In Gramsci, I think a lot of working class people who struggled to become educated, will find themselves and be glad when they do. If you are like me at a young age you began to work to help pay bills, and so did Gramsci pulling him from schooling after his father went to prison for embezzlement. Because of this their family was reduced in status, but ultimately a foundation was laid that his brother expanded.
The images accompany this post to include more information I will try and synopsize in the text, but will allude to the photo to save character space. In the CLN podcast Marx Madness (where we read you theory) we had the help of our friend and comrade Prez from the Minyan podcast (an anti-Zionist Jewish podcast from a Marxist-Leninist perspective) come on to season 9 and develop for us a custom Gramsci reader to best understand his Prison notebooks. This choice was made to present the contents (which can sometimes be stream of though about the smell of his cell mate) in a more organized fashion useful to our education and full understanding of the useful writing he did. Our reader also covers relevant writing leading to the prison notebooks, in order to provide a fuller understanding of Gramsci's development, and in the podcast we try to cover relevant history. One of the essential pieces imo is 'War in the Colonies' written 1919 in the New Order.
"The colonized were not even left their eyes to weep"
It is no wonder Lenin would commission Stalin to write On the National and Colonial Question, and it was in response to the same dialogue I am referencing that Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Hoxha, Tito, Mao, Kim etc would find the Soviet's position to be lacking at various periods of time. This to me indicates a larger contradiction going unexamined to its fullest, and I'd argue it is the realities of colonialism. The red star rose over the Third World, and with it a light was shown on the Fourth World. These are nations occupied by Imperial core nations, who suffer the same material conditions as the periphery.
The expansion of our analysis to include Fourth Worldism not only incorporates Third Worldism into a larger theory (yet less known) theory, while moving beyond its shortcomings in analysis and success: though it is third world movements that lead the global movement today (China and Cuba were pillars of Third Worldism, and now where is the Soviet Union or Tito). Like any contradiction communists fail to fully understand in their material conditions, when its important enough the weight of subsequent contradictions spawned from that rot, will cause an easy point for the Imperialists to press on.
This often unspoken, taboo, and mystified contradiction, is the same unconscious bias and unconscious vampirism, I and Gramsci spoke about; and is settler-colonialism. I'd argue it was the Soviets refusal, or inability, to wrestle with the settler-colonial realities of the Russian Empire that were left over, that led to the chauvinists and bad actors who were able to garner power and undermine an experiment in scientific socialism. We can't copy and paste, but we can see the echoes and rhymes of history, as we march ever faithfully to the new world as it struggles to be born.
Yes we will win because we have to, but if we don't that means its the failure of the movement to form a capable vanguard. Yes outside reaction will occur, and inside agitation from opposition, operatives, and opportunists, but capable carries a specific connotation and that includes defending the project. We chose Pine Ridge as our primary organizing location due to a variety of reasons, but it is primarily due to the proven leadership their communities have, the stark and obvious economic void that is easy to fill, and Sungmanitu's family having lived there since their family rode with Crazy Horse only a few generations ago. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Sungmanitu analyzed the old movements and found a severe under education of AIM after Wounded Knee 1973. This is due to a concerted effort by state actors to mystify and hide the real struggle at the root of oppression here on Turtle Island, and that is the one against settler colonialism and the subsequent systems and oppression it wrought.
As Gramsci rotted, our leaders like Leonard Peltier do too only thanks to modern medicine, even the US gulag system has yet to kill him. Leonard Peltier was building community gardens when the US fabricated consent to raid the Jumping Bull Ranch, under the false pretexts that a potato cellar was a new bunker like AIM built at Wounded Knee. What initiated the raid was the execution of a false warrant claiming Jimmy Eagle was there, and had stolen boots in a bar fight. This is a post for a later time of course, but this is to say these same fabricated stories have already been deployed on Oceti Sakowin Treaty Council Headsmen, David Swallow Jr in the 90s by the Clinton administration and failed. We expect that same repression as our success grows undeniable. We owe it to everyone who has died for our movement, and as now is the time of monsters, we must prepare for the shape of things to come. If we don't another reign of terror will be brought upon my people and the communist movement.
