred years ago is more correct than what colonized people have been saying since then?

With analysis like this, it’s easy to see why:

These contradictions changed and developed enough that the United States underwent two bourgeois revolutions, the War of Independence which overthrew the British colonial system and the Civil War, which overthrew the slave system of the Southern planter class.

I have to stop myself from typing this in all caps, or in the Spongebob meme font. To assert that the civil war overthrew the slave system proves that these people aren’t even introductory students of history. This person is just re-explaining basic Marxist analysis from a century ago and ignoring literally everything that has been learned since then.

The oppressed nations in the U.S. are the African American nation, with its homeland in the Black Belt South, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, and the Hawaiian nation.

Speaking of history, does this person know that there are dozens of Indigenous nations which have self-governed land and treaties with the US government? Are the Navajo people Chicanos? They really published this.

What does this mean? The U.S. isn’t an apartheid system, like “Israel” or “Rhodesia” for example. The horrific system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the betrayal of Reconstruction was itself uprooted by the Black liberation movement. While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character.

Again, what? It’s like in US schools when they are like “and then MLK jr fought the government and now Black people are equal!” These people think that because the U.S. succeeded in normalizing their apartheid system means it no longer exists. They think that history is a series of moments that go from one to another mostly unrelated. They have no ability to determine the form of something versus its content

This is because workers of all nationalities, both oppressed nationality workers and white workers, toil shoulder to shoulder on assembly lines and shop floors, in kitchens, warehouses and offices, from coast to coast. Even as national oppression puts greater pressure on oppressed nationality workers, they are still forged into one multinational working class together with their white siblings as they suffer exploitation together under the same bosses.

No they don’t. The worst jobs are overwhelmingly done by non white people. White people are overwhelmingly in middle management in these work sites. As someone who has worked in many of these places, when they do have white people working with non white people, the white people make racist comments regularly and have a knee jerk perception of colonized people as less valuable than white people. The white people “suffering” the same still think they are better, and the rest of them suffer less in exchange for complicity in the settler colonial system.

Mao Zedong famously said, “In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles that oppress the black people.” Mao was explaining that while many white workers may have racist and white chauvinist ideas that have to be overcome, those ideas are the ideology of the class enemy. It is that class enemy, the capitalists, who wield the instruments of oppression against the oppressed nationalities. The ruling class, not white workers, are the bosses and the landlords. The ruling class are the ones who control the police and the courts. It is the monopoly capitalist class who reap the super-profits from national oppression.

Mao Zedong, famed expert on the United States. I’m sure when W.E.B Dubois was hanging with Mao he said ,“Oh yeah, typical white people don’t oppress us, only the bosses.” Sure, police and courts ultimately are owned by the ruling class, but who calls the cops? Who sees the grave injustices done to colonized people via these systems every day and turns a blind eye, or worse, encourages it?

These are, first of all, petty bourgeois radicalism, and second, a desire to “copy and paste” from the Palestinian experience.

Ah that explains a bit, this person is so young that they think our analysis of settler colonialism comes from the study of Palestine, as if that project is not… copy and pasted from the US.

He then goes on to do a whole bit about the reasoning behind this settler-colonial theory is based in petty-bourgeois people who are not workers trying to pretend they are revolutionary.

This settler has completed his mental responsibility to erase colonize people from reality. It is not colonized people, the hardest worked of all workers, who understand and organize with the idea of settler-colonialism integrated into their analysis, but the petty-bourgeois.