To put it as plainly as possible, if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the “settler working class” as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.
A shame, a sad sad shame. For anyone that’s read settlers, or knows about the history of labor zionism, or prioritizes any kind of indigenous voice in their praxis, this is really bad. No peace for settlers! Settlers cannot lead the revolution! I hope we see an end to any respect given to this “settler colonialism is over” politic soon.
Fanon makes it clear: there’s a place for settlers, but only if they subordinate themselves to the anticolonial struggle. Their job is to be the nice white face that distracts the police, not to lead the vanguard or tell it what to do or how to think.
I still have trouble with this, even though I know better. I’m a know-it-all by nature, it’s so fucking hard to sit down and shut up when I think I know what’s best. I need to learn that lesson.
It is really hard to fight against the “main character syndrome” all of us white folk have been raised with our entire lives. Some simply cannot handle the idea that in a people’s struggle they won’t be the “main character” and will need to listen and support others, not lead them.
I’ve never seen people who insist that the settler-colonial nature of the US disappeared at some point in the past account for intergenerational wealth transfer. Do these people think that folks with all the money, land, and power tend to be white because whites just coincidentally happened to be better at capitalism on the day America “ended segregation”?
So much of this shit stems from the need to center yourself as the main character of revolutionary struggle and work backwards from there. “If I’m personally not the proliest prole to ever prole then why should I bother?” is just a few steps removed from “what do you mean I probably won’t see the post-capitalist utopia in my lifetime? Why should I bother then?” My answer to both is that if “bothering” is just posting online, giving to local charities, and voting for Democrats, then I don’t care: dress it up in whatever narrative you like; the results are the same.
Marx didn’t start his analysis of class society by going “ok so there’s two classes and I’m obviously in the good one or I might as well just tear all this shit up”. I’m fairly sure Marx didn’t die believing he’d made a giant mistake because he didn’t personally overthrow capitalism in his lifetime.
It’s just another form of the settler move to innocence, there is no point in which the relation stopped. It’s the same argument as “racism is over because civil rights!”. Settlers never stop being settlers as long as they rely on a settler colonial government structure, nearly every company you will work for is going to be using underpaid black labor and on still stolen land. The natives are still here as much as these people want to forget that. Many black people are still practically enslaved. So why do white people get to say “It’s over now I’m actually inherently revolutionary” even though their class historically has never led anything revolutionary and has been making the same argument even when settler relations were more obvious?
because liberal indoctrination trains people to see the world through the lens of individualism: “I’m white, and I don’t think of myself as privileged, so white people as a group must not be privileged”; “Sure I own a few rental properties, but I don’t think of myself as exploitative, so landlords as a group must not be exploiters.”; “My friend’s a cop, and I’ve never heard him say anything I thought was racist, so it’s wrong to say that US policing is institutionally racist!”; “I worked hard enough to own my own small business (I earned it with nothing but determination and a loan from my parents), but don’t you dare tell me that means I’m not working class! you’re basically telling all of us (me and my friends) to not even bother doing revolution (posting!)”
some people can only understand class struggle through a moral lens. they see a class contradiction, recognize a “good” group and a “bad” group, then conclude that if they’re not on the “good” side, then the taxonomy needs to change to accommodate that. it’s difficult for some people to reconcile how they can belong to groups with “bad” class characteristics and personally do good in spite of that. I don’t feel “bad” or “good” about being born white or having a settler background, but I know that any good I aim to do in this life will disempower those groups as a necessary prerequisite to empowering the vast majority of the world. I also know that the people leading those struggles must necessarily come from the other side of those class contradictions. education and expertise are invaluable assets to revolutionary struggle, but there’s a reason that successful socialist revolutions haven’t come from the most comfortable, educated elites using their superior knowledge, expertise, and influence convince everyone to give them power so they can benevolently distribute it to the grateful serfs.
some people can only understand class struggle through a moral lens.
A huge part of it is how liberals/conservatives criticise Marxism. The idea that classes equated to morality in Marxism and that marxists were obssessed with equality above all else was probably one of the biggest criticisms of Marxism I used to hear back when I was a liberal.
It was basically what kept me away from Marxism for a pretty long time. I used to think that Marxism was deeply rigid and moralistic so was put off by it. Now I’m beginning to understand that for a lot of people, rigid moralism is a selling point.
A lot of people have vested interest in counter-revolutionary organizations as well. For some reason, despite a lack of accomplishments, any critical look at the material cause of their issues is met with aggression. Either the orgs are actually great and it’s just those uppity black people that don’t like it (weird that white people are saying this hmm) or native people were erased so completely their criticisms don’t matter because the genociders just won.
You’re missing the point. What is the basis of most wealth generation in the USA currently? Is it the theft of land and natural resources from indigenous peoples or is it imperialism? The origin of that wealth is in settler-colonialism but that is no longer the primary aspect of the US economy.
the extraction of wealth from the imperial periphery would not be possible without the inherited wealth stolen from the indigenous people of the imperial core. the people doing the former today are the children of the people who did the latter and passed on that stolen wealth. yes, the means and method of extraction today aren’t predominantly the same as they were in earlier centuries, but the extraction of today is only enabled by and because of the extraction of yesterday. Modern imperialism develops as a method of maintaining profit when primitive accumulation is constrained by physical limitations (running out of land and bodies you can easily steal).
