Marxism-Leninism and the theory of settler-colonialism in the United States

The purpose of Marxist analysis is so that we can know how to make revolution, so that we understand the terrain of struggle, formulate correct strategy and tactics, and identify our friends and enemies. We must understand the contradictions at work in society and unite all who can be united if we want to win. So, we need to be very careful and precise in that analysis.

It is also important to challenge and correct theoretical errors that can lead us in the wrong direction. There’s a tendency from some on the left to argue that the United States should be understood today as a settler-colonial state. Such a position may seem at first glance to be obvious; many accept this position without careful consideration, simply taking its correctness as given. By automatically accepting the correctness of this position, these perhaps well-meaning revolutionaries fail to understand the ways in which this theory deviates from Marxism, and fail to consider its deeper implications for revolutionary strategy.

Overall, this is a relatively amorphous tendency, with a lot of varying positions that don’t always agree on the particulars. But, so far as there is one, the basic argument from the proponents of this theory goes something like this: The United States remains today a settler-colonial state. People of European descent, regardless of their actual class position, are settlers, and are seen as continuing to benefit from and perpetuate a colonial system. In other words, the people of the United States are divided into two camps, with the colonized in one camp, and the settlers in the other. Some even go so far as to say that this makes up the principal contradiction in the U.S. This is furthermore viewed as a fundamentally antagonistic contradiction.

This ought to be contrasted with the Marxist-Leninist view, which sees the United States as an advanced imperialist country. Again, we see a division of U.S. society into two camps. On the one hand there is the camp of the capitalists, and on the other the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities. The principal contradiction is therefore between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the multinational working class and its allies on the other, particularly the oppressed nations. Historical development is a law governed process, and it is a law of capitalist development that this basic class struggle is the fundamental contradiction inherent to capitalist society.

What’s at stake in the debate over settler-colonialism in the United States?

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.

Obviously, this is a very important strategic point, and it cannot go unaddressed. We should examine where this theory comes from and look at how it can be answered by Marxist-Leninist science.

Some points of historical development

We can all agree that the United States began as a settler-colonial project, founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. We can furthermore agree that the legacy of this period of U.S. history persists. National oppression and the oppression of indigenous people continues.

However, some people believe it’s as simple as “once a settler-colony, always a settler-colony.” This is metaphysical thinking. While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. Dialectical materialism understands that the nature of a thing is defined by the contradictions inherent to it. Things aren’t fixed, but always changing and developing according to these contradictions. This is true of capitalism in the U.S. as it has developed as well. At different periods in U.S. history, different contradictions have taken the principal, determining role. As contradictions shift, so too does the terrain of struggle.

U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of “primitive accumulation” during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States.

Those who came to the American colonies, of course, were not an undifferentiated, classless mass. As Philip S. Foner notes in the first volume of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States, “Probably half the immigrants to Colonial America were indentured servants. By 1770 a quarter of a million had entered America, of whom more than a hundred thousand were victims of kidnaping or prisoners sentenced to service.” This is, of course, in addition to “five hundred thousand Negro slaves, approximately 20 per cent of the colonial population.”

As the capitalist mode of production developed, this transitional settler-colonial period had to give way to mature competitive capitalism, bringing forth new contradictions. These contradictions changed and developed enough that the United States underwent two bourgeois revolutions, the War of Independence which overthrew the British colonial system and the Civil War, which overthrew the slave system of the Southern planter class.

As the book An Economic History of the Major Capitalist Countries by Kang Fan puts it, “American victory in the war [of Independence] and the subsequent establishment of the United States overthrew England’s colonial rule in North America. Domestically, it swept aside many feudal remnants, and it opened the road for the development of capitalism.” Lenin called the War of Independence “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few,” and after that war the U.S. was no longer a colony.

Industrialization brought about heightened contradictions between labor and capital. After the intensified industrial buildup of the Civil War, monopoly capitalism emerged in the United States out of the merger of banking capital with industrial capital into finance capital, bringing the capitalist mode of production into its most fully developed and final stage. The rise of monopoly capitalism brought about the end of competitive capitalism.

