The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

This may be provocative to some, but there is no denying it once the actual structure of the state is understood. This isn’t a historical point of curiosity, but the bedrock on which the United States has been built and continues to stand to this day.

If the United States isn’t a nation-state, then what is it?

Above all, the United States is a settler-colonial state, and it has remained a settler-colonial state for well over three hundred years, going back to when the territories that would go on to form its constituent parts were ruled by the British crown from across the ocean. European settlers of different nationalities crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind increasingly precarious class positions, to seize Indigenous land for themself by force. For this purpose, the Indigenous peoples were murdered, expelled, and forced into unequal treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, until gradually the settler colony turned into an independent, continent-spanning empire that reigned supreme from coast to coast.

In the meantime, the settlement of the so-called ‘New World’ combined with the globalization of trade brought a new horror with it: the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in the abduction, purchase and enslavement of millions upon millions of Africans to provide forced labor on the other side of the world. In the prosperous lands of the so-called American South, ripe for exploitation after the native populations had been expelled or exterminated by the settlers, slavery created the foundation for the quasi-aristocratic planter class. This relation would form the backbone of the southern plantation economy, so vital for primitive accumulation, which paved the way toward fully developed capitalism in North America, by appropriating the labor of the enslaved African masses.

All of this finds its expression through the central ideology of this American settler empire, creating justification for the crimes and consolation through the crimes’ artificially constructed necessity in one: White supremacy.

So far, this should be a relatively agreeable understanding of American history, even if expressed in sharper terms than one would find in the average acknowledgement of historic (always historic, never current) brutality. All but the most reactionary Americans generally conclude that slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples aren’t something that should be celebrated long after the fact, and even they will usually admit that racism ‘played a role’ in it. The issue is that the hegemonic narrative starts to become confused and downright bizarre at the latest when assessing everything following the post civil war reconstruction period—a period that is criminally misunderstood by many, which contributes to the confusion—and is given over to historical narratives that are pure expressions of liberal ideology, which insists that equality in the United States is aspirational, and slowly (but surely!) ‘history’ is moving in that direction. Its proponents, often across party lines since internalized white supremacy is genuinely bipartisan, might ask:

Did we not abolish slavery?

(Ignoring the astounding continuity between the modern American prison system and the legal reconstruction of slavery after the Civil War.)

Did we not give the Indigenous peoples rights to their land?

(Ignoring the forced assimilation once the process of extermination was concluded, and the continued existence of the reservation system on tiny fractions of their land.)

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

(Ignoring the complete banality of formal rights in the absence of equality in all political, economic, and cultural spaces.)

Are we not a nation of immigrants? Are we not all human? Are we not all Americans?

This ‘we’—the worst kind of we, the chauvinist’s national we—is imaginary in all capitalist states, but it is especially empty in the context of the US empire. There is no American national identity with any content beyond propagandized adherence to the symbolism, slogans and personality cults of the settler state, mixed with what is essentially commodity fetishism. The exception is the one identity that outright fascists try to revitalize out in the open, and liberals try to obscure with an incoherent ideology of moral progress: Whiteness—an ever-expanding and yet brutally limited category built around the exclusion of the actual nations within the empire’s borders.

Some of these nations carry names and are recognized by the US as a token gesture, and even that much was often bitterly fought for: Sioux, Cherokee, Shawnee, Navajo, and a hundred more Indigenous nations split into disparate tribal reservations by the process of genocide, displacement and subjugation.

Just as the settler state fragmented Indigenous nations, it forged new oppressed nations through slavery and annexation. Enslaved Africans, ripped from their home continent, transported across the ocean, and over generations deprived of much of their cultural heritage and even their language, formed a distinct national identity through the shared experience of enslavement, liberation and struggle against white supremacy. Similarly, although in less acute circumstances, the people subjugated by the conquest of the western territories once held by the Mexican state were subsumed into the empire, but not into whiteness, and without that, never raised to the status of settlers. When we speak of nations, we mean communities forged by shared history, territory, and struggle—not mere cultural identity. The Black nation in America, for example, like the Indigenous nations in their modern form, was created through violent subjugation and resistance against it. All of this, from the first settlements to the modern condition, exemplified by the underserved reservation and the ‘inner-city’ ghetto, only leaves one conclusion:

The United States isn’t a nation-state. It is a prison—a “prison of nations.”