Where conditions make primitive accumulation possible (e.g., West Asia right now), modern imperial powers still leap at the opportunity to do it. The point is that you can’t seriously hope to roll back the spoils of modern imperialism while leaving the spoils of the primitive accumulation that enabled it intact. An “Israeli” “communist” who says “I’m not a settler, I was born here! To call me a settler is to suggest that we shouldn’t even bother trying to make a socialist Israel!” is fundamentally no different than a US, Canadian, Australian, etc. “communist” who says the same of their states. I would agree that those people would be wasting their time trying to create a “socialist Israel” or “socialist US”. Those states have no authentic historical national identities outside of settler expropriation of the people who live there. Socialism will be built on those land masses by the people who live there after they successfully destroy the settler states and eradicate the material basis for the settler identity.
the extraction of wealth from the imperial periphery would not be possible without the inherited wealth stolen from the indigenous people of the imperial core. the people doing the former today are the children of the people who did the latter and passed on that stolen wealth.
I completely agree with this analysis. However I think you have shown that there is a qualitative transformation from the primitive accumulation of indigenous peoples to mature imperialism. I agree it COULD NOT have happened without settler-colonialism, but that settler-colonialism is no longer the dominant mode in most of the West—even if it is preferred as seen in the rampant plunder and subjugation you are correct to point out in West Asia.
The argument of making a ‘socialist US’ or ‘socialist Israel’ seems to be a strawman. No theoretically consistent communist wants to ‘turn a state socialist’. Marx explains “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” As such, real communists seek to smash the bourgeois state.
I more so align with the critical view of primitive accumulation that it is a constant, unending process. There’s no end to the stealing of land, the permanent underclass status given to black people. It is merely that this is the basis for a greater American imperialism which reinforces the former, but the former is still in constant need of re-enforcing in order to maintain the American state. If we’re talking about building a revolution in America, I don’t see a point to saying imperialism is the principle contradiction instead of settler-colonialism. A system such as capitalism is inseparable from the colonial conditions which it was borne of (as the Red Nation calls Capitalist-Colonialism), and capitalism will always expand into imperialism if able to. If we want to stop American imperialism, both are mutually reinforcing and need to be fought. The idea that settler-colonialism needs to be put on the back burner or isn’t a major factor in our conditions and contradictions seems to be something only people who have a personal interest in maintaining it (white) feel a need to say.
I read through it and I’m sort of confused what the sides of the argument even are here, apart from arguing over abstractions of terminology.
I’m going to be honest with you, there aren’t really sides here and it genuinely seems like OP hates anyone who the system would label white.
Like I can’t even understand who he wants to lead the revolution other then… “pure” Native Americans and maybe “pure” African-Americans descended from slaves. Which is barely 2-3% of the population if every one in those groups was 100% on board.
Nevermind, going through their posts OP believes that only a decolonial indigenous-only movement is capable of facilitating a communist Revolution in the west. Also creating a government that is representative of the people is also bad, only an indigenous led government and state is allowed. What an utter lunacy of a statement.
Yeah, I’ve had multiple convos with them where I wasn’t entirely clear what their stance is other than centering indigenous struggle (which is sort of vague when, like you point out, the % is so low). If they just think “any not indigenous in leadership bad”, that seems way too simplistic and naive. That said, I believe in the idea even the article seems to include as valid:
The demands of indigenous peoples deserve special consideration and are distinct: full sovereignty and national development of indigenous peoples, and the protection of their cultures, languages and traditions.
The way I’ve understood it in the past is that indigenous liberation and black liberation in the US need a certain amount of independent power as distinct from relying on the good graces of the institution of whiteness. But that said institution, developed over hundreds of years with some pretty arbitrary distinctions made up along the way (like how the Irish in the US weren’t considered white at first), also needs to be dismantled. And it may be that in order for it to be dismantled with security for the most marginalized groups, they need a certain amount of independence of power to guard against revising how it works rather than dismantling it. Along with just needing the sovereignty of culture and so on, in the case of the indigenous.
But none of this means those who would count as descended from settlers can’t hold any power at all; without the numbers there, I just don’t understand the logistics of how it would work. And while there are some people who are considered “white” europeans who are close enough to their ethnic ancestry they could return home and get citizenship, plenty others aren’t (nor does such a path have anything to do with indigenous sovereignty and flourishing necessarily; I’ve never heard of indigenous groups endorsing a mass exodus of “settlers” from the US, but maybe I’m not tuned into the right sources of information). As it is, without time for indigenous groups to have the pressure off and rebuild, simple abandonment of the locale would leave a hell of a lot of cleanup behind for far too few people to fix. The geographical area that counts as the US is huge, one of the largest areas designated as a country in the world, and full of capitalist waste and infrastructure. It’s going to require a lot of people power (in sheer numbers) to address that and begin to get it back to a mode that is more centered on being caretakers for the land.
So I guess for me, it comes down to: On the one hand, I would like to be able to say simplistically “oust the settlers and put the indigenous in power.” But having grown up in the US and having a decent level of familiarity with how things are here, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the logistics of doing so. It seems like there’d sooner be the US split into lots of smaller states without the federal than see something on the federal scale of the US that is indigenous run. I understand there can be issues of white people betraying non-white historically, in working class and other like movements in the US, which I can only guess is where the staunchness of it comes from. But there’s still the matter of the sheer amount of logistical planning and decision-making of scale when we’re talking about the size of the land and the 330 some million people living within it. There are those western chauvinists who don’t care at all and just want better working conditions for white working class people, and they are a real concern, but I don’t see that as being the same as white people who are doing what they can to reject whiteness and organize in solidarity with the most marginalized, where possible and desired.