In a relatively short span of time, the U.S. went from being a colony to an imperialist power. The old colonial system based on the export of commodities was transformed into an imperialist system based on the export of capital. The financial oligarchy which came to dominate the U.S. sought to solve its growing crises through the oppression of whole nations and peoples, at home and abroad, in order to extract super-profits to prop up its rotten system. 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.

The national question in the U.S.

When we talk about oppressed nations in the United States, we have to be very clear. The United States is the greatest imperialist power in the world. It isn’t a colony. Like Tsarist Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, it is a “prison house of nations.”

Within the borders of the U.S. there are oppressed nations. What is an oppressed nation? As Stalin defines it in Marxism and the National Question, “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” These oppressed nations are nations without states. They don’t govern themselves. The oppressed nations in the U.S. are the African American nation, with its homeland in the Black Belt South, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, and the Hawaiian nation. This national oppression exists to allow the U.S. monopoly capitalist class to draw super-profits from a higher rate of exploitation of the oppressed nationalities. This national oppression is the material basis of racist ideas, and uprooting national oppression is therefore the key to demolishing racist and white chauvinist thinking.

To be perfectly clear, it is important to note that oppressed nations are not the same thing as colonies. The correct demand for a colony is immediate independence. This is the demand we must put forward regarding Puerto Rico and other colonies, where basic democratic rights are denied and which are merely objects of plunder. The demand that must be raised regarding an oppressed nation, on the other hand, is self-determination. This is a very important distinction.

Self-determination is a democratic demand. It means that the oppressed nation ought to democratically determine its own destiny. Historically imposed obstacles to genuine political power must be systematically dismantled. And most importantly, self-determination means the right to separate in its historically constituted national territory and govern itself however it sees fit. But self-determination isn’t forced separation, just as the right to divorce isn’t forced separation. Indeed, the purpose is to create the basis for unity on a truly equal footing. Thus, self-determination is the demand of the oppressed nations in the U.S.

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.

Finally, it must be noted that in the era of imperialism, the national question is bound up with proletarian socialist revolution. No longer is the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class. Imperialism closes off the path of independent capitalist development for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The national liberation movements therefore must ally themselves with the working class struggle, with an orientation towards socialism – or find themselves diverted into neocolonialism. In the U.S. this means that the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation movements of the oppressed nationalities is central to the united front against monopoly capitalism.

The multinational working class

For any of this to be any more than wishful thinking, a real revolutionary movement is necessary. For such a movement to be successful in the United States, such as it really is, it must have working class leadership, and the working class in the U.S. is fundamentally multinational in character.

What does this mean? The U.S. isn’t an apartheid system, like “Israel” or “Rhodesia” for example. The horrific system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the betrayal of Reconstruction was itself uprooted by the Black liberation movement. While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character.

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.

This is also true within the territories of the oppressed nations, though there tend to be greater numbers of oppressed nationality workers proportional to white workers in those places as a simple demographic fact. The higher rate of exploitation in the oppressed nations drives down living standards for the entire multinational working class.

Mao Zedong famously said, “In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles that oppress the black people.” Mao was explaining that while many white workers may have racist and white chauvinist ideas that have to be overcome, those ideas are the ideology of the class enemy. It is that class enemy, the capitalists, who wield the instruments of oppression against the oppressed nationalities. The ruling class, not white workers, are the bosses and the landlords. The ruling class are the ones who control the police and the courts. It is the monopoly capitalist class who reap the super-profits from national oppression.

Sources of the error

The facts of the matter are clear. Where then, does the confusion on this question come from? There are two main ideological factors leading to the development of the theory of U.S. settler-colonialism. These are, first of all, petty bourgeois radicalism, and second, a desire to “copy and paste” from the Palestinian experience.

