It’s not surprising that after the United States experienced two great crises this year in the form of Covid-19 and the new great depression, the social unrest which inevitably emerged was a reaction to racist state violence. The catalyst event for the unrest could have been another outburst of anger over economic injustice in the vein of Occupy Wall Street, but instead it’s been an outburst of anger over the most recent police murders of colonized people.
This year’s rise of Black Lives Matter-as well as of the indigenous movement Land Back-is a foreshadowing to how a revolution in the U.S., and on the continent more broadly, will unfold. When a revolution occurs, the driving forces behind what happens afterward are which contradictions have just motivated the masses to overthrow their government. In the case of the U.S. and the other settler-colonial states, there’s a contradiction that doesn’t exist within England, or Germany, or the other lands where an indigenous population is not living under colonial occupation. Within the borders of the territory currently called the U.S., all of the land rightfully belongs to the 574 Native tribes. And therefore after the U.S. government is overthrown, all of the land will need to be transferred back to these indigenous First Nations.
This step will have to come before the establishment of socialism. If a communist party were to rule in the same way that the regime in Washington rules, and make it so that Natives still only control as much land as they’re allowed to within limited reservations, the contradiction of colonialism will remain unaddressed. The fundamental problem of settlers ruling over land that was taken away from the Natives through genocide will still be present.
I get this line straight from Lenin, who wrote in Theses on the National Question that “The article of our programme (on the self-determination of nations) cannot be interpreted to mean anything but political self-determination, i.e., the right to secede and form a separate state.” He elaborated that this means the governing political entity should “be unconditionally hostile to the use of force in any form whatsoever by the dominant nation (or the nation which constitutes the majority of the population) in respect of a nation that wishes to secede politically,” as well as “demand the settlement of the question of such secession only on the basis of a universal, direct and equal vote of the population of the given territory by secret ballot.”
In other words, all the nations which have been liberated from the control of an imperialist central government (such as Washington) must be able to exercise their right to decide their own fates. In an interview last month, Brooks Arcand-Paul of the kipohtakaw nation stated that this is the goal of Land Back: “Borders are a colonial construct. Any border was imposed unilaterally, without consulting the Indigenous Nations that would be impacted. Resolving these issues is not difficult. In Canada, provinces should include Indigenous Peoples, from the bottom up, in discussions about interprovincial borders.”
Despite how hopelessly complex decolonization is often portrayed as by those who are opposed to the idea, the core goal of decolonization is as simple as what he described: give the indigenous peoples a bottom up say in how the land is divided. Only after then, when the theft of the land has been undone, can the people of this continent begin to implement socialism.
In this post-colonial scenario, one where hundreds of nations are now governing independently from any outside power, the socialist movement will only be able to righteously advance its goals by not taking on the role of such a power. The communist parties that helped overthrow the United States can’t try to force any of the First Nations to adopt socialism, they can only try to persuade the peoples of these nations to pursue proletarian revolution-with the tribal leaderships having the final say. And given the new way that the territories will be divided, these parties will likely also have to evolve into a series of localized entities which function within their respective nations.
The settler socialists who remain skeptical of decolonization recoil at prospects like these, fearing that a transition into full Native sovereignty rather than a remaining centralized state would weaken the socialist movement. But in the kind of scenario where such a transition has just taken place, how much trouble would the continent’s socialists really have with carrying out their goals? When the U.S. is abolished, the single greatest roadblock to socialism, both within U.S. borders and abroad, will no longer be able to subvert the advancement towards Marxist development. The First Nations will be able to democratically decide their fates without interference from a colonial power.
And should aspects of bourgeois society persist within these nations-which will realistically be the case-the conditions will surely compel many of the peoples of these nations to work towards socialist revolutions within their respective territories. A revolution against the U.S. will most likely only succeed after a number of decades from now, when the climate crisis, as well as America’s descent into inequality and poverty, have been vastly exacerbated compared.
Colonialism, which was proliferated as a result of capitalism, will have recently brought about a vast series of atrocities and driven the colonized peoples into enormous economic hardship.
In this scenario, socialism could become overwhelmingly viewed as a practical necessity throughout the First Nations. Already this seems to be acknowledged by Land Back advocates like Arcand-Paul, who said that “I do not think displacement and erasure are core values of the Land Back movement; however, if violent extractive and capitalistic goals are what some settlers desire, I do not feel as though there is room for them in achieving Land Back.”
But these optimistic visions of the future shouldn’t distract from what our goal is as Marxists who are living through the first stages of the collapse of the U.S. This goal is to actually make the efforts to build our organizations and spread class consciousness to the masses, instead of waiting for the process of capitalist collapse to automatically bring a socialist revolution. Without a revolutionary movement strong enough to defeat the capitalist state, crises always lead to the forces of reaction coming out on top. In the U.S., the state will continue to be strengthened if no viable overthrow effort emerges.
This responsibility of ours will remain even after the U.S. is overthrown, because the contradictions of capitalism won’t go away on this continent right after the settler-colonial state itself goes away. While making sure to respect the sovereignty of the nations that we’re residing in, we’ll need to continue advancing the line of proletarian revolution.
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