In June of this year, I wrote an essay titled “Against CPUSA’s Colonizer ‘Communism’” in which I critiqued the rejection of an analysis of settler colonialism at CPUSA’s Chicago convention. In this article I attempted to show in what ways the settler colonial relation still affects class society in the U.S. today, and argue that the CPUSA’s rejection of these ideas, their actions during the convention, and their subsequent conduct online constitute a reductive distortion of the concept of class struggle and a betrayal of Marxism. You can imagine my disappointment, then, when the Freedom Road Socialist Organization’s (FRSO) mouthpiece, Fight Back! News, published their recent article mischaracterizing the concept of settler colonialism as a strain of petit-bourgeois ideology and slandering it as anti-Marxist. Up until this point, myself and many others considered FRSO to be the best of the big country-wide socialist organizations, but this article, written by one of their leading theorists, J. Sykes, suggests that FRSO is perhaps doomed to follow the same path of great nation chauvinism and revisionism. The article in question is intellectually dishonest and wholly reductive, yet swaths of FRSO followers felt compelled to crawl into the discourse and defend the argument. It is clear that the position put forward by Sykes is a deeply entrenched error being taken up by some generally very principled comrades, and so I must attempt a sequel to my previous essay.
This essay is an initial response as USU plans to publish a full critique of the article in the coming days.
I will attempt to illustrate my point using feminism as an example. Feminism and decolonial theory are in fact very similar, in that they are bodies of thought developed to address a specific axis of oppression for one section of society. As Marxists, we utilize feminism to understand the complex gender politics at play within society, between men and non-men of different classes and between men and non-men of the same class. Within the class of the proletariat there exist both men and non-men, and patriarchy not only complicates their relationship to one that is at times antagonistic, it shapes the form of the class. The struggle against patriarchy is a class struggle because the patriarchal relation is a relation of power and power is a function that is expressed through the class structure of society. The bourgeois class is overwhelmingly comprised of men. This is no coincidence, and feminism helps us understand this reality.
Decolonial theory, as utilized by Marxists, attempts to do the same thing, but for race, ethnicity, or nationality instead of gender. When the vast majority of the bourgeois class is made up of white people, it is, again, no coincidence, and it is critical to understand how this came to be and why it continues to be.
We can compare those who deny the importance of decolonial theory to those who deny the importance of feminism. For example, we can draw a direct parallel between the Communist Party of Great Britain calling “trans ideology” anti-materialist to J. Sykes calling decolonial theory a petit-bourgeois distortion. It is a lazy, dishonest, and anti-intellectual stance that refuses to engage earnestly with the study of the class struggle these misguided “Marxists” claim to be waging.
The failure of the Communist movement to contend with the realities of gender emancipation and national liberation are critical errors of the past century of struggle. The failure to contend with the particularities of these relations is one of the primary reasons why the U.S. working class has come nowhere near revolution in this country’s entire history. As such, it is absolutely critical for Communist organizations in this country to put forward a comprehensive and complete understanding of these concepts if they hope to be successful.
How does this failure manifest? It manifests in the simplification of the idea of class and of class struggle.
When learning the basics of any new field, the most effective way to create a base of knowledge is through simplification of complex ideas. We take, for example, the Bohr model of the atom and teach it to elementary school students. It is useful for conveying the concepts of a nucleus and the orbiting of electrons around that nucleus and the energy levels associated with different types of orbits. But this does not tell the whole truth, we don’t tell them that the Bohr model was disproved in 1920 and that the true form of the atom is far more complex than this. It would be counterproductive to teach an elementary school student quantum physics even though it presents a more accurate atomic model.
We can compare this to the simplified concept of class and of class struggle that we use to bring new people into the fold. It is quite straightforward to inform a learning Marxist that there simply exists a proletariat and the bourgeoisie and they have interests which are antagonistic to one another, and this results in the class struggle, and that the class struggle is resolved through socialist revolution. While this is all essentially true, phrased this way it is a simplification of the real world into an easily understandable model for new learners. The problem with Marxism in the U.S. is the lack of a vanguard capable of consolidating an education model that can churn out scientists of scientific socialism on a mass scale. Without such a vanguard, Marxists exist in a state of perpetual underdevelopment.
And so our big national parties, at whose feet we can lay this failure, assume simplified lines and present them as complete to each other and to the masses. While it can be useful in convincing the disaffected Bernie voter to join the Communist Party, it is a sorry excuse for intellectual and ideological struggle.
This is why J. Sykes has put forward poorly worded and poorly argued polemic decrying the body of decolonial thought as a petit-bourgeois distortion. It allows so-called “Marxists” to insist that nothing but class matters and that all struggles are created by class and thus subordinate to the struggle for socialism. It allows them to mischaracterize all decolonial theorists as white-hating ultras who deny the existence of the working class and its role in socialist construction.
To subsume the struggle against colonialism to the “working class vs the ruling class” automatically treats the working class as a single homogenous entity with no internal contradictions and struggles; no motion within itself. It denies the struggle that takes place within a class and the contradictions that are present between the advanced and backwards elements of that class. It denies that the struggle for national liberation, the struggle for gender and sexual equality, the struggle for the emancipation of disabled peoples, and the struggle for the liberation of undocumented workers all constitute class struggles.