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

When the Bolsheviks prepared for revolution against the semi-feudal Tsarist state—the original “prison of nations,” as Lenin referred to it—the task of national liberation was often at the forefront, and often controversial; from the question of how to deal with bourgeois nationalism to autonomy for the colonized tribal nations of Siberia. The experiences of the early Soviet Union show that dismantling empire requires combating national chauvinism with proletarian internationalism, which necessarily includes the right to national self-determination.

Consequently, the nations chained by the empire must be liberated from it—this goes for the less than United States now, as it did for the decrepit Tsarist Autocracy a hundred years ago. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences, and what concrete lessons there are to learn for today’s liberation struggle.

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

This, in three words, can be understood as the official ideology of the Tsarist state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was in many ways its answer to surging bourgeois national movements all over Europe, including within the borders of the empire. We will focus on the “Nationality,” which would be better described as national supremacy and primacy of the “Great Russians”— we simply call them Russians today, and the name already contains a hint of their supposed role in the eyes of Tsarism, as a guiding nationality for the “lesser” peoples.

Lenin describes the use of this supremacist ideology, as it was expressed by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement and endorsed by the Tsar:

The conditions of life of this vast population [the oppressed nationalities] are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy of oppressing nationalities is one of dividing nations. At the same time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses […] This dirty and despicable work is undertaken, not only by the scum of the Black Hundreds, but also by reactionary professors, scholars, journalists and members of the Duma. Millions and thousands of millions of rubles are spent on poisoning the minds of the people. — Lenin, National Equality, 1914

So, how are these conditions resolved, and how do they relate to socialist revolution? The most obvious answer, the “common sense” of today’s liberals, as it was of liberals of the last century, is the establishment of legal equality. This was obvious to everyone except the most reactionary chauvinists. Even the 1906 constitution gave token concessions to the national minorities, and finally, the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the remnants of official national discrimination, especially severe against the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the empire. The success of the Bolsheviks was not needed for this hollow “equality under the law,” instead, they went far beyond. While Kerensky’s government of national defense quickly became a government of national oppression, attempting to keep the prison of nations intact by all means—a cause soon taken up by the White Army, much to their detriment—the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular often against fierce opposition, insisted on the uncompromising right to national self-determination and secession by oppressed nations. This position was kept up during the entirety of the civil war—the only debatable exception is the Red Army’s seizure of Baku to secure an oil supply for the nascent proletarian revolution, and even there, a government of Azerbaijani communists took the lead.

For the Bolsheviks, the national right to self-determination was the basis of proletarian internationalism:

In this situation, the proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognize, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession […] Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers. — Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914

It is no coincidence that Lenin would later stress the negative influences of Great-Russian chauvinism on the early Soviet Union, and, with that, the centrality of combating it. It is no coincidence either, but rather a direct expression of this policy, that the Union Treaty of 1922, which formally established the Soviet Union, enshrined the right to secession for the constituent socialist republics, that the Soviet Union returned land seized from China and Mongolia by the Tsarist autocracy once the revolution took root there, and that where policies of russification or national suppression were implemented the offending members were expelled from the party without hesitation. This program was applied to all colonized nations, from autonomy for the tribal peoples of Siberia to demanding equal rights for those colonized by the imperialist states across the oceans.

The so-called American left should be ashamed that a party leading a revolutionary conflict in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Europe was miles ahead of them when it came to the question of national self-determination over a hundred years ago. In fact, they often reproduce the exact chauvinism so sharply attacked by Lenin.

Of course, not all of this survived into the era of consolidation under Stalin’s leadership, but that is a discussion for another time—the general principle and its importance should be clear:

The October Revolution did not lead to the foundation of a ‘Great Russian Soviet Republic’, and neither can an American revolution lead to the foundation of an ‘National American Soviet Republic’. The right to national self-determination and secession must be upheld under all circumstances. In fact, these rights become only clearer in the American case, because of the class structure inherent to the settler state. Let’s talk about that in more detail.

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

The argument that is about to follow is the exact type of argument people in the West who imagine themself as prospective revolutionaries don’t like to hear. That makes the argument all the more important, considering most prospective Western revolutionaries never engage in revolution. I’ll try to be gentle.

Unlike in Tsarist Russia, where the ‘Great Russian’ proletariat became one of the chief revolutionary forces for the reasons discussed in the last section, the vast majority of American settlers, even those among them who are supposedly proletarian, have always been complicit in the reproduction of empire. To be clear: This isn’t a moral judgement on individuals, but rather an attempt to approach the objective class relations within the boundaries of the US state, and understand where revolutionary potential can be found and under what circumstances. Without that, making revolution is an impossibility.