I do think we won’t ever see this kind of communist America with federal control, as the concept of America was a settler construct to begin with. I understand the logistical issue, but it’s important to understand many areas do have active indigenous presence that could lead governance and steward the land. Many areas have large ghettoized black populations that would be in their best interest to be able to govern the communities they understand and economies they do the labor for. The main idea is taking the settler out of the populace, the white out of the euro-american. Having black people teaching the schools and hiring people and otherwise leading society as to flip this relation on its head and nullify the benefits of white supremacy. Many people will move back to Europe in this process and the rest will either go along and contribute to a new society or need to be policed and prevented from interfering. It’ll largely depend on the specific areas and the forms of governance able to take power, and likely will be an ugly balkanization that deals mostly with preventing white supremacists from ruining society building projects, but this has always been inevitable.
do have active indigenous presence that could lead governance
Do you have sources on indigenous tribes stating that this is even what they want across the board in the first place? Because having sovereignty / protected culture / re-growing their own people, and trying to lead an effort to deprogram millions from white supremacy, are two different things - and we’re talking about a lot of thankless effort for the second one and having to deal with a lot of confused if not angry people who may view them as outsiders, stupid as that may sound on the surface, considering the US was founded on outsiders coming in. But because the indigenous have been so systemically erased, as far as I can tell they have little presence in the consciousness of many a USian, so the idea of them taking over from the outside (of the US-centric paradigm) to make people think and behave differently, is going to come across very weirdly, to say the least. Unless you are trying to say the indigenous would lead over specific areas in isolation, without any non-indigenous there, and black people would lead de-radicalization efforts?? I don’t know, I’m getting lost in the weeds.
Many areas have large ghettoized black populations that would be in their best interest to be able to govern the communities they understand and economies they do the labor for.
This makes sense to me as them leading those specific communities. Black people as a whole are mixed in with the same capitalist socializing as white people at this point—albeit with probably more openness to the needed radicalization and education because of the systemic racism, incarceration, etc., that they experience—so it’s more complicated than just having black leadership and calling it a day, as we see with figures like Obama or Harris.
Many people will move back to Europe in this process
How though? By deporting them via an agreement made with parts of europe? Who may still be imperialist in this scenario and want to reject the efforts being made? A lot of people don’t have citizenship that they can go back to. The heritage isn’t that simple.
In general, this sounds like an analysis bordering on an assumption that if somebody belongs to the right group that white supremacy has placed them in, they de-facto are well suited to dismantle white supremacy. Rather than looking at it based on the cultural and socioeconomic context they are in. Like the people dealing with the fallout of the hurricane in that place in north carolina, appalachia, I think it is, do you really think the white people among them would be big defenders of white supremacy if a revolution kicked off tomorrow? They’re just trying to work out how to live, some of them. Is Obama a better candidate for leadership than white people among them because he’s black? At what point is it taking it too far to the point of ignoring where people are placed in the system as a whole, if you get my meaning. I don’t see you accounting for that in how you describe things, but maybe I’m missing it.
For my initial point I mostly meant reserves, largely native populated bordertowns, and historically stewarted but current day US-owned (if rarely used) land being truly sovereign and leading governance without any US-reserve treaties as there are today. This’d need to take a form as the communities see fit and what works, so some would likely mean deradicalization/desettlerification, some would go full juche, or others would go the hamas route of making some part of the occupied land unsafe for settlers as to make them leave. We’ll see these form as their relationship with the US is weakened and contradictions sharpen. It’s important to see that today, if the US were to collapse, these communities would still be able to function as they retain a seperate economic base from the rest of the US.
Leave where is a good question, as most euro americans lack dual citizenship. I don’t necessarily mean mass deportations would happen as the power to make this happen would just manifest, but more so along the aformentioned hamas route. More and more able people will leave for europe and more euro americans will be detached from the conditions of settlerism as decolonization continues. Europe will likely take some refugees. I also believe we’ll see in real time a microcosm of America’s downfall as Palestine is reborn and learn much from it and the deradicalizing process necessary to stabilize a decolonize a society run by Palestinians post-Israel.
I also believe we’ll see in real time a microcosm of America’s downfall as Palestine is reborn and learn much from it and the deradicalizing process necessary to stabilize a decolonize a society run by Palestinians post-Israel.
That would be helpful to learn from for sure. Too much of the US situation seems lacking in parallels to draw from and just has to be worked out as we go along. This may be part of what it comes down to for me, pushing back on this specific mindset to it; that it seems too simplistic to engage with the US as a whole. And I’m not convinced the article this thread is about, is working from bad faith, and not just trying to make an attempt to engage with the whole of the problem, as opposed to saying some kind of messy balkanization is inevitable. Indigenous sovereignty matters, as does black liberation, and greatly, but so does human life more generally. And 330 million people is a lot to contend with, no matter who is doing the leading and where.
I do understand your concerns. I wanted to emphasize with this post however that this rhetoric is unnecessary and chauvinistic, even if the situation is more complicated than how I’m trying to get it across. The article’s parent organization is made up of mostly white people and is using this rhetoric and basing praxis off of a settler move to innocence, when what’s necessary is seeing the “primitive accumulation” as a never ending process that predicates the settler having any right to the land or having the ability to live such lavish lives. The article’s claim that there’d be no praxis unless settlers are revolutionary isn’t true and reads as someone that organizes primarily with white people.