Much like proletarian feminism seeks to identify the class basis of the struggle against patriarchy, an analysis of settler colonialism in the U.S. is an attempt to elucidate the origins of the U.S. working class and to analyze the struggles within the class itself. When we utilize feminist theory to seek to understand the complex gender relations that operate within class society, we do not do so on the basis that all men are counter-revolutionary and therefore cannot make up elements of the advanced proletarian party. However, there are strains of feminist thought that see patriarchy as the source of all social ills, including class society, and there are strains that take a stance against all men as a class. However, these misguided beliefs do not mean that feminism as a framework and body of thought is completely wrong. We can obviously see the complex gender politics in class society today and we can even see that socialist revolutions do not automatically solve the problem of patriarchy, therefore it is something that must be incorporated into a complete Marxist analysis of class society and the struggle for emancipation of all peoples.
The same is true of decolonial theory. Yes, there are some distortions of the idea of settler colonialism that says all white people are enemies of the working class, but this is a flawed analysis. However, to abandon the framework altogether in favor of a reductive concept of a multinational working class to whom the colonial relation has no bearing is almost worse. To frame it as a purely petit-bourgeois ideological strain of thought is lazy and dishonest. When we analyze the colonial relations in this country, we do not do so to supplant an analysis of class, we do so to inform our analysis of class. The colonial relation is a class relation. The struggle for national liberation is a class struggle. Any analysis of class that denies the continued existence of the colonial relation and how it shapes class society is incomplete.
It can be tempting to discard the ideas of race or gender as immaterial, non-essential, or otherwise subordinate to the class struggle. At a first glance, we can see the social basis of these concepts. In other words, a gender or a race is not fundamental to what it means to be human; these concepts arose out of social relations and have no presence in nature and no material basis. Therefore, some would say, we must focus on the material fight, the class struggle. But class is also socially constructed, and it is class society which “invents” the concepts of class and applies material consequences to a person’s specific class status. In the same vein, patriarchy transforms the socially constructed concept of gender and gives it material consequences. Colonialism does the same for the concept of race. Because patriarchy and colonialism are products of a class system, this makes the concepts of race and gender class relations. This is not to say that all women or all Black people constitute single classes, but that a person’s gender or race are determinants of class. Under capitalism, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and the various minor classes in between still exist. We have not invented new classes, but we have illuminated elements of the origins of this specific class structure and identified what we call class determinants.
Race and gender are social relations, elements of the superstructure, and therefore are subject to the conditions of the substructure, or base. But the relationship between the base and superstructure is not static, it is fluid. When studying two aspects of a contradiction, it is necessary to determine when and under what conditions the dominance flips and one becomes the other. The base shapes the superstructure and the superstructure maintains the base, but under certain conditions the superstructure also shapes the base. It is cases such as these where we can begin to understand how race, a superstructural relation, can shape class character. Under the colonial relation, a person’s race dictates a person’s class. In colonial Africa, the Europeans were not working the mines and plantations, they owned them. A person worked the mines because they were African and a person owned the mines because they were European. In the U.S., a person was a slave because they were Black and a person was a slave owner because they were white. Today, this reality has been buried beneath decades of assimilationism and obscured behind liberal radicalism. But there was no forceful overthrow of the colonial system, and because of this, it persists and shapes class relations to this very day.
Settler colonialism not only exists today, it shapes the internal struggles within the working class, and the shifting complexities of class loyalty, consciousness, and propensity for revolutionary struggle.
J. Sykes derogatorily remarks that proponents of decolonial theory are attempting to “‘copy and paste’ from the Palestinian experience” as if the struggle for national liberation in Palestine is wholly disconnected from the struggle for national liberation here. While it is true that the conditions in Palestine are not identical to the conditions in the U.S., the settler colonial relation in “israel” is a microcosm of the settler colonial relation here. Because the colonization of Palestine is not buried beneath centuries, it is easily observable. Coupled with this fact, it is highly intense due to the shrinking of the technological gap between the colonizers and the colonized, thus making it extremely visible to the entire world. The same cannot be said of the process of colonization of the continental U.S., which has become relatively dormant. However, there are clear parallels in the colonization of the U.S. and the colonization of Palestine. I have written about some of this history in my previous essay.
What Palestine is showing us is a clear picture of settler colonialism at work. We can see in this case the ways in which race (nation) is the axis of oppression. We can see the clear rift between the “israeli” proletariat and the Palestinian one, how the settler relation aligns the “israeli” proletariat with their own national bourgeoisie, and how our simplified model of the class struggle breaks down. No longer is there a single, homogenous working class that has a united interest. There are contradictions within the class itself, struggle and motion between different segments. This is not to say that an “israeli” is incapable of engaging in revolutionary struggle, but the “israeli” section of the working class constitutes its backwards element. An “israeli” who denounces the formation of the zionist entity, rejects their nationality, and joins the struggle for national liberation truly understands the meaning of class struggle. This would be the task of any true Communist Party in “israel”.
This analysis does not “copy and paste” the Palestinian experience into the American one. However, a magnifying glass held over the continental United States will reveal thousands of little Palestines waging their own national liberation struggles on every street corner of this rotten nation.
Our task as Communists seeking to unite the progressive elements of the working class and oppressed peoples cannot be to deny the relevance of the colonial question to the class struggle. It must be to expand our understanding as practitioners of the science of Marxism-Leninism, to understand the history of class and how class in this country is shaped, to embrace new theoretical contributions and to utilize them in our practice. Our task is to bring together the advanced elements of the white working class, oppressed nations, and oppressed genders and sexualities and direct them in their historical role as harbingers of a new and better world carried out through the utter annihilation of this settler nation down to its very foundations.
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