To explain the particular class position of American settlers, we should talk about J. Sakai’s often maligned but rarely seriously interrogated polemic ‘Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat’. He didn’t try to be gentle. His fundamental position is that the vast majority of white workers in the US have always constituted a privileged labor aristocracy, ultimately in alliance with the bourgeoisie when it comes to the subjugation of colonized nations. They are settlers, which, in turn, reflects on the self-conception of the American left if they falsely identify them as the primary revolutionary class.

Sakai states this position on the history and present of the American state and with that the American left, explicitly:

The imperialists even concede that their standard ‘U.S. history’ is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why? The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: ‘You folks, just think about your own history; don’t bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.’ — J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

What are we—those of us not interested in reproducing national chauvinism with our analysis of class relations in the US—to make of this? Well, for now, let’s take Sakai’s arguments seriously.

One of the most destructive tendencies of the American socialist movement has been to view the struggle of the oppressed nations against the empire as ‘merely’ an incidental part of the larger struggle against capitalism. This tendency will acknowledge that white supremacy is a central issue, that indigenous self-determination is vital, that reparations for slavery may be necessary, and so forth, while ultimately seeing all of it as an afterthought compared to the ‘real’ fight for socialism. These ‘lesser’ issues are relegated to the eventual destruction of the white supremacist bourgeois state, which will presumably unfold in the revolutionary process that is, for the foreseeable future, exclusively unfolding in their heads.

On what terms is this real struggle supposed to take place, then? The Bolsheviks understood the necessity of a combined struggle on all fronts, so what do these ‘Euro-Amerikan’, self-declared revolutionaries have to offer? They would never say it out loud because that exposes the blatant white supremacist logic beneath, but ultimately they conceive the revolutionary process as one advanced by the white majority, which should ‘accommodate’ or ‘integrate’ non-white proletarians into the larger struggle. And just in case it needs to be said: No, claiming you ‘don’t see color’ like a caricature of the worst kind of liberal, doesn’t change the ideology of this surface-level integrationist tendency, and its complete inability to conceive of a general liberation struggle against the American bourgeois state by those who are actually subjugated by it.

In reality, and this is absolutely vital to understand, the revolutionary process is one and the same as the struggle for self-determination by the proletarian masses of the oppressed nations. They have never been truly integrated by the settler state, and face it as the most severely exploited people within the empire’s borders.

Ignoring this inevitably reproduces white supremacy, and ultimately is an expression of the settlers’ concrete class interest of maintaining their comparatively privileged position as part of the global imperialist hegemon’s labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois landowners, and at the very top, as the imperial bourgeoisie. This is rarely understood in those terms, but is crystal clear when viewed through the historical failures and capitulations of the American union movement and various communist organizations—as Sakai does—which were dominated by a settler majority.

At best—and it really isn’t good at all—it results in treating the conflicts of the oppressed nations, and with that, the vast majority of the most acutely exploited proletarians, as secondary, as it has been done over and over again by class-collaborationist unions in the United States. Instead, the goal is to win concessions from the spoils of empire.

Sakai makes special note of this in his characterization of early trade-unionism:

Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That’s why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no place in these movements. —J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

At worst, we can see the results in parties like the CPUSA, which gradually turned itself into a sad, parasitic entity attached to the Democratic Party—and with that to the settler state—by abandoning even the semblance of revolutionary action. Why? Because once the Civil Rights Act established formal legal equality, they had exhausted their wedge issue, which initially led them ‘across racial lines’, and reverted to the lowest common denominator for all practically exhausted and theoretically confused communist parties: reformism thinly veiled by red flags. To this day, the CPUSA blatantly denies that anyone except the American bourgeoisie can be understood as settlers, while appropriating the language of national liberation—they, too, have made the ‘prison of nations’ comparison, abusing Lenin’s work only to retreat to the equivalent of a ‘Great Russian’ chauvinist’s position on the matter.

A crass difference can be seen between organizations taking on the role of de facto collaborators with the empire, and those that actually presented a threat to it by focusing on a proletarian liberation struggle, and connecting it to the larger fight against world imperialism. There is a reason why the Black Panther Party became the most advanced communist organization the US has ever seen before it was suppressed, why militants of the Black Liberation Army were killed and hunted down without mercy, why the Indigenous-led Red Power movement was torn apart with armed force and the violence of courts, and why even the generally more ‘moderate’ Land Back Movement and Chicano Movement are under continued surveillance and pressure by American state institutions. They present a real threat by uniting the proletarian masses of oppressed nations within the Empire’s borders in the struggle against the bars of their collective prison.