You can support our efforts to prepare and build, find the mentioned reader, and the various podcast on the https://linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork as I update it and try to localize information better. Our website is in development and will launch soon, and I am writing several effortposts to talk about the history of Wounded Knee as the audio documentary I have been writing for the last 3 years is delayed by one thing or another. When the website launches we will also publish our 5 year plan, and principles of unity, so people can better understand the full scope of our organization and network as people don't seem to get the big picture quite yet. Which to me is a good thing as it gives us a clear direction to educate AND more importantly means as it becomes easier to understand who we are, and what we are about, support will undoubtedly become greater then it already is. I look forward to further updating people on things as of right now we are at 600/1000 needed to connect a trailer we bought a community member to the electric grid, thus providing a larger cushion for our organizers there. You can donate to $ZitkatosTinCan on CA or @zitkato on ven, or bandsofturtleisland@gmail.com on paypal. You can also become a monthly sustainer of these efforts as mentioned before on the linktr.ee via patreon or liberapay. Our goal is 2k/month to provide 500 stipends to our strongest organizers to make their survival easier, thus helping boost their organizing and the overall organization of CLN. I think you'll regret not doing it sooner
It never comes as a shock to me, but always a disappointment, when the people who say slogans like "Free Hong Kong" are the same ones who give you puzzled looks when you ask them for their opinions about Leonard Peltier or the Wetʼsuwetʼen Nation or Hawaiian sovereignty, let alone who has treaty rights to Mount Rushmore (and all of the Black Hills) or Alcatraz Island, because they've never even heard about these matters before.
It's real easy to point the finger and make performative demands of some other government but, speaking as a white person living under a settler-colonialist regime in a different part of the world, it's much harder to reckon with what's going on in your own backyard, what needs to be done about it, and more importantly what you need to do about it. And I mean truly reckoning with it - just look at this bullshit on Wikipedia, which claims to be objective and free from editorialising:
Native Americans. On their own lands. Seizing the territory to which they are rightfully and, under the treaties and laws of the settler-colonial regime, legally entitled to. And they are shamelessly slandered as being "occupiers", by none other than the occupiers themselves.
If you're reading this comment, take a minute to really reflect on what this means because Gramscian cultural hegemony is much more powerful than most people realise.
— Malcolm X
Theres actually a lot of nuances youre missing to your example but your heart is in the right place, Native Americans arent a monolith, the pretext used to claim the island though morally and spiritually correct; had no legal reality, and the tribe whose land it actually was was erased from the history, and crudely copy and pasted in now. The Audio documentary I am releasing will take the time to open up some of these contradictions and due to previous partners on the project limiting the scope, we have chosen to go through and add back information that was previously being held back for fear of being too controversial. We will also be doing an interview with Malcolm Harris who wrought the must read Palo Alto: History of California, Imperialism and the World (subtitle might be wrong), who is working with Ohlone going to the senate this spring in a large caravan of Indigenous nations being wronged in specific ways. For the Ohlone in the 1930s (date could be wrong) or so, were just declared gone by an anthropologist similarly to how Spain repeatedly tried to pen and paper Indigenous people out of existence. For use the Oceti Sakowin, our treaty council will be going there and demanding the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Reorganization Act end on Oceti Sakowin land, and will be demanding the return of the Black Hills utilizing the Palestinian issue to point out; we too are born in open air prisons designed to murder us slowly. We have seen the US enact the same level of violence and depravity in the same location even, only 50 years ago, and before that 130 years ago. When we stand we expect that violence again. Be ready to stand with us. Of course for some reason I only know of a dozen communists who are even mildly aware of this reality and the upheaval about to happen, when we are asking ourselves who is the vanguard; it certainly is not all those who will talk about this once the testimonies happen. Those who wait til then, are obvious tailists as this information is available and ready to be heard, our thought leaders simply are bad at thinking and I should know I was friends and worked for many