First let’s talk about petty bourgeois radicalism. As Mao once put it, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” So what is the material basis of this theory about settler-colonialism in the U.S.? Petty bourgeois radicalism is characterized, as Lenin puts it, by “the instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another.” The petty bourgeoisie, the class of small business owners or petty capitalists, is under immense pressure. They are under pressure from the working class on the one hand, whom they exploit generally, and the monopoly capitalists on the other hand, with whom they cannot compete. Because they are driven to ruin by the monopoly capitalists, and ultimately have no future as a class, they sometimes take up radical, even revolutionary, ideas, however inconsistently. These petty bourgeois radicals pride themselves on taking the most outwardly revolutionary position, regardless of whether or not it holds up to scientific analysis. Lenin writes that the petty bourgeois radical “easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organization, discipline and steadfastness.” They are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere. The only way to make such a position fit into a Marxist analysis is to revise the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism – namely the key role of the working class.

Second, many see the heroic struggle of Palestinian resistance against Zionism and wish to copy and paste an analysis of the Palestinian struggle onto U.S. conditions. Largely this comes from a desire to use what is happening in Palestine to draw attention to the need for revolution in the U.S. As admirable as this is, the United States is not Palestine, and so this obscures as much as it illuminates.

The contradictions at work are not the same. This is a fact clearly understood by the Marxist-Leninists in Palestine. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine themselves say in “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine”, their main programmatic document, “The class structure in an underdeveloped community naturally differs from that of industrial communities. In an industrial community there is a strong capitalist class opposite a numerous working class, and the basic struggle in such communities is a sharp clash between these classes.” In other words, we have to understand the strategic array of various forces based on the class contradictions at work. The Palestinians have done their own analysis of their concrete conditions, and we must likewise analyze our own.

The Palestinians find themselves occupied by an apartheid state, much like Zimbabwe prior to liberation. The principal contradiction in Palestine is certainly that between the Palestinian resistance movement on the one hand and the Zionists and their imperialist supporters on the other. That is the contradiction that is clearly driving things forward. In the U.S., where people of all nationalities are forged into one multinational working class, there is a basis to build a multinational working class party. Under Israeli apartheid, there is no such multinational working class. The analogy breaks down when faced with concrete reality.

Indeed, the situation the Palestinian comrades find themselves in isn’t the norm on a global scale. In fact, it is quite rare. Some of the most recent examples include Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, none of which remain settler-colonies. Unlike in Palestine, which is occupied by the Zionist apartheid state, in much of the underdeveloped world neocolonialism holds sway, where a class of compradores and traitors rules on behalf of the imperialists, creating a show of nominal independence while the economic life of the country is in fact entirely subservient to the imperialist powers. Settler-colonialism is used in Palestine because Israel is the lynchpin of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. Because U.S. power in the Middle East depends on the survival of its regional proxy, oppression is especially sharp.

Strategy for revolution

Revolution in the United States requires Marxist-Leninist analysis. Furthermore, it requires the leadership of the multinational working class, organized in a Marxist-Leninist party. The misguided theory of settler-colonialism in the United States has to be overcome if we are to accomplish this historic task.

This erroneous theory of settler-colonialism is an obstacle to building the strategic alliance that must be at the core of any revolutionary strategy that can hope to be successful. We have to base that strategy on the contradictions that are truly driving things forward in the real world, and that contradiction is between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities on the other.

We live in the belly of the beast, in the heart of the most vicious imperialist power in the world. We have to turn the whole order of things upside down, and, if we’re going to do that, then we have to accomplish several major tasks.

Our central task is party building. We have to fuse Marxism-Leninism with the multinational working class and build a revolutionary communist party that can contend for power. And we have to build around that party a united front against monopoly capitalism, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and oppressed nationalities at its core. In order to do this, we have to be crystal clear in our analysis, so that we can put that analysis to work.

Only the multinational working class, allied with the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities, can overthrow the rule of the capitalists, smash the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, build socialism, and end exploitation and oppression once and for all.

#RevolutionaryTheory #MarxismLeninism #NationalQuestion #OppressedNationalities

Source: https://fightbacknews.org/marxism-leninism-and-the-theory-of-settler-colonialism-in-the-united-states?pk_campaign=rss-feed