These movements prove liberation must begin where the empire’s violence is most acute, not where settlers feel most comfortable.

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

Ultimately, the American left has two choices: continue as the empire’s useful idiots, or finally recognize that liberation won’t come from the settlers, but from those they’ve imprisoned in the boundaries of their state. Of course, it is no coincidence that the largest sections of the so-called left have not recognized this, since it is in their class interest as labor aristocrats to close their eyes, and the others are pulled along by their sway in organizations. Class suicide—actively working against one’s own class interests, in more than words—is rarely an appealing notion, and neither is the prospect of a grueling revolutionary struggle that will, for some time at least, shatter the established value chains, reduce living standards and cause panic among those used to living off the superprofits extracted from the labor of the third world and the land of subjugated nations.

This can be no excuse. Facing reality is always preferable to idealist fantasies and lies, produced to enable a false radicalism that is ultimately destructive. Lenin was quite clear on that matter, and the role of such delusions in revolutionary situations:

After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the ‘paradise’ of which they were deprived […] In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other. — Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

All of this does not mean there is no role for white Americans in this struggle—quite the opposite, in fact, because they have the veil of protection granted by white supremacy others are not afforded—but without understanding their own position, they are bound to reproduce completely dysfunctional and often outright reactionary tactics. And while whiteness is generalized, there are, of course, differences in the concrete class positions of white workers in the United States, ranging from fully integrated labor aristocrats in the empire’s metropoles to the historically superexploited workers of the Appalachians—the fact that this needs to be addressed is already a concession to white fragility, but I want to anticipate the inevitable outrage in the comments somehow.

At the same time, the objective existence of oppressed nations must be seen as an opportunity. The most elemental task of any revolutionary organization is to find a revolutionary class to make revolution with, not as an appendage, not as an imposition, but as one of them, leading the struggle in the clearest possible terms. This is the task of the vanguard party—not to ‘include’ or ‘consider’ the proletarian masses, but to take a leading position from within the proletarian masses.

Consequently, in the United States, the task of this revolutionary organization is not to convince oppressed nations or settlers that they must work together, on a vague and entirely ahistorical and anti-materialist basis akin to liberal denial of the most severe expressions of white supremacy, but rather that their collective liberation is one and the same task. This is what the most advanced socialist organizations like the Black Panther Party advocated for, despite distortions to the contrary that attempt to deny the colonial nature of the state:

The dissolution of the American settler empire, the destruction of the bourgeois state, the establishment of workers’ power, and the uncompromising right to self-determination, autonomy and secession for the nations imprisoned in the boundaries of the empire.

The terms of this struggle are clear—the prison of nations must be shattered.

The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

These lands are actively occupied. They were not acquired through fair and conventional warfare, but through the distinctly unfair practice of genocide, targeting mostly women and children. This genocide was and is waged by coerced treaties, active war, deprivation of resources, chemical and biological agents, ethnic cleansing, and more treaties. These practices have certified these regimes as apartheid states.

If you do not agree, you do not need to visit Palestine to see the dispossession of the people being pushed out of their generations old family homes, out of their land and being deprived of their resources and the many U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognitions of genocide. You have the option of seeing that in the country/occupation we already reside in; but even easier, we can read up on the Indian Act and see the starkly different conditions that we live in.

I don’t use the term settler, it’s too soft and it’s inaccurate because most people did not settle, they were born here. I use the terms colonist and occupier because these are active descriptions, their being here is active and our efforts must be active. 

Indigenous people and occupiers are not naturally antagonistic towards each other. But if we examine the differences under the colonial enfranchisement of cisheteropatriarchy, we see inequalities being instituted. We see the inequalities of class society being replicated. This makes it harder to deal with. We see it with the ruling class and working class, then masc folks and femme folks, then colonists and Natives, older generation canadians against refugees and new immigrants, with parents and children, abled and disabled, workers and sex workers. The instituted inequality makes it so we all have differences in the level of violence we face. This fabric of our colonial and capitalist society with its wide range of violence ensures that people experience our reality differently, and as such, assimilate at different rates. Our reality is a lot messier than a Marvel movie where there is our protagonist to root for and our antagonist to defeat. Our goal is not as simple as 1. Defeat the ruling class. 2. Live happily ever after. We cannot beat the bad guy, check our phones as the credits roll, and walk out of the theatre stimulated and satisfied. Our goal is to heal all the existing antagonisms so that we can have harmony. It’s a lot harder and bigger than defeating the antagonist/reactionary force. All reactionary elements at every level must be healed.