When focusing on doing praxis in America the focus of imperialism is important as we can smash the imperialist war machine and see the many ways it is the basis for the so called “American dream”, but if we’re dreaming of building a better America we cannot ask the natives to be once again subjegated to a new “communist” America, and in order to prevent that they need to make up the movement and not be subject to it.
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Which is who? Is communist praxis mass-genocide now? I must have missed those chapters in Capital and What is to Be Done.
Are there a lot of reactionary white people? Yes. Are there a lot of reactionary Americans in general, yes. That being said, I don’t think it’s really realistic to think that all Americans aren’t capable of organizing for revolution. America is a settler colony, this is true, but it’s already established and it’s inhabitants don’t stand as much to lose as the settlers in Israel if Israel collapsed tomorrow. I don’t think the average American has as much affinity to the Idea of being “American” as much as the average Israeli settler does to being an “Israeli”.
America is also heavily populated with those who were the descendents of enslaved people and those who were themselves the victims of US imperialism, whether indigenous or immigrant. While there is the US government and a dangerous faction of US white nationalists, the people themselves are a whole lot more complex than the Israeli populace. Time will tell when more things come to a head here, but there’s more reason to be optimistic about the American working class than other countries in the Global North.
It definitely is more complicated, but it isn’t impossible to analyze. In Israel we see a microcosm of some of these dynamics with Arab Israelis that get treated very different from native Palestinians, many non-Jewish settlers of many different kinds as well. In America we definitely have many different races of settlers now but you we can still analyze how it works through an individual’s proximity to whiteness. Clarence Thomas may be the descendant of a slave but he is a settler, but most black people are in hyper exploited positions that make them not. Most Asian people in America are here by choice through capitalist relations beneficial to them (emphasis on most) and a rich Taiwanese person or a Japanese person has a proximity to whiteness many don’t. Many Iraqi people here are victims of US imperialism, but there are those that are predominately well off and fit better into white supremacy (Chaldeans) that are certainly settlers.
In all these cases there is the question of goodies gained through imperialist plundering and the relative access to them, as well as the ability to benefit from white supremacy and the exploitation on those not allowed within it. It’s complicated and as the contradictions sharpen and imperialism can buy off less and less people we’ll possibly see the definition of white constrict and more revolutionary circumstances arise so I can see the relative optimism. So far the effective method of continuing the project has been expanding who fits into “white”/settlerism, but if Trump is any indication our ruling class doesn’t want to see this at least at the moment.
Yeah, not impossible to analyze for sure. But also, the analysis like you pointed out is a lot more complex. But ultimately, people in the US are subjected to a lot of the harsher effects of capitalism than elsewhere in the Global North. There’s no right to healthcare, insane educational debt, waning home ownership and childbirth, little worker protections or benefits, mass shootings and executions by police just about every day, and we’re all seeing our money being stolen in order to sponsor a genocidal apartheid state. There are a lot of things encouraging Americans to become class conscious, which can ultimately lead them to an awareness of their own settlerism if they follow that consciousness with theory.
Whereas in Israel, the populace is pretty overwhelmingly racist and genocidal and that doesn’t look like it will change anytime soon. If ever.
It’s not necessarily that they can’t organize, I just think they’ve been trying to lead parties when the only really successful attempt at an ML communist party in America has been from the Black Panther Party and that’s for good reason. I see what EFF has been doing in South Africa to move on from some of the failures of the SACP which feel very similar to those of the CPUSA and I think it ought to be learned from. There are quite a few white people in the EFF as well, it’s just that they aren’t the majority in the org.
I just think they’ve been trying to lead parties when the only really successful attempt at an ML communist party in America has been from the Black Panther Party and that’s for good reason.
Successful seems really arbitrary here. CPUSA Pre-fuckery times was majority a white party, and yet it was virtually one of the few meaningful political bodies for black people at the time. We’re talking about becoming organized to reversing death convictions for Black men who were accused of raping a white girl, formation of the first sharecropper unions, being a cornerstone for agitating for the new deal, etc. No one race was leading over another, and they were all working in common.
Not necessarily true, and the new deal was really a big moment for continuing the American project over anything else. The support of FDR was the real death knell for the party. I really like the CPUSA history as covered in Settlers for this reason, those chapters do a great job explaining this.
The CPUSA initially being majority white isn’t true?
“The party’s work among the Negro masses has been negligible. It was in the main a white working-class movement and the masses of Negroes were not yet drawn to it in any large numbers.”
William Z Foster himself
and the new deal was really a big moment for continuing the American project over anything else.
The actual hunting and persecution of communists seems like a much bigger reason for the decline of the CPUSA, than the New Deal itself passing. The CPUSA didn’t advocate for the New Deal because they thought Capitalism was so great and needed to be preserved but because there are times where reforms should be fought for. Membership peaked in the mid 40’s because of their pushing for it.
I more so mean that this was before a lot of the “white” people were truly white. The new deal solidified Irish/Scottish whiteness and brought up their condition to the rest of white people. Also, many of the organizing done for black people among the CPUSA was largely inaffective and was directly criticized by BPP on many occasions. If supporting black people is the metric, this is a legit criticism to be had.
I also think communist persecution is an over emphasized point considering very few euro-american communists were persecuted in anyway close to even the average black person. Settlers also covers this point, and regardless of why the CPUSA advocated for the new deal it was still a bad move as it allowed the American project to continue ushering in likely more than a century of darkness
I more so mean that this was before a lot of the “white” people were truly white.
