The Freedom Road Socialist Organization recently put out this article, arguing that the United States isn't a settler-colony and it's rubbing me the wrong way.
The article makes some assertions and assumptions that I have some thoughts about, and I'd love to hear y'alls as well.
[Proponents of the US Settler colony theory say that] 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
I don't know if this is an accurate description of the US Settler-colony theory. All settler and colonized populations, be they in Israel, Canada, South Africa, etc. Have class distinctions within them that ought to be considered. Saying there's a settler population isn't mutually exclusive with class analysis.
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.
OK? I don't necessarily disagree, but how does this contradict the notion that the US is a settler-colony? It contradicts the version of that idea given earlier, but I think that's a strawman. Or at least a case of a narrow representation of a wider trend.
The article goes on to describe American history, talks at some length about the class makeup of the settlers. The implication seems to be that this varied class makeup makes them not a single class of "Settlers™". But then goes on to say that the early US was characterized by a:
transitional settler-colonial period
But that this period ended... At some point.
The article also seems to conflate the concept of a Settler-colony and colonies written large.
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.
So we've finally named some oppressed nations. I don't know why Hawaii is here, but otherwise this is fine. It's how the other colonized/oppressed people's in the US are handled that confuses me
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 argument about a colony requiring independence is compelling. But why is Hawaii not included with Puerto Rico? Why does one island nation stolen by the US empire get independence, and the other doesn't? There's no fleshed out analysis on that.
Also, an overseas colony and a settler-colony are different.
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.
I think this is the first mention of indigenous peoples, and we're 2/3 of the way through the article.
WHY ARE THEY DISTINCT? HM? COULD IT BE THAT THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE PROCESS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM MEDIATES THEIR INTERACTIONS WITH THE BOURGEOIS STATE?
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.
.... So you know we shoved indigenous people onto reservations and continue to systematically exclude them from modern American life. South Africa was pushing Africans onto reservations, and Israel is de-facto doing the same thing to Palestinians.... Because they're replacing the native population with a settler one...
De Jure Segregation being over means nothing in terms of the actual material conditions of oppressed nations in the US.
I could go on. But the article just seems poorly thought out. Despite supposedly refuting the idea that the US is a settler-colony, it spends so little time actually talking about indigenous peoples.
Am I onto something? Is the analysis of this article missing the mark? Or am I a petty-bourgeois radical, like the article suggests?
I think the real driving force behind articles like this is that many within FRSO want to organize the US working class (e.g. they salt Teamsters) and perceive critiques that put white settlerism as "primary" as saying, "don't even bother". They need to say, "no there is a point to it and in fact it is the theoretically best grounded look I said primary contradiction" because otherwise they are doing something with no hope of success, so the logic goes. This would also explain why the discussion of white settlerism is so full of errors and oversights. It's not really about knowing the topic and analyzing it, they clearly felt no compulsion to read and understand what has been written about the topic, let alone talk to indigenous comrades to get real-world organizing analysis.
I think the core of this thinking is incorrect and gussyjng it up in the language of dialectics distracts from the real point, which is just this simple yet clearly very difficult to answer question: how could we organize the US working class into an anticapitalist force, even a revolutionary one? I would say you cannot begin to answer that question without understanding and combatting the importance, function, psychology, mechanisms of settler white supremacy, and you cannot begin to answer it without understanding and combatting capitalism and imperialism. Really, you have to think about the demographica of who joins and leaves left spaces, what they want to do in those spaces, and which forms of activism resonate with who. You should look at past formations and ask why they failed. You should look at those most similar to you and think about how they are succeeding or failing and what forces work against them.
And if you're going to write public essays, you should really think about your audience and what you hope to achieve.