One example is the “patriotic socialists” (patsocs) calculating that the white guys at the top of the labour aristocracy have their labour expropriated the most because they make the most. Through this math, they concluded that they are the most oppressed. This is one small example of brushing off the importance of the analysis that we live in a settler colonial regime. Our existence of exploitation in our respective societies is more complex than a set of numbers, it’s about our relationships to society, to the state, to the class opposing us, etc.

Another example is the many East European fishermen on the west coast. Many with military experience and a truly rugged upbringing should make them incredibly powerful allies in revolution. Yet they spend decades repeating racist tropes about Indigenous people on the radio transmissions up and down the coast because canadian fishermen have long done that. Those Eastern European fishermen and the canadian fishermen should have unity with Indigenous People and Indigenous fishermen but that isn’t the case at all. 

The ruling class is able to manipulate them because they don’t face the same violence that we do. Their class interest is in contradiction to the ruling class yet they do not speak or fight against it. They assimilate because they operate in an extractive industry of our resources and they are brainwashed. This is a much bigger and more important problem with the oil industry because it affects more people. 

I was a fisherman for a long time and first hand I’ve seen it worse with oil workers. In both industries, the brutal alienation, physical duress and propaganda eviscerates people and strips them of who they used to be, converting people from humans to husks. When Samidoun brought me in to lead an educational on colonialism and Indigenous history, I tackled this science and assimilation. 6 minutes of it is linked here. 

In 25 minutes you will have better analysis than most of the people in this country on the topic, better than some scholars. If you have time later and gain from this writing, I’ve included 7 or 8 hours of other studies.

Speaking of some scholars, some members of United in Struggle had written a paper that laid out some critiques but it was not really their place to be making them. I had discussed the topic a few times but I never read a paper about it. It was good to read up on it and then discuss the paper with many others. However I went into the meeting angry. The paper had 4 authors: one is a Native friend and the other three are non-natives. I was told that only 1 line of my friend’s writing had made it into the paper. I viewed this as tokenizing him so that they had the freedom to critique Indigenous organizing. During this meeting, he was not there to uphold this work and they could not use him as a shield.

They have done good work before and they helped occupy the port of vancouver during the last escalation in Wet’suwet’en. Not the one where the police fired 70,000+ rounds, that was before this last one. I honour the efforts and contributions of ILPS in that port blockade. Personally, I had gone home a few hours before the 37 arrests because I am weak to the cold. The blockade lasted 3 and a half days.

I usually write a bit longer than this, so this doesn’t contain much prose. This is writing about as dry as 3 unbuttered buns with no drink. 

During the discussion, a lady said that she doesn’t see any meaning in analyzing differences between settler colonists and natives. Now this deeply bothered me because Strasserites push that; Trotskyists push that; wooks, hippies and anarchists say things like “We are all part of the human race, I don’t see colour” etc., etc. Now that line is probably not the line of their entire organization, more likely it is just her feelings being previously hurt causing her to say nonsense. I thought about joking “I want to smoke what you’re smoking because it must be fantastic stuff.” I wanted to say “I have over 40 near-death moments in the workplace, 50-60 sprains, I’ve lent over 120 grand to my family over 15 years beginning at age 13, and I’ve been to more than 40 funerals. Surely if there is no use in examining the different experiences between natives and occupiers, all 3 of you must have worse numbers than I do, because you are older than me.”

I could have mentioned residential schools and gone into detail about what my grandpa and many family members of mine went through. Here is a free educational I had on it, covering Residential Schools on both sides of the border: Indigenous history, Residential schools, Indigenous issues and canadian imperialism (The Four Cornered Room podcast, 137 minutes)

My headache as a colonized person in a revolutionary organizing space and state-driven intergenerational trauma aside, we can take a look at the science. A quote from The Native National Question and the Marxist-Leninist Movement to show the theory of our reality of existing in a settler colony:

“It is a Marxist-Leninist principle, put forward by Lenin and defended by Stalin and Mao, that colonized peoples have the absolute right to self-determination, up to and including secession from their oppressor nation. As Communists we recognize that struggles which weaken the hegemony of the world imperialist system are progressive. This means that the bourgeois democratic revolutions in territories which have not yet achieved bourgeois democracy, that political independence in countries which do not yet have political independence, is a progressive step from the standpoint of the world proletarian revolution; they are a part of the world proletarian revolution and they help to realize it. This is part of the Marxist-Leninist understanding that the Third World is the motive force propelling history forward today. Trotskyites malign these national liberation struggles in the Third World, saying that their nationalism is reactionary and that only a “pure” proletarian revolution is appropriate; revisionists insist that Third World struggles can only be revolutionary when under the hegemony of the “proletarian” struggles of the developed sections of the world. Marxist-Leninists distinguish themselves from these agents of the bourgeoisie by understanding the role which Third World struggles have in the course of world events, by defending their progressive nature and above all by upholding the right of Third World nations to self determination.”

