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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t see where they are asking the indigenous to be subjugated. Best I can say is I think I understand your concerns and that their analysis may be clumsy in how it engages with people who may not even think of indigenous sovereignty at all in the first place and could take it as a reason to not care. I’m not convinced it intends to be doing that, it comes across to me more as the “programmer who thinks in code talking to the customer” trope of someone very analytical forgetting to think about the audience and how it might be taken, but I could be wrong.
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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.