There were already anti-lynching laws aimed at protecting Italian immigrants as early as the 1800’s. It’s also irrelevant if they did “see themselves as white” when at the end of the day, Jim Crow was at full wing and well…CPUSA was primarily white in the early 1900’s.
many of the organizing done for black people among the CPUSA was largely inaffective and was directly criticized by BPP on many occasions.
Care to cite specifics? I don’t find it particularly useful to talk in such generalities. I highly doubt the BPP would describe anti-lynching, Black union work, and theories of Black self determination as “ineffective”.
I also think communist persecution is an over emphasized point considering very few euro-american communists were persecuted in anyway close to even the average black person.
And it’s not a Olympics of Persecution. This is an entirely irrelevant point when people like Debbs were being prosecuted, The palmer raids happened, the espionage act, etc. Also communist persecution and the persecution of black people aren’t really two separate circles.
and regardless of why the CPUSA advocated for the new deal it was still a bad move as it allowed the American project to continue ushering in likely more than a century of darkness
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/sep/12b.htm
Read lenin on reformism. It’s very short sighted to reduce the continuation of the American project to the New Deal being passed.
I would suggest “Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists” the new Gerald Horne book for a good history on their relationship. I found this nice Substack article that goes over some points it makes, the failure to see american fascism, expulsion of Harry Haywood, removal of black belt nationalism from the program, etc… While some panthers appreciate the work of sympathetic whites many didn’t want white people in or around the org at all. Quotations of criticisms of the CPUSA are in the book, genuine apology I can’t give a quote here as I lended the book.
I also brought up the persecution point because it absolves the CPUSA from having internal problems, even if it was very real and did strip them of the organization they did have they had a very big problem with being unable to recognize settler colonialism and its effects. I see Browder is also another scapegoat for the ineffectiveness of the CPUSA, without analysis on why his open revisionism was so accepted amongst cadre. In my mind, the CPUSA supporting the bourgeois class that was offering them an out during a time hard particularly hard for white people instead of striking when the bourgeois was weak was the ultimate culmination of this. Again I would really suggest reading this chapter in Settlers for the analysis, I think Lenin’s thoughts on reformism are very useful but in the context of the American project I think this analysis is more relevant and important.
I think my main issue with your stance here is that it’s based much more in absolutism than actual material conditions.
What does settler colonialism provide for its benefittors? Well, as they themselves will often say, land. I resent the term “reset” but settler colonialism is the closest humanity gets to actually turning back time in class society. It slows down the centralization of capitalism and allows for the creation of a large petite landowning population. Of course as well it makes room for large immigrant populations who are generally more friendly to being the exploited proletariat than either the conquered peoples or the settling population.
The problem is, how much does the American proletariat benefit from these things today? How easy is it for a American proletariat to gain land, how many resources remain completely untapped and can be exploited to increase the rate of profit? Etc.
This isn’t to say that America and Americans don’t benefit from the legacy of settler colonialism, but I agree with the CPUSA that it is not the primary contradiction. It certainly is an existing contradiction, but it isn’t the primary one that determines the material conditions of the American proletariat.
[settler colonialism] slows down the centralization of capitalism and allows for the creation of a large petite landowning population
tf lmao
colonialism as whole is a necessary precondition to modern capitalism and imperialism. it is, in absolutely no way, a setback to capitalism and is in fact the only reason global capitalism and western dominance was possible at all
is this what yankee communists actually believe?
I was writing this at like, 3 in the morning dude cut me some slack.
What I mean is that, essentially, class divides are lessened between the classes of settler colonialists. You can see this in Israel, for instance, in that white Israelis get to live in “socialist” kittibutzes (however you spell that infernal thing) while underpaid migrant workers and such do much of the work. Ergo it gives white Israelis much more economic and consequently political and social freedom compared to those oppressed people’s.
In the same way imperialism uses super exploitation to create a labor aristocracy. Settler colonialism does something similar with land. If you were a poor prole in America, an option you had was to “go west young man.” Land monopolization could be delayed in the western terroritories with the expulsion of natives, while the labor power could be bought cheaper from the waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, etc.
This isn’t to say that it was “good” or avtually slowed down capitalism at all, in fact I’d argue, concurrently with you, that it did indeed speed up the adoption of capitalism. Its a complete mischaricterization of my response. Class conflict and monopolization still occurred, and mainly occurred in the states settled earliest that weren’t dominated by slave owning plantations (like new York, Philadelphia, Ohio, Michigan, etc.) However i argue that it occurred to a lesser extent because of the lack of resource competition on the continent, along with the aforementioned boons of settlement and such. This is my general explanation for the lack of class consciousness for much of American history (combined with other factors of course). I use “reset” as a term in comparison to other states on the two continents. In Mexico and other Spanish colonized states, the encomienda system made lesser even the people considered Spanish who did not come from Spain. Of course they held a higher position than slaves and indigenous peoples, but the land owning class was quickly centralized (at least in comparison to the United states). And so class conflict was accelerated in these nations. I’d argue that you can even see this in the American south, where instead of Yeoman farmers you had the slave ran plantations which stifled the growth of capitalism in these areas.
Ergo, what I was arguing in my comment is that, while the legacy still exists, the American proletariat no longer profits primarily from settler colonialism. Rather I say they benefit mainly from imperialism, same as in Europe (i.e, France and Britain). So while I do think that white Americans definitely benefit from the latent boons, it is just as possible for white Americans to be as revolutionary as white Brits or French people in comparison to Israelis because the class contradictions between them and the Bourgeoisie are greater than the material differences between the white proletariat and the black, Latino, etc. population.