With this, we can see why Trotskyists, Strasserites, “Patriotic Socialists” in the U.S., and other people who make light of and deprioritize Colonized people’s struggles are either ignorant or malicious, often both. In the U.S., the American Indian Movement was Marxist-Leninist and it made amazing progress. The Black Panthers were mostly M-L and the American state massacred and imprisoned them. I hope you are not familiar with the 3 bastard groups I mentioned (as a bastard, I mean no offense to my fellow bastards). The last group is the newest. Strasserites are a bit older — they were basically national socialists who wanted to control the means of production, but not work towards international liberation and the end of imperialism. This is a very easy position for white folks to develop into. Let’s take an uneasy look at SAG-AFTRA. 160,000 union members united. An amazing feat. And also a horrible colonial reminder of what happens when you do not have theory, history and love for marginalized peoples; SAG-AFTRA voted against supporting Palestine. 

Related, there is no wave of celebrities supporting Palestine. But there was a wave of celebrities supporting the U.S.-backed Ukrainian state with many western voice actors jumping for gigs to get paid to support Ukraine in the propaganda blitz, in hiding the U.S.’s 120 years of interference in that country and blaming everything on Russia. Why are there no gigs for getting paid to produce propaganda for Palestine? Why are there immense gigs and paid support for israel? The answer is Imperialism. In depth piece I did on the topic here: Historical and Contemporary context on Ukraine and NATO interference. 

I set to work. I pulled out a microscope for the room of people to examine the colonial chauvinism. 

I told them of nearly every job on reserve paying a dollar or two more than minimum wage. I swallowed my anger and did not tell them directly that everyone is poor except the business owners and those paid to administrate the colonial chief and council capitalist wing of the canadian regime’s “democracy”. I told them they can read Unsettling Canada if they want to get a grounded stance on colonization of this province, where we cannot judge harshly those who sellout because each treaty has been made under coercion and they have all been deemed illegitimate. 

An example from that book that Arthur Manuel uses is that the Wet’suwet’en nation has land so they are able to maintain their culture and reject offers from corporations and the canadian regime. The Nisga’a do not have land and the fishing industry in the west coast has been fully privatized and commodified, so that the Nisga’a and other coastal nations are not in the same position to uphold our culture and we are not in the same position to be able to raise a fist and a war cry to offers from corporations and the canadian regime. 

Can you imagine being elected to govern your people, or just being someone who your people look to for guidance, and watching your people suffer and starve for decades, and then be given a choice to continue to watch your people starve or to sign away your land and resources to get some food to the people dying in front of you? The canadian state figuratively has set my people on fire in order to sell water to their leadership. If they literally did this, it would be faster. On the plains, John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, starved Natives so thoroughly that the population starved from 32,000 people to 20,000 people from 1880-1885. 

One famous incident was the Indian Agent Thomas Quinn gathering the Natives in the reserve he controlled and starved. He gathered them in front of the ration house and then announced, April Fools, no one was actually going to be fed.

These examples are good to examine. We have that history, and then we have colonists being given land to farm. 

If you are reading this, I know you have had struggles. We all do. It does not matter if your ancestors were barbarian racist murderers or unwashed mealy-mouthed wrist-wringers. Even if they were revolutionaries, they are then and we are now. You are your own person. You are the link between them and your future generations. What matters now is your analysis and your efforts. For better or worse, you may mirror them — you might uphold their legacy. We live in the age of information, there is no point in history where we can be as well informed and organized as we can be today.

Near the end of the meeting, I told them that a mutual friend of ours is stuck for 7 weeks on a seine boat because the ruling class bought most of the family licenses and our ruling class was permitted to convert 3 of them together into an industrial seine license. It was the Jimmy Pattison corporation but now it is the Weston family upholding this privatization. I am a 4th generation fisherman and after 15 seasons, I have left the industry. Our mutual friend is not native but he is still suffering from this privatization nonetheless. 

