Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.
I am with you. I do think Degrowth is potentially problematic because it’s being used to argue against the need to develop the productive base of overexploited nations. It’s also not really something the West is capable of doing considering it doesn’t have a productive base anymore. Degrowth in the West would be a combination of austerity and literal abandonment of settlements, particularly in the areas that are environmentally hostile to villages.
But I see degrowth being used against the overexploited world as a demand for them to stop developing their economies, especially against Marxists who argue for developing productive capabilities - a thinly veiled chauvinism against China and the BRI.
But even on Lemmy we see people railing against decolonization as though the “working class” of indigenous nations can stand in solidarity with the working class of settler nations because they have to otherwise it’s not “Marxist”.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but aren’t indigenous people vastly outnumbered by the settlers in the US and Canada? If i’m looking at this as a war between the colonized and the colonizer, the manpower numbers and the total assets on the side of the colonized for waging and sustaining war don’t look too good. We are not talking about Palestine where the settlers are still a minority and where the settler state is surrounded by more or less hostile states that can be potential allies to the indigenous population in their armed de-colonization struggle. This is a continent where the indigenous were all but genocided and where there is little outside help that can be expected. Wouldn’t the logical conclusion be that seeking allies among the settlers is just a mathematical necessity?
I can’t speak for the community as a monolith, but from where I sit, if ‘mathematical necessity’ means subordination to the sons and daughters of the same settlers that stripped us of our names, religions, cultures, and place in the world, then no. Flatly. I’d rather be liquidated than assimilate into whiteness-- and make no mistake, that’s all I see the settler-led left parties as.
My genealogical trail to follow disappears after 1900. I will never know where I originally came from, who I was related to, what I am more than a mutt tainted by slavers-- and the constant demands for subordination to settler interests from the white left, over unfinished business in the wake of Reconstruction’s failure really, just reminds me of everything else that was already taken. Things that we need to re-establish ourselves if no one wants to get right.
so what do u think should happen? would something similar to the way the soviets republics worked not be the best solution, cuz thats what i have seen as the predominant idea from the so called “settler” left and i cant really imagine a better solution if autonomy on a national level is a requirement.
NFAC had some good ideas. Not enough to keep perpetuating post-GM Jay getting locked up, especially not with how they cut out Black folk who only have Black moms; but there were some good ideas regarding ‘armed formations all on the same accord finding a way to either buy land, or take it from the settlers.’
Assuming we pull that off, then we coalition build with the other historically downtrod, as I know that NFAC probs wasn’t planning on that-- the more I look at them in hindsight, the more issues I have; but they at least had a start.
I don’t blame you. I think all prols should be free to practice what they please for culture, and religion too so long as it does not pose a threat to the DotP (referencing Christianity mostly here). America has never been a culture of the settlers, that is something they would advocate but this is not the truth of the matter. Many peoples have come to call this land home, it is indeed a ‘melting pot’. We should not aim to seperate these cultures nor pretend they do not exist as the settlers have, we should embrace multiculturalism however from a proletarian standpoint not cynically as the bourgeoisie have
Yes, but the settlers have already established that they refuse to recognize treaties between themselves and the indigenous. The revolution will need to be powered by settler proles but it will need to be led by indigenous and black leaders and organized around decolonization.
That inherently means suppressing many millions of settlers, because the interests of settlers in Las Vegas, most of Arizona, and much of New Mexico requires the appropriation and transportation of water. If they don’t get that water, those cities become ghost towns and the proles in there becomes displaced. It’s as Tuck and Yang say, the interests of the settler proles and the indigenous are incommensurate.
It’s this displacement that will be one of the first major aspects of degrowth in the US, and that displacement is only going to happen in one of two ways: either a vanguard of settler proles led by indigenous communities suppress the reaction to the displacement, or the indigenous genocide will enter a new stage as disorganized settler proles collaborate with the bourgeoisie to extract and transport water in way that will further kill and displace large percentages of indigenous reservations. The second way is already starting to happen.
It’s this incommensurability of interests that requires the settler vanguard to be national traitors, by recognizing that settlerdom is doomed by its own environmental destruction and that if we wish to avoid further genocide we must displace settlers from unsustainable settlements and figure out how to manage them and how to suppress the violent and racist reaction that will inevitably arise.
Ehh, I challenge your concept of the term ‘settler’ in reference to proletarian decedents of settlers. Quite simply, class determines politics (Lenin), not race. The only people in America today who have a continuing interest in their heritage of exploitation are those whom still benefit from such behavior - the pette and big bourgeoisie.
The proletariat of the settler nation clearly have interests that are incommensurable with the indigenous of the nation. Read Tuck and Yang. The question isn’t whether or not those interests are at odds, the question is what we can do about it.