This is of course not ignoring the labor aristocracy created by imperialist super profits and such, and so them being revolutionary is unlikely, but not as impossible as, say, a 1900s Boer or modern Israeli.
This type of defeatist third-worldism is even worse white man’s burden. If genuinely nothing can be done in the imperial core, than all that remains is to wait for revolutionaries in the Global South to establish JDPON. Unless you are going to put up and join in with the ‘legitimate proletariat’ in the Global South, you are basically saying you are entitled to do the intellectual work of revolution while revolutionaries there do all the fighting and dying. This seems like a sublimated justification for inaction.
From ‘A Critique of Maoist Reason’ by J. Mouffawad-Paul:
What ultimately disqualifies [third-worldism] from correctly representing [revolutionary] reason is that it has no logical basis upon which to develop its theoretical insights. If there is no proletariat in the imperialist metropoles, and thus no proletarian movement, the first world third worldist cannot make a correct assessment of anything since it cannot practice the mass line.
I would be interested to see a single vibrant organization in the Global South that upholds this line. If you know of any, please share.
Its a very all or nothing take too. Like lets assume that theres a 0% chance of any successful revolutionary action in the USA. There are still actions people in the USA can take. Things they can do to take the pressure off the global south. Every soldier in the states fighting rebels, every bullet, and bomb not made in the factory workers walked out of. Is one less weapon for the empire to use against the rest of the world.
But how is the ideology prerequisite to taking those actions going to form if all white workers are principally settlers? The point in the FRSO article isn’t that racism doesn’t exist or that racially/nationally oppressed people aren’t exploited at a higher rate. It’s that settler-colonialism is a specific stage of development where the dominant force in the economy is the primitive accumulation of indigenous wealth. Whereas now the “USA” is mainly an imperial power characterized by the export of capital. Calling the main economic paradigm of the “US” settler-colonialism is not an accurate or useful characterization.
I think it can give us a guide for revolutionary praxis here in America that avoids the many problems other settler communist parties or organizations tend to have. Settlers aka yt people aka those who benefit from imperialism abroad and settler colonialism at home are a different class and don’t have the revolutionary class consciousness that a native person or a black person in the ghetto does. I’m no third worldist and certainly no maoist but rather I support efforts for decolonial marxism and smashing the imperialist war machine, and I think if we were to have a real revolutionary party it should take the form of something similar to the EFF or the BPP.
Organizing and working among the hyper-exploited and poor in our own communities is possible, and despite the mass of treats from abroad, conditions for many people here are horrible and can/should be seen through a revolutionary organization. I just believe that having settlers lead this organization who don’t experience the bulk of this oppression, mostly lack non-capitalist communal structures, and actively have a stake in the continuation of the flow of jobs/housing opportunities they are much more privy to is one of the major problems plaguing our efforts.
Uncritical support for black and indigenous comrades in the US!
People cracker posting in this thread lmao.
White people need to learn to cope with the uncomfortable reality of our colonialist history and whats required to fix that. People spitting their dummies out cos a non white person told them they can’t trust them is very funny to me.
Please behalve y’all or we will have to lock the thread
The problem with such statements is that they are inherently defeatist attitudes that only breed complacency and apathy, as if you’re right, then what the hell is the point of trying to organize within nations such as the United States. Further how do you classify who is a settler in a state such as the modern day United States? Do you lock mixed race people out of the movement as well? How about if they are white passing? Or how about recent “white immigrants”? What about the millions of white appearing people descended from settlers that live in abject poverty or are crushed under the oppression of capitalism? You can’t seriously believe that there’s absolutely no way such people could be mobilized or organized to join or lead a revolution, can you?
In such a racially and ethnically diverse nation like the United States, do you genuinely believe that you will ever effectively mobilize the working class if you limit your demographics to… who exactly? “Pure” Native Americans and “pure” black individuals who can trace their roots back to slavery and have no race mixing in their lineage?
I also fail to see the issue with the article, the author agrees that the United States is a settler colonial project, and that the lasting consequences of this must be addressed within a socialist society. However, all he states is that chasing bizarre notions of racial purity when organizing only sets back the movement by isolating elements of the working class that are ripe for education and radicalization. What do you see wrong with his statements?
Ok, lets say you’re right and are able to effectively exclude who you label settlers. Ok… what now? How does this benefit your organizing, popularity among the proletariat, and ability to sway the population to your side?
The issue with the article is that it practically implies that there aren’t any contradictions between settlers and non-settlers. It acts as if settlers class interests don’t often align with that of the bourgeoisie. Practically an outright denial of the labour aristocracy. And let’s just be honest, no one has ever advocated for barring white people from participating in the workers’ movement. Not one.
OPs past comments explicitly state that that’s what they wish for.
Also this is a conflation of the current stage of settler colonialism in states such as Zionist Israel and the United States. Settler interests are not a thing anymore in the United States, beyond maintaining the systems of power and consequences of previous colonial policy. Also no one is denying the labour aristocracy, however being a “settler” does not impart magical labour aristocracy privilege to even the vast majority of “white” people directly descendant from settlers.
Also labour aristocracy arises from workers exploiting super profits from external colonies. How does the author sweep aside that in any way?
Settler interests are not a thing anymore in the United States, beyond maintaining the systems of power and consequences of previous colonial policy.