I told them across the 5,000 kilometre breadth of this colonial project there is unity against extractive industry and oil projects, that the only supporters are the people who work for them and they are outcasts among the rest of us and even their own people. I told them every Native house you pass by you will see unity of anti-oil placards in the windows, that we may not have Native socialist groups writing about imperialism but that our anti-oil line is in line with anti-imperialism because extractive colonialism is driving our conditions today. We can look internationally and that holds true; as of 2020, there are 194 canadian mining corporations in South America and around 75% of mining corporations in the world are based in the canadian regime. 

The U.S. puts more money into oil subsidies than it does running its entire government. I forget the exact number, somewhere around $740 billion per year. This lets us see the focus of these settler states…which is resource robbery, expropriation of Indigenous land and resources domestically and internationally while maintaining NATO as the consolidated imperial bloc.

Back to the meeting, when they said imperialism is the primary contradiction here, I told them inside this settler colony, settler-colonialism is our primary contradiction because it is the foundation that everything is built on, and that they would not tell a Palestinian that settler-colonialism is secondary. The only difference is more time has passed between that land and this land. But the same remains true, colonists and occupiers are eager to hide the truth of our conditions here because it requires that they fight this injustice. Any colonist on this land has the same relationship to it as an israeli: direct colonialism with a relationship of comfort granted as long as they look the other way. If you are reading this, it is vital that you look at the canadian flag with the same visceral fury that you look at a nazi flag and an israeli flag.

I told them I fucking hate to see colonized people’s becoming anarchists and about my 14,600 word piece on it: Why Anarchism can rub a sack (Dialectics of the Western Left). I told them that many natives become anarchists because the people we are around are deeply right wing, we are frequently bombarded with nazi bullshit. We are almost never in a place where we hear revolutionary discussion, history, theory and accomplishments; we just hear liberal noise and the most progressive thing we hear is fantasies of libertarian escapism of wanting to start a commune. We are functionally wading through a swamp of colonial opinions and reactionary violence.

Personally I had one coworker and one facebook friend tell me about their uncles fighting in the White army. These did not surprise me because I have met more than a dozen white nationalists. Settler states are international havens for white nationalists, enslavers, kulaks, and general traitors to humanity.

Another thing I vented was that the NGOs popping up to take native revolutionary potential and convert it to liberalism is distinct. It is a really effective way to defang our power. The exact same tactic is used to absorb Black power in the U.S. while Native power is power defanged this way there too. In episode 6 of season 2 of Reservation Dogs, they cover a similar method. The method of fake radicals who sell smoke and mirrors, who sell the vacuous essence of Decolonization and the words preaching it while not systematically changing anything or even identifying capitalism as the source of our oppression. I told them a question they need to be asking themselves is, can we work faster at building Indigenous Socialism than the canadian state can provide grants and fund NGOs to target this potential?

One thing they brought up was the worry of Natives adopting capitalism, they mentioned a worry of a Native ruling class. In canada there is no need to worry about this. In the U.S., casinos have been brought to many First Nations. But in the canadian regime, First Nations are too far from most cities for casinos to be effective. The injection of casinos is a strong tool of implanting destruction and capitalist influence into Native lands.

After the meeting, a white guy told me he didn’t feel what I was saying until I spoke of the government killing 1 million buffalo to wage genocide and privatizing fishing, these examples of capitalist and state level efforts to wage genocide and destroy our cultures and force us to assimilate. A parallel to this is in Palestine where israelis destroy olive trees and have made it illegal for Palestinians to harvest and sell Akoub. A related local example is the canadian government killing 20,000 sled dogs of the Inuit to force them to settle and lose their nomadic way of life. The focus of genocide is not merely to kill, it is to destroy culture, destroy their way of life, bury their legacy and erase every trace of a people. Hence the canadian government openly saying “We want to kill the Indian in the child” as their policy during residential schools. The focus is not just to kill, but to prevent the culture developing and to violently enforce assimilation. 

One of the last things I said was that a question they need to be asking is: What are we doing to build Indigenous Socialism?

I would like to stress, they did not argue with me. I have dealt with this argument in the Young Communist League as well. I have argued this online with many people over the years, which is why this gave me a headache thicker than a bun with only peanut butter. Things continue as they are until they are interrupted, these conversations are worth having. It is good to have them. The folks did not disrespect me at all. They said we may not see eye to eye on every issue, which is natural, we aren’t legally required to be in perfect harmony. They did not dismiss me. They were deflated and not smug, which is what leadership needs. The reason it was so frustrating for me was because I dealt with it so many times, not because they were in denial or reacting harshly. 

