this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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GenZedong
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I'm sure plenty of white people resist the idea of a black-led revolution for something similar to this, at least unconsciously. But a much stronger critique of the Settlers philosophy is looking at stuff like this:
And concluding that a multi-racial, anti-racist leftist coalition is necessary for victory. In such a coalition (like in any coalition), you can't expect a large group of members to contribute without some say in leadership. Settlers implies (can't remember if it outright states) that such a coalition is impossible, which is why many leftists read it as defeatist.
Gerald Horne's The Counter-Revolution of 1776 has all the good parts of Settlers without this and the latter work's other flaws.
Settlers makes pretty clear these were frequently rather successful, but the problem comes when they get co-opted or hijacked by white people. I’d personally agree that the best solution is a mixed coalition, it’s just important that white people’s interests are not prioritized. A problematic idea promoted by patsocs is that since most people on this land are white it will be our revolution ie. finders keepers rule of genocide. We must combat that by putting the interests of those to whom this land belongs first.
If you have to say "we were successful until...", how successful were you, really? Ultimately, every leftist project in the U.S. has at most a few significant wins, and none have achieved anything resembling the success of AES states, or even that of groups like the Zapatistas. A movement's resilience against reaction and other right deviations is a key part of its viability; I'm guessing that's part of why most of us here are MLs.
There's also the argument (I'm pulling from In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil, which cites Settlers repeatedly) that co-option/hijacking of potentially greater successes broke down more along ideological lines than racial lines.
It might be the most just to hand the keys of the U.S. to an indigenous government, but I don't see any realistic way that happens. I don't think this means you abandon the idea entirely, but I do think it means we're going to have to choose between a less-just outcome that might be feasible or nothing.
The EZLN is an indigenous nat-lib movement, rejecting the idea that their lands can be controlled by the Mexican government. Many of the nations in the US and Canada had similarly fought with settlers and armies to maintain their lands, the reservation system is the residue of those conflicts, a suspended state of war.
This can be said for any revolution, does the collapse of the USSR deny tested praxis of the Bolsheviks? The existing parties dominated by settlers have yet to provide a theory for revolution that moves beyond somehow changing the minds of the American workers, overwhelmingly labor aristocracy and reproducing with more labor from overseas than they put in. They haven't been able to change many minds; there are some 200k "Socialists" between the ML parties and the DSA, this is smaller than the number of Dine people and dwarfed by the number of Hawaiians who are building an alternative state in opposition to the American occupation. Dozens of millions of Americans straight up don't engage in electoral politics yet the Communists can't seem to make a dent there. The Fish Wars which saw collaboration with what would become the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers got real wins in forcing the states to recognize treaty law. AIM and the Panthers attracted the most brutal state oppression, not disconnected from the general value American society assigns to black and indigenous bodies, and nothing of the sort has ever been directed at the CPUSA leadership as what befell the Panthers. The CPUSA fell into revisionism and tailed the Liberal Assimilationist line of the so-called "Black Bourgeoisie" which Frazier had proven was lying about the conditions of Black people in the US for the benefit of the Imperialist Settlers. This is not to say that amount of oppression is directly associated with revolutionary-ness, but that AIM and the BP clearly upset the settler order in a way in which Communist parties lead by settlers and white-dominated trade unions never could, and that opportunism for groups capable of upholding the settler order just doesn't exist for groups like AIM and the BP.
Indigenous protests have been at the vanguard of the environmental "movement" and indigenous lands have almost all of the biodiversity on the continent and indigenous nations are at the fore-front of conservation and environmental science. Black people are at the fore-front of politics surrounding police and have mobilized the largest protests in US history. We focus on black and indigenous people (with special attention towards Latinx and migrant workers given their super-exploitation) because these groups are most readily organized on an anti-Colonial basis. More than half of the settlers frankly live good and have little interest in unsettling the colonial order. This is why our direction needs to build up the most oppressed spectrum of workers in solidarity with those who do not fit in settler-society for one reason or another, push these community building movements into direct conflict with the settler order and stress the contradictions of settler-colonial Imperialism, like what the Palestinian Resistance is doing as we speak, and what the EFF is pushing to do in South Africa, the forms of our struggles differ by conditions but the dynamics are the same, a (class) war of national liberation for decolonization. We just won't see the level of organization from settlers in reaction required to defend themselves from us, our prediction is similar to that of what we are seeing in "Israel", the settlers will run and hide while their society collapses under its own contradictions. We will be there for the refugee settlers who wish to experience a different road.
Settlers as a book just shows actually existing history of the labor movement and choices made by settlers. Today we can see a deep lack in investigation of conditions from the "Communists" here. We will work with settlers who are sympathetic towards us but we will not rely on their assistance, with our without them we will fight.
The USSR ultimately failed, yes. This doesn't mean their contributions were worthless, but it does mean we should be generous with our criticisms and that we shouldn't hold them up as a model to copy step-by-step. We should do the same with movements that achieved far less than the USSR, too.
Yes and we can and should compare movements of some classes compared to others. The settler class has proven itself incapable of resisting opportunism. MLs in the core need to focus on the classes with revolutionary outlook. Far too many do zero study of the conditions here.