I was gonna ask “Are Mestizos settlers?” but I quickly realized that the answer to this question probably isn’t black and white. If the answer to this isn’t just “Yes” or “No” then what determines whether or not a Mestizo person is a settler?
I was gonna ask “Are Mestizos settlers?” but I quickly realized that the answer to this question probably isn’t black and white. If the answer to this isn’t just “Yes” or “No” then what determines whether or not a Mestizo person is a settler?
Q: Do they live on stolen land?
A: Yes
Conclusion: They are a settler
Define “stolen”, please. I am a Russian jew, living in an area that was conquered back when the Rus as an entity was young. My ancestors moved here after the Socialist Revolution, when jews were given full rights. Technically this isn’t my land. Technically it is stolen. Does it make me a settler? Does that mean I must pay reparations and atone for my sins?
This comment is made more specifically as an answer to the OP, not to Russian Jews. I simply cannot answer your questions but I would encourage you to look deeper into this yourself.
I think you conflate being a settler with sinister intentions or immorality. I don’t think this will help you understand. In fact settler-colonialism is usually justified with good intentions. And interestingly enough, reperations in some contexts do more to justify theft and violence than anything. Some colonized/semi colonized places have rejected reperations from colonizers entirely, including China.
I would suggest getting to know more about the land you live on and the people of that place and then look into what the USSR (and now the RF) did or did not do in terms of anti colonialism or decolonization. It must be stressed that only you and your community can get to know your situation in a way that answers your questions through engagement.
As you do this it will be more clear what your place is and what obligations you may have.
Also it is very important to note that land as a concept in North American Indigenous philosophy is usually not what you think. It is an intergenerational, “international” (as in other creatures and agents are also part of nations as well as other peoples are- not nation-states), system of relations that is built on obligations and reciprocity. This is still a heavily watered down definition frankly
So when Indigenous scholars talk about land in their books (sometimes capitalized as Land) they are talking about more than just dirt, but an infrastructure, a “mode of life” as Marx says in The German Ideology, that is also inherently opposed to capitalist accumulation.
Give me an example of land that hasn’t been ‘stolen’ a single time in human history. Better yet, divide the world into settlers and non-settlers. Haiti? Jamaica? It’s a made up distinction. Yes, imperialist empires have and will commit terrible atrocities, but the only thing that matters for us is the dictatorship of the proletariat and how it will steer our lands towards common worker prosperity. No amount of cultural, racial or historical connection to the soil could change that. Instead, we need to focus on the one characteristic we all share; class position.
So basically it’s too complicated for you to understand how to fix so you ally yourself with genocidal states to ease your mind and keep revolution the simple process you want it to be. Speak for yourself. Proletarians have never been the only class that struggles against capital. The proletariat risks failure by misrecognizing the conditions of the world. More disturbingly, it risks advancing capital’s empire by disregarding Indigenous peoples and peasants as it has absolutely done throughout its history in the US.
Your fixation on class is false because it is a vulgar understanding of class that was watered down by western, bourgeois, settler academics that have no engagement with the actual conditions of the world and instead favor the simulations of the liberal state.
Class is determined by your relation to the capitalist mode of reproduction. Hence only two classes. The exploiters, and the exploted. I’d still like you to tell me a piece of land on earth that hasn’t been stolen, and your plan on how to feasibly migrate billions of people into their own little ethnostates without killing loads of people like when the greek and turkish populations swapped in 1923. Maybe class struggle is just easier?
Projection
Why is Rye assuming that decolonization automatically means deporting the settlers? You know Vaush literally made that same error too, right?
Well my guess is that it is actually quite intuitive from a settler point of view. If we cant have a settler state in this place, then we will obviously have to disposses someone else to fix it. There is no imaginable way forward when you refuse to accept land theft is a defining feature of America so one might through their hands up in disgust, or justify it. It is not entirely different from the logic that goes into the occupation of Palestine. To question it is practically an atrocity with colonial logic. To be sure there is a marxist flavor to this that we must be on guard for.
Of course it is not Indigenous people saying all this rather but reactionaries that oppose decolonization. Likewise, it is typically white settlers, and other colonial accomplices, saying it would be genocide to return land and dismantle settler institutions. There is always a move to center white settler subjectivity and claim innocence. This should always be a red flag. It is bigger than individual failings, it is also a community problem as well. We have to hold each other accountable.
With time people can hopefully learn more. Just as we how when we learn more about how capitalism functions we are better able to combat it. Same for the idiosyncrasies of colonialism and the sensibilities it fosters. It is unfortunately common for people to lash out like this when faced with this. I think we should show patience for our comrades while we still do our best to explain. We simultaneously can’t let ignorant, potentially dangerous, comrades compromise those that we should be championing. We risk putting people in danger and discrediting ourselves.