Colonial chauvinism shows up in different ways. A few ways:

• Pretending to be Indigenous and taking jobs and grants reserved for native folks to try alleviate economic depravity after centuries of intentional efforts to deprive us of economic prosperity 
• Going to a country and complaining about slaves becoming free and saying that that revolution “took everything from you” or “took your family’s business”
• Believing racist propaganda locally but also being willing to believe anything about other countries and centring the West as Just, civilized and a moral place to judge countries interfered with by NATO as if we aren’t in an occupying genocidal kingpin of a “country”
• Coming from a country resisting the U.S. at the state level and singing stories of how evil they are and directly using political energy to propagate that instead of learning about and fighting local injustice
• Selling out your homeland by selling anti-communist propaganda to pearl clutching liberals who call homeless people “junkies”
• Talking about how hard you work and saying Natives should stop asking for handouts
• Suggesting “we are all one”/denying our material conditions and history
• Caring only about your own personal struggle
• (Very closely related: western chauvinist anti-theism and Islamophobia)
• Burying our duties to wage revolution here by pointing to other countries to critique them when we do not know their material conditions, their history, their language or the external contradictions and hegemony that limits them
• Repeating “National Endowment for Democracy” CIA propaganda about Uyghurs from Adrian Zenz instead of talking about actual death camps like ICE camps and residential schools
• Patriotic Socialists who create a false dichotomy painting feminists and people who care about queer struggles as liberals and painting themselves as the “real” revolutionaries and anti-imperialists
• Sharing Lithuanian double genocide theory and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s Holocaust denial that the Bolsheviks were worse than the Nazis
• Listening to Gusanos and white nationalists’ descendants excusing their crimes and speaking ill of revolution
• Suggesting all of humanity is evil/human nature is innately bad due to the actions of the colonial powers
• Hiding history by blaming all states as equally bad when this directly buries revolutionary history and defeats of nazis, enslavers, nationalists, U.S.-backed nationalists etc
• Blaming the Chief and Council government for being corrupt while not addressing that it is the canadian regime’s Apartheid bureaucracy, while also ignoring that the canadian government is vastly larger with worse corruption. C and C makes decisions that deal with millions of dollars while canadian bureaucrats make decisions with tens of billions of dollars. C and C is the tail being wagged by the dog, no Chief and Council determines the fate of colonists.

I don’t want you to have to read a part 4 so I will keep this short. The important focus for us as revolutionaries is that the material analysis here is that we cannot simply build Socialist canada. There cannot be Communist canada, just as there cannot be Communist israel. Revolution here means demarcating from colonialism and the point that has led us to where we are, which is a continental mass grave. If you are an anarchist the last few sentences may bring you joy, if you’ve read Lenin this may bring you joy. If you are strongly tied to canadian identity, this may bring you distress. 

Comrade, this settler state must be destroyed and sovereignty must be granted to the Indigenous nations. The privatization of our land, deprivation of our resources and political autonomy must end. We must be able to determine our path forwards from the last few centuries of genocide. We have more than enough resources for all. Kinship with the land is not complex and it has served us well for thousands of years.

We must build a Socialist Confederacy of Indigenous Nations. We can have societies that prioritize the People and every Pro-social pursuit. Bolivia is doing this already with its 14 point plan. Will you join the efforts to usurp Colonialism?

P.S. Please share this writing with anyone you think might benefit from it, I am very tired of having this argument.

Additional Resources

These are some really accessible and important resources for anyone to study to focus on Indigenous peoples.

• 1+1 Ep 105 Youri speaks to Alexander Reid & Damien Gagnon on Indigenous Affairs in Canada (114 minutes)
  • Wet’suwet’en struggles
  • Indigenous struggles across canada
  • the complexity of the Indian Act and why a right wing figure supports abolishing it
  • MMIW
  • how and why canadians are pitted against Indigenous peoples and colonial law
  • prison reform versus prison abolition
• Indigenous material analysis of settler colonialism (72 minutes)
• Legal history of the West coast, commodification of the fishing industries and contemporary fishing struggles on both coasts (97 minutes)
• Glen Coultehard on his book Red Skins White Masks (40 minutes + 20 minutes Q&A)
• Canadian mining corporations and extractive industry robbery of Latin America and Africa (15 minutes)
• Bolivia’s 14 point revolutionary constitution (10 minutes)