When you take a hard look at America, what do you see? People can’t afford the best in themselves anymore — empathy, wisdom, courage, defiance, truth, meaning, higher purpose. They have to sacrifice all that just to go on. Nobody will hire you, pay you, reward you for any of those. The more cynical, cruel, heartless, ignorant, and short-termist you are, though — the more money will be thrown at you. Humanity is a luxury that Americans can ill afford, and that’s why the world’s jaw drops when tales of America’s surreal cruelty are recounted — like people crowdfunding insulin, or the elderly living in their cars and working shifts at Walmart, or arming teachers.-Umair Haque, October 2019
At this moment in history, as the United States and other capitalist societies fall into ruin amid ever-increasing inequality and ecological collapse, it becomes easy for whites like me to understand why some Native Americans still don’t see their government as legitimate. We’ve been told that the United States is the greatest country on earth, that it’s worth fighting for because it represents grand democratic ideals, that it’s our duty to be patriotic. Yet year by year, the material reality of what it’s like to live in America and what our government’s agenda is gets more and more separated from anything that would vindicate these beliefs.
Average Americans aren’t rewarded for hard work anymore. They’re forced to struggle in an economy that drives them ever deeper into debt so that they can survive, and that can easily deprive them of healthcare, food or shelter. American police can no longer maintain the illusion that they work in favor of the public; they’ve become heavily armed and enabled to kill hundreds of people every year. The American military, which steals tens of trillions of dollars worth of national resources and perpetuates an eighteen-year-long era of war, has lost the respect of the world because of its staggering atrocities. American political institutions, defined by corporate collusion, lack of free and fair elections, and complicity in a recent campaign to put thousands of migrant children into concentration camps, have shown themselves to be illegitimate.
Now it’s easy to understand why the radical parts of the Native American community have long wanted to decolonize the continent. For indigenous peoples, the establishment of the United States and all the other colonialist nations has been an insult to the destroyed civilizations that they’re built on top of. The U.S., which continues to glorify its origin story as that of the supposed pioneer of freedom and democracy, merely appropriated some of the democratic aspects of the indigenous societies it was built upon; many of the tribal nations ordered themselves around the same democratic ideals that the U.S. partially adopted, despite these ideals being contradicted by the U.S.’ ongoing role as a perpetrator of slavery and genocide.
Now it’s easy to understand why the radical parts of the Native American community have long wanted to decolonize the continent. For indigenous peoples, the establishment of the United States and all the other colonialist nations has been an insult to the destroyed civilizations that they’re built on top of. The U.S., which continues to glorify its origin story as that of the supposed pioneer of freedom and democracy, merely appropriated some of the democratic aspects of the indigenous societies it was built upon; many of the tribal nations ordered themselves around the same democratic ideals that the U.S. partially adopted, despite these ideals being contradicted by the U.S.’ ongoing role as a perpetrator of slavery and genocide.
We have no reason to respect the U.S. government’s authority, anymore than the Palestinians have reason to respect the authority of the genocidal colonizing power of Israel. Both countries can only mask their illegitimacy with racist propaganda about the occupation of Native or Palestinian land being for the best.
But it’s not for the best. This becomes more apparent the more brutal, destructive, and dictatorial the U.S. government behaves. Pro-capitalist left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders claim that the U.S. can be made just and equal through reforming America’s government. Yet Sanders doesn’t want to end the capitalist system that drives exploitation and social inequality, nor does he and his fellow social democrats even want to end imperialism. Both morally and practically, trying to reform our government isn’t going to lead to justice.
What will lead to justice is pursuing the agenda put forth by American communists like Huey P. Newton. In Alex Zamalin’s Struggle on Their Minds, the chapter Huey Newton, the Black Panthers, and the Decolonization of America recounts that:
For the most devout patriots, America had always been something of what John Winthrop called an exceptional shining city on a hill...With the Cold War fully entrenched in the 1950s, this vision became orthodoxy for many prominent American intellectuals...Had they listened to Newton, these intellectuals would have been scandalized. Newton would often draw on Malcom X’s distinction between “Negro revolution,” which was about nonviolent respectability in the United States, and “black revolution,” which was about the end of worldwide racial colonialism.
In the upcoming decade of the 2020s, when a deep economic downturn is expected to come amid the expanding climate crisis and the progression of fascism, white Americans won’t have the material comforts to be able to ignore Newton’s message like was the case during the mid-20th century. The death of the middle class has discredited the neoliberal ideology and the wealthy elites who advance it. And with the proper steps on the part of the modern communists and anti-colonialists, the masses will also come to reject capitalism and the concept of the United States.
To build this movement that combines socialism with decolonization, we must present a goal set that clearly defines what decolonization is. Decolonization is the transfer of sovereign authority from a colonizing power to an indigenous population, not merely symbolic and practical improvements to public life. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in Decolonization is not a Metaphor:
Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization.
To abolish the U.S. government, and to then give authority back to the 573 tribal nations, we must follow the path of China’s decolonization process. After China defeated the Japanese occupation in 1945 and underwent a communist revolution in 1949, the land was able to pursue its development while free from capitalism and imperial control. Mao’s Cultural Revolution, wherein the Chinese people got rid of the “Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas,” was a crucial part of this decolonizing process. It was the step where they destroyed the remains of the civilization that had imprisoned them, making way for the unparalleled societal advancements of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. China’s story is one of restored honor for a people who were formerly subjugated.
To get our own Cultural Revolution, we’ll need to adopt Mao's fighting approaches. One of these approaches is the mass line, a philosophy that puts faith in the masses in order to get them organized towards building towards revolution. While we study the theory which constitutes the mass line (as is linked here), we must grow the communist organizations that best fit the agenda of decolonization. Among many others, the most prominent of these organizations are the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Party of Communists USA, and the African People’s Socialist Party. From there we can engage in the more direct actions-arms training, civil disobedience, agitation propaganda-that put our cause into action.
Can we foresee the exact steps that will take place before the revolution? Of course not. But we can adopt the thoughts and practices that have defeated capitalism and colonialism in the past. I’ve become a Marxist-Leninist because while I can’t tear down the system by myself or learn everything about revolutionary theory at once, Marxism-Leninism is the ideology that’s historically defeated capitalism and imperialism. It’s worked because it’s oriented around seizing the state apparatus, and around using this apparatus to liberate the victims of colonialism and class exploitation. In our case, it’s crucial that indigenous people be at the forefront of shaping the liberation movement.
If the people in my camp take the right actions throughout the revolutionary crisis that America is experiencing, we may well manage to end America itself and restore what was stolen from the land’s indigenous people.
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