Listen Ive had this convo with you before, at this point don’t say your idealogy has anything to do with the liberation of native/black people and tell it like it is, you want to organize with and for white people only. This shit doesn’t fly for anyone that’s interacted with the prison system, lived on a reserve, been priced out or kicked out of their land. It’s ridiculous, you can’t imagine settlers/yts not having a front and center place in the revolution I’m saying they need to be subjegated to the native/black proletariat ala EFF or BPP, or move back to europe. There’s plenty of room for praxis, hell look at the EFF it’s being done today in a settler colony like cmon
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I think you posting screenshots of our old conversations as to prove I just hate white people is much more vindictive. I’m sick of settler communist spaces leading action in the US and I do work with many other people who are as well. I am voicing things that are not unique to me or even this country and you are denying our real life experiences with angry attempted owns and half-responses, even if you disagree there is no need to be so combative to a viewpoint EXTREMELY common to natives in marxist spaces. You just push people away from marxism and keep it another white space. Talk about bad faith.
You live in a fantasy world you’ve made in your own mind. You’re acting like I have any problem with indigenous people AT ALL, and not that my problem is you frothing at the mouth about how white people keep ruining any Marxist spaces and that it’s YOUR space because YOU want it to be.
I am trying to act in good faith but you are saying you “dont have a problem with native people” so if native people are uncomfortable with your rhetoric or settler communist spaces at large it is their fault. You are being actively hostile to the idea this should be bettered and denying the fact that this real life opinion even exists. Even if I outright hated all white people no matter what you need to understand that would come from a legitimate outright revolutionary place, and that if communism or marxism is actually to be the idealogy of the oppressed in America it will be made up in majority of those who have been hurt most by capitalist colonialism and its superstructure of white supremacy (even the white people!)
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Not once in the article is it mentioned that certain parts of the “multinational” US have vested interest in imperialism and internal exploitation. I’ll show you two places where this is completely omitted despite being crucial to the topic
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.
The multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities found themselves with a common enemy – the monopoly capitalist class. Thus, a united front against monopoly capitalism, based on the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nations, became both possible and necessary.
OP didn’t mention that in this thread though. Albeit i haven’t checked their past comments on other threads
I would suggest reading through their comments. They believe that no one beyond black individuals descended from slaves and indigenous population deserve to participate and lead revolutionary organizations and that white participants can neither understand nor have a place in a decolonial world.
They froth at the mouth about “Starbucks leftists” over and over. This person is not serious.
“Deep issues due to the settler base of the parties”
Ie: it’s not government interference or other issues, it’s the white people who ruin everything.
Okay, yeah i don’t agree with that view. I just misunderstood OPs views
Still a sprinkle of truth to be found in there though. Specifically when they mention CPUSA, Maki, SACP struggling with the labour aristocracy due to, again, many of them having a vested interest in maintaining the present state of things.
I mean, that’s what I believe. I don’t think settlers can’t participate but they need to be subjegated to the actual proletariat (ie join the PFLP and not Maki, the EFF not SACP) and focus on decolonial marxism and not a labor politics that ignores very real contradictions. When they lead a communist party, you have a party with labor aristocracy conciousness. Also, I don’t think Ive ever mentioned “starbucks leftists” like was claimed, no clue where that came from other than trying to make me out as a crypto conservative
Alr, thanks for clarifying
No one said anything about the labour movement in the US needing to bar white people from participating in it. The problem with the article is that, one, it is completely unnecessary because, again, no one had advocated for barring white people from organising. It’s just pointless. Two, it outright denied the existence of a labour aristocracy which is often aligned with the bourgeoisie. This is seen in the text the OP quoted.
“No one said anything….”
Who is OP referring to then. Which group of people do we think op is talking about.
“Settlers cannot lead the revolution!” doesn’t mean white people shouldn’t be barred from organising. Settlers have a vested interest in protecting the racist, colonial institutions of the US. This does not say settlers should be barred from leadership positions, it says that the interests of the settler colonial class shouldn’t dictate what the revolutionary movement does. The same thing as you wouldn’t want the labour aristocracy in charge of labour movements, as they have vested interest in protecting the current order. Look at what happened to the communist parties of the US and Europe.
What is your definition of a settler? To me, it is someone actively expropriating and profiting from indigenous people. Where is there a homesteader or a militia forcing people off the land in the US?
Are you kidding? Youre kidding. What? Police brutally enforce natives off the land when someone wants to put a pipeline or mine in a reservation which, mind you, is another settler construct only in existence because of the police which allows even less native autonomy on anywhere outside the reserve. The same police that force black people to be homeless because the same settler colonialist system purposefully does not give them opportunities and keeps them in debt so they are forced to take extremely low paying jobs, thus providing super profits for settlers. This is the case in Israel, this is the case here, this is the case in Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the relative comfort of the settlers is all based on the suffering, underpaid, over policed, exploited masses on which the majority of the labor rests. The black man cleans the toilets for pennies so yts can engineer software for thousands, the native lives in a concentration camp so a euro-american can live in the suburbs.
You are not responding to my main point which is that these acts are not the primary aspect in the economy. The primary contradiction is not between internally oppressed nations and the United States, it is between the United States and peripheral nations. I completely agree that Black, indigenous and other nationally oppressed people are disproportionately exploited, underpaid, and policed. However, I do not agree with your slippery and unsubstantiated claims that 1) this is the primary aspect in the US economy, and 2) whites are settlers whose principal economic basis is the primitive accumulation of oppressed nations. White workers are shielded from the most intense exploitation because of the super-exploitation of oppressed nations and so hold a dual-character but the settler characterization is absurd.
