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.
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.