Cities in deserts are the best example. Indigenous people require water to live and they have water rights. The settler proles require water to live and they have water rights. But the indigenous live sustainabily with the water and the settlers live unsustainably. The solution is the mass abandonment of desert cities. This is in the interest of the indigenous. It is against the interests of the settlers, proles and all, because they have nowhere to go. They will all band together to oppress the water rights of the indigenous and they will import water from elsewhere. There are tipping points beyond which it will be too late for the settler proles to come to some sort of eco consciousness.
But on a different point, the concept of settler descendants not being settlers is completely at odds with the entire theory and history of settler colonialism. The descendants are part of the point. Breeding and expanding your settlement is violence. It’s not like settlements stop being settlements because the people who did the sailing died. The settlements are multi-generational oppressive structures by design and we see it everywhere we see settlerism.
I’m unfamiliar with Tuck and Yang, and since they are not well known Marxist theorists such as Marx or Lenin, could you raise their arguments here? One cannot simply walk into a theoretical space and say “x is fact, read person largely unknown in the space” and expect myself or others to simply accept the authority of these authors.
Cities and deserts are included in Marx’s evaluation of the contradictions between city and country side. The city exploits the country and in doing so must hold leverage over it (water). You conflate all of society which lives under settler society with those who benefit from it and thus maintain it. This is pointing to a contradiction which does not exist equating “white” Americans with the pette bourgeois simply because of their ethnicity. Class not “race” determines politics, Lenin makes this perfectly clear. Your argument that “all white people will band together to suppress the indigenous” falls flat once one looks to Standing Rock or the various pipeline protest movements.
It is indeed at odds with the historical reality of settler colonialism, which has changed over time and is no longer the same as it once was. The descendants don’t magically have some racist gene, once’s interests are formed by their material conditions and their relation to the means of production of which the indigenous and proletarian “whites” share. You advised me to read Tuck and Yang, I advise you to read Marx and Lenin.
As though I haven’t. Thanks, though.
Your lack of reading past Lenin is not my problem. There’s an entire contribution to critical theory in intersectionalism, post-colonialism, and decolonization. You could read Fanon, Freire, Sakai, or Tuck and Yang. In fact, I recommend you read all of them and wrestle with their writings in earnest. They may not have everything correct, but the process of moving beyond Lenin is important for all of us to continue to develop our understanding of the world in the spirit of scientific socialism.
I don’t. I expect you to commit yourself to reading the continuously developing and evolving corpus of theory as the world continues to develop.
Here’s a link to Tuck and Yang’s Decolonization is not a Metaphor.
And here’s an excerpt from their abstract:
The argument is significant, and it draws upon decades of prior work, which it seems you may not have read, so it becomes difficult to summarize. Let me try to address your strawmanning of my position.
First off, in the desert example I gave, the city is in the desert. The city does not exploit the country, it exploits quite literally another nation. The leverage it holds over this oppressed nation is genocidal leverage, meaning both mass murder of bodies and mass murder of cultures.
This accusation is rich coming from someone who claims to read and understand Marx and Lenin. You may as well say Marx is conflating all bourgeoisie with those who have shared interests and thus maintain it. You have literally defined a class, a group of people who inhabit a structural role in society that share interests and use the mechanisms of the system, including violence, to maintain their shared interests through the reproduction of their way of life.
This is also a complete misunderstanding of the colonial context. Settlers do not need to be equivalent with the petite bourgeoisie for them to share interests that are incommensurable with the interests of the colonized. It is, in fact, possible, and indeed is the case, that the settler proletariat do not have a shared interest with the colonized, most of whom would not neatly fit the definition of proletariat. In fact, this is the primary point. The colonized have interests and these interests are shared and the interests are maintained through reproducing their livelihood in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the settler proletariat.
Indeed, but race is an expression of class warfare and in colonial contexts is entirely inextricable from that class warfare. One cannot solve the class question without addressing the race question as equally urgent. It is not an either/or but a both/and. And it just this way because the bourgeoisie have used race as their secondary expression of class war, second only to private property, and private property in colonial contexts is inextricably bound up with the expression of race. In the colonial context, race and class interpenetrate.
Surely you just. No one ever said “all white people will band together” just like no one ever said all proletarians will join together simultaneously nor that no proletarians will betray their class nor that all bourgeois will use violence to defend their property. We are talking in terms of classes. Settlers, as a class, will see individuals who betray their class and stand with the indigenous. This is good, but it is in no way an indication of class interests breaking down, but rather a heightened consciousness of the settler class’s place in history.
This is a strawman of the actual argument. No one is arguing from a position of race. Settler colonialists obtained the land for their factories through genocide, rape, torture, child abduction, cultural grooming, and scorched-earth environmental destruction. The descendants don’t need a racist gene. The descendants’ entire way of life depends on the maintenance of the structural dispossession of the indigenous from their lands. Everything from language to education, from social mores to art, from religion to location, from production to consumption, absolutely everything about settler society is entwined legally, physically, culturally, ideologically, politically, and violently with the oppression the colonized. Decolonization explicitly works against the interests of the settlers AS A CLASS, regardless of their individual feelings or beliefs.