But this primitive accumulation is a never ending process. The violence never ended and is at the basis for the continuation of our society as America. I don’t see how it isn’t primary to the question of building the communist movement within the US.
OP gave the game away. They legitimately just despise white people and saying that white people should not be part of the revolutionary movement is exactly what they meant with their statement.
This seems to be a category error. Settler and white aren’t synonyms even if there is significant overlap in a white supremacist system.
Then who is a settler in the United States at this point? For Israel the distinction is easy. The lines are to muddied in the US.
Yes it is a white supremacist system, but settlerism is entirely obsolete save for the vestiges of colonial policies that are still maintained.
It is muddied, I agree. The question is who maintains those policies and by what processes of production and reproduction. Legislators don’t achieve anything by writing a new policy or law; it takes thousands to carry out their will, either consciously or accidentally.
Two other important points are that (1) settler isn’t necessarily a permanent description—settlers can choose a different path—and (2) in the US context, settler-coloniser involves internal and external relations (in terms of inside and outside the US)—being a US settler means e.g. demanding a redistribution of wealth to provide social services and healthcare without acknowledging that most of that wealth flows in from the periphery and much of the ‘domestic’ wealth creation is clever ‘value added’ accounting.
Doing something about the problem is a quick way of negating the description of settler even for those who objectively and clearly fit it (e.g. middle managers in arms factories, officers in the military, the police, and haute bourgeois ranchers on the border of reserves). Things that can be done:
- reading revolutionary theory and educating others about necessary changes
- organising to prevent the continued pollution of and resource extraction on land that is still clearly designated as native land
- going on strike over issues of institutional racism and/or imperialism
- getting involved in prison abolition
- not voting for and therefore supporting the very people responsible for no tolerance policing in racially targeted zipcodes
- getting written signatures on a petition to fairly fund schools
- attending government meetings and repeatedly asking, ‘what about reparations’
- striking in solidarity with workers in the global south who are in the same value chain as one’s industry
- not compromising on shipping weapons when one’s transport union is on the verge of winning a pay rise
- campaigning against the interference of US capital in other countries
- doing anything to oppose the US military industrial complex
There are a lot of ongoing manifestations and practices of settler colonialism. It’s difficult to pick out and articulate the role of specific individuals who are settlers but it’s not impossible to consider the system as a whole and then analyse any individual’s or group’s position/role in the system.
I think determining who is a settler is like our Marxist definitions of class - it’s not meant to categorize every single person into a category, its only meant to describe a group that doesn’t have firm boundaries. White people in the US are settlers. The fact that who is “white” has a very fuzzy and fluid definition doesn’t take away from being able to identify a group (white people) and classify them as settlers.
By any definition, I’m white. I’m a settler. That doesn’t mean I should just take myself out of the game and stop organizing. But that does mean I should be aware of my own privilege and be careful to check my own assumptions and thought. And when my non-white comrades call me out on something, I am 100% going to really take what they say to heart.
What is your definition of settler?
More or less someone who takes land away from an indigenous population and treats it as their own, OR the descendants of those who did so long as there is a material benefit received by the settler’s descendants.
But of course this definition leaves gray areas; even situation is different as the material situation is different.
Even the American liberals realise that vast differences exist in the wealth of the different races in America that are the direct result of explicit discrimination that existed just 2-3 generations ago and implicit discrimination that still exists today. The existence of a settler class in America is undeniable.
Finding out which individual belongs to which class is one the other, almost always a pointless endeavour since classes are an emergent phenomena in groups of people.
Again, you are conflating race and settlerism. The US is a white supremacist state, but you are using settler and race interchangeably.
Who is a settler?
Again, you are conflating race and settlerism
Race is entirely a product of settlerism in the first place.
Who is a settler?
The settler class as a whole inherited humongous amounts of real estate wealth (which then exploded exponentially further under neoliberalism) and live in the more developed neighbourhoods of the country.
Think of suburban single family homeowners. These people are settlers in the truest sense of the word. They are the urbanised version of the settler yeoman farmer. They use more land, water and energy than basically any non-bourgeois class on earth, and by a long shot.
Their lifestyle and luxury is fueled by government subsidies (distributed on a racial basis) to the massively inefficient infrastructure and agriculture needed to sustain them.
When I say that the US and Canada continue to practice settler colonialism and still have a settler mode of production, I mean it quite literally. North american suburbs are notorious for their urban sprawl, that is, uncontrolled expansion, which is/was fueled by tearing apart dense developments suitable for the lifestyles of the proletariat. Not to mention that the urban proletariat’s production is siphoned off to the suburbs via the government.
The author doesn’t refute labour aristocracy? He simply states that even the labour aristocracy can be mobilized against the the bourgeoisie because they themselves are suffering under capitalism.
A McDonald’s worker is “labour aristocracy”, do you think they aren’t ripe for radicalization? The author is stating that pushing them away from the movement based on race is foolhardy and bizarre.
I mentioned this in another comment here, but this topic cannot be properly analyzed without mention of the labour aristocracy and the fact that certain sects of the population materially benefit from the exploitation internal exploitation of native, black and other minorities. It mentions the need to combat imperialism but doesn’t mention that portions of the US populus, at least in the short term, would lose many privileges.
Examples of this being omitted:
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.
The multinational working class and the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities found themselves with a common enemy – the monopoly capitalist class. Thus, a united front against monopoly capitalism, based on the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nations, became both possible and necessary.
Sorry, what is “yts” in this context?
Whites
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