For every demand of the indigenous, there is a settler interest that will be impinged. There is no other way because settler society is structurally organized, intentionally, to harm and oppress the colonized. Whatever settler society is, it is such through a process of dispossession and genocide. Settler proletarians who have successfully taken control of the machine of state can negotiate nothing except either capitulation to indigenous leadership or oppression of indigenous needs. There is not middle ground because, as Tuck and Yang argue, the interests of the colonized and the settlers are incommensurable.
Each thing that the settler proletariat must solve for in the revolutionary mode - distribution of land, distribution of extracted resources, extraction planning, waste management, national defense - inherently will impinge on indigenous interests. Including indigenous leadership in the decision making process can only lead to either the interests of the indigenous being upheld or the interests of the settlers being upheld, with the possibility of the deferring of one of those interests to a later decision making time. In any case, there is no possibility of indigenous people’s negotiating with a settler state in a position of equal power, and certainly in no way as nationally self-directed, as Lenin would require. Instead, the national boundaries would be those boundaries drawn by the settler imperialists, changing the boundaries would require settlers living their to live under indigenous sovereignty, and the indigenous may freely choose to organize their state according to settler interests or not. To assume that settler will simply adopt indigenous culture because all cultures are interchageable and the only thing that matters is one’s relationship to the means of production is to completely misunderstood what is meant by “need”.
That we’re having this debate at all is indicative of a massive gulf that cannot be crossed by me attempting to summarize 60 years of theory and practice. Please read Fanon, Freire, Sakai, and Tuck and Yang. You’ll find that these thinkers have read and engaged with the idea of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others. There’s an entire world of indigenous, anti-colonial theory that has been developing for decades and ignoring it will get you nowhere.
I have read past Lenin, I was suggesting a primary Marxist theoretician because the argument you are raising displays a lack of understanding of class politics and economic relations.
I would indeed commit myself to reading a series of works if they were recommended by respectable and principled Marxists, you are simply a person on the internet but one I have yet to meet thus far aside from this conversation.
You referenced a few options which would suffice in your opinion to demonstrate your points, one of whom is comrade Fanon. I have been unable to locate a set of works by him thus far and am interested in reading his works. Do you happen to have a link for his works? As I see is this would benefit our conversation.
My argument was not a strawman, I was under the impression we were discussing native Americans (in general) not the tribal nations.
“You may as well say Marx is conflating all bourgeoisie with those who have shared interests and thus maintain it.”
…He does, it’s called the pette bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy. Although in some cases proletariat or semi-proletariat, these groups hold an interest in society which aligns with the bourgeoisie, the proletariat do not. This is a reason why I questioned if you had read Marx or Lenin.
“This is also a complete misunderstanding of the colonial context. Settlers do not need to be equivalent with the petite bourgeoisie for them to share interests that are incommensurable [sic] with the interests of the colonized. It is, in fact, possible, and indeed is the case, that the settler proletariat do not have a shared interest with the colonized, most of whom would not neatly fit the definition of proletariat. In fact, this is the primary point. The colonized have interests and these interests are shared and the interests are maintained through reproducing their livelihood in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the settler proletariat.”
This is you simply restating your understanding of the situation, however no underlying logic is explained how this is the case in your opinion. I have stated my case already, and I will add 1 thing I thought of since yesterday:
When America was created, the economic relations were of a slave nation, and the land was predominately the means of production. Then the industrial revolution came and with it bourgeois-proletarian relations evolved. This is an example of how the nature and indeed character of the settler state changed. The settler “whites” no longer entirely benefited from the economic relations, there was a middle class now who maintained the privileges allocated to the “white” settlers, and the slave class merged with other “white” settler families to create the proletariat. Yes the tribal nations remained this is true, but their relations to the new class of prols changed.
" in colonial contexts is entirely inextricable from that class warfare"
I agree however you blend the past with the present conditions and as I’ve stated things have developed since then.
You now: “No one ever said “all white people will band together” just like no one ever said all proletarians will join together simultaneously nor that no proletarians will betray their class nor that all bourgeois will use violence to defend their property.”
You last reply: “It is against the interests of the settlers, proles and all, because they have nowhere to go. They will all band together to oppress the water rights of the indigenous and they will import water from elsewhere.”
“A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.” - Wikipedia
This is not a strawman, it is a simplification of your argument, not a distortion of it. You are arguing from a position of race determining economics when it is the reverse. Race is not unimportant, however race relations do not determine economic relations, it’s the other way around.
“the settlers AS A CLASS”
As I explained, the settlers no longer constitute a class, but a nation with it’s own economic relations, of which the oppressed in that nation’ interests align with the interests of all oppressed peoples.
If I’m understanding your logic correctly, you seem to be centering your arguments around the idea of the tribal nations v the settler nation America, yes? My answer to this paradigm is the destruction of America and the recombination of tribal nations with the people who lived in America. I understand how this is not historically just however it is impractical to simply move 340 million people to satisfy this justice. This can be done over time however the destruction of America is needed not only for this issue but for the peace of the world giving it a certain urgency. So what is to be done to reconcile this contradiction? Are the tribes to wage a nation war against the people who still exist on the land of the fallen settler nation to take it over? Or would it perhaps be a better choice to work with the people who lived there?
Now comes the question of who should rule? Your position presupposes the natives should take back their land and rule it however they please. This is a nice idea however as Marxists we must insist on a class-based approach - the proletariat ruling both indigenous and settler-descended.
In all due respect comrade this is a horrible argument. It’s basically saying “yeah but what can they really do about it?” It comes off as disrespectful to the indigenous imo.
As materialists we have to remain grounded in reality. No disrespect intended but wars aren’t won just by having the moral high ground. I’m not saying it can’t be done but if you are serious about decolonization then it can’t just be rhetoric and moral principles, you need a plan, you need to figure out how to overcome the various material obstacles and disadvantages. It is not clear to me how they achieve victory in this particular struggle without allies.
And what is exactly the goal? Full independence for indigenous nations? And if so in what borders? Would those borders even be defendable, would they allow for the survival of the indigenous states or would they be able to be blockaded and cut off from trade with the rest of the world? Would population transfers have to happen to ensure an indigenous majority? Because if there is a majority settler population within the borders of the new indigenous states then there is a risk of the usurpation of power by the settlers and the previous power dynamics just being replicated again.
Or is the goal just the destruction of the settler state and its replacement with a pluri-national model like Bolivia’s? Would that even be sufficient? Is that not also in essence a kind of assimilation? Would that not require a partnership between the settler proletariat and the indigenous people? These questions are not for me to answer but they do need answering in order for a coherent strategy to be formulated.
A big complicating factor here is that unlike with the Soviet republics or the various autonomous regions in China for ethnic minorities, the population of the colonized nations in the US is not concentrated in one contiguous geographical territory, rather it is spread out and interspersed with a numerically superior settler population. It is more akin to what the Zionist apartheid state seeks to achieve in Palestine.
That has clearly been purposely done by the settler state to cripple the potential of the colonized for banding together and posing a threat to the settler-colonial project. They were also purposely pushed onto land that is as resource scarce as possible. If all majority indigenous areas were to declare independence tomorrow the settler state could isolate them, starve them out and crush them one by one.
These are some of my thoughts as someone trying to analyze the situation looking at the US from the outside. I’m sure there is a lot that i am missing or don’t know about and i’m sure other people have had the same thoughts and maybe even figured out elegant solutions to these problems. I’m eager to learn.
“wars aren’t won just by having the moral high ground.”
Of course not, I was simply saying perhaps utilizing a different argument or even rephrasing the one you put forward so as to not stoke conflict within the discussion. For example, instead of pointing out the lack of forces instead focus on the fact that the argument being made by them isn’t based in the first place. Show them that they are theoretically wrong instead of going to the material inferiority, which only presents itself to be a challenge to overcome, and not a disqualification in of itself.
“And what is exactly the goal? Full independence for indigenous nations? And if so in what borders? Would those borders even be defendable, would they allow for the survival of the indigenous states or would they be able to be blockaded and cut off from trade with the rest of the world? Would population transfers have to happen to ensure an indigenous majority?”
Yes, indeed. This is what we are here to determine. What IS the goal?
-> “A big complicating factor here is that unlike with the Soviet republics or the various autonomous regions in China for ethnic minorities, the population of the colonized nations in the US is not concentrated in one contiguous geographical territory, rather it is spread out and interspersed with a numerically superior settler population.”
-> This is a great point and I add the arrow so as to draw attention as this adds to the overall conversation on the matter. IMO socialist policy would have to incorporate the specific needs of minorities within the proletarian class, it would have to be similar to how it is now under the neoliberals - general law effecting society. As for the issue of land ownership I believe an interstate labor transport project which would be similar to the EU’s free to travel between states policy except gov provided and for labor, could also help move specific populations from several areas into a few specific ones (tribal lands which will be expanded). The only issue I would have is the same one I have when comrades suggest a minority-only-ran government: It has to be socialist, it has to serve the cause the best. We can help them get there if that is what the nation (of our class) decides but as such these tribal nations must too be under proletarian control, they cannot become sanctuaries for parasites.
I personally advocate for a proletarian state which is blended and in harmony, where all needs are respected no matter who is in power as our class is the only one in power and so our interest of equality is enforced.