The news and the news media determine who gets to be considered “innocent” of crimes. Yet we know the zionist state makes use of “civilians” in order to further its goals. In a time of genocide, even reporters and propagandists can be found guilty under the Genocide Convention, which even the U.S. government claims to recognize (despite its name, the Genocide Convention is an international treaty making genocide an international crime, rather than a convention for genocidaires. One can be forgiven for mistaking it for the latter, however, as the United States, one of the most genocidal states in history, is a proud signatory to the convention. It  became a signatory to the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948). At the Nuremburg trials, those who enabled the genocide were found guilty and executed. The zionist state utilizes Hasbara, the method of propaganda in which state actors, embedded as civilians, lie openly about the actions of the regime to launder its image and erode public trust in Palestinian sources. If the zionist state continues to utilize “civilians” and Hasbara, then we should not expect any citizens who support its genocidal forces to be considered “off limits” to counterterror. 

This trick — claiming colonized people are already guilty — is one that the U.S. imperialists have used for a long time. From Palestine to Sudan, the West has robbed the people of their right to innocence. Ibrahim Traore, president of Burkina Faso, for instance, is said to be a violent tyrant — so the U.S. can plot to assassinate him and pillage his country. Who is really innocent? What are the true crimes? If you listen to the U.S. government, you’ll never know.

There is a cradle of popular revolution rising. The zionist genocide is not merely confined to the borders of the zionist state. In fact, it is a genocide being carried out with the policy protections and active support of the United States government and our ruling class. It is a United States genocide. The United States has determined to expand its military borders to the four corners of the earth; its bases are located throughout the entire world. Its tendrils reach into every economy in every country. In such a case, the front, the frontier, the border, is everywhere. There is no “rear,” there are no “civilian populations.” Take the words of the genocidaires as true: there are those who are for and those who are against it.

“There are no innocent civilians,” according to the zionist embassies.

Every act of resistance builds up friction inside the imperialist machine. It is right and brave to inhibit the empire from carrying out its genocidal tasks. Policy makers and imperial managers must be made to understand that they are not secure. They are not safe behind the walls of a U.S. border. There is no territory, there is no home, that cannot instantly become the frontlines of the fight. Only when the political actors and the ruling, owning, capitalist class realize that they cannot sit safely in their glass and steel towers and derelict the murder and massacre of millions across the globe will they relent, will they pause. For them there are only two considerations: 1) profit, and 2) geopolitical stability. That means the ability of the U.S. empire to continue supporting their businesses abroad and extracting profit. It can all be boiled down to profit and its continuation. If we want our collective voices to be heard, to be louder than the few additional dollars for the U.S. ruling class, then we must amplify them. We cannot speak, we must shout. We cannot talk, we must argue.

There is only one argument the enemy respects.

There are several diseases currently spreading unregulated throughout the world, many of which are centralized in the so-called United States. The U.S. government, corporations, and much of the population has decided that unmitigated and uncontrolled transmission of deadly disease is now the norm. 

These diseases include SARS-CoV-2, Influenza A, H5N1 Bird flu, Measles, Tuberculosis and Norovirus. This article will mostly focus on the mitigation of the spread of these five diseases and to combat specific misinformation that is clouding current understanding of the risks of these diseases on the individual and the community. 

These five diseases are exceptional in their current level of spread, lethality or resurgence. We will go through several sections discussing vocabulary, the diseases themselves, best practices of prevention, control of symptoms, and post-illness care.

Vocabulary and Concepts

• Epidemic: uncontrolled spread of a disease in a given area that causes exceptional threat to human life and society
• Pandemic: epidemics of worldwide reach
• Multidemic: colloquial slang for multiple pandemics occurring at the same time.  
• Pathogen: any organism or agent that can infect a living being and cause disease
• Virus: a kind of pathogen that hijacks the DNA of the cells of hosts and uses them to reproduce copies of itself, which then go on to infect other cells. Viruses are not technically living. Some viruses can be treated by antiviral medications, although not all. 
• Bacteria: single-cellular life forms, some of which are infectious and cause bacterial infections. These infections are treatable with antibiotics that target different kinds of bacteria and kill them outright. 

Spread

Airborne 

• COVID, Flu A, H5N1, and Measles are airborne viruses that are aerosolized through breathing. This means that they are made into microscopic particles that remain in still air. In indoor rooms without ventilation, they can stay in the air from 2-8 hours. Imagine someone smoking and the odor remaining in the air, and lasts for some time after smoking. Infectious particles can stay in the air for hours after being breathed out. 

Bodily fluids 

• Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection of the lungs that spreads through coughing up mucus, blood or saliva. It is not able to hang in the air like the above viruses, but does remain on surfaces, and anything that your bodily fluids get onto after coughing.  
• Norovirus is transmitted through stool, after bowel movements. It can transfer onto hands, which can then spread by touching surfaces, items or people. Touching a contaminated surface with your hands, and then touching your mouth transmits the disease to you. 

Surfaces

• Flu A, H5N1, Measles, norovirus and Tuberculosis are spread through surfaces, touch, skin, and eating after others. 

Contagiousness

• Flu A, H5N1, COVID, and measles are contagious several days before symptoms show up. 
• COVID is asymptomatic (does not show any symptoms) in up to 40% of all cases, and it is spread during this time. 
• Measles is spread through air and is extremely contagious for unvaccinated or immunocompromised individuals, which may be more people than currently known due to the continuing COVID Pandemic. 

Diagnosis and Seeking Treatment

If you believe you are sick with any of these conditions, seek medical attention at a clinic. COVID, Flu and Norovirus can be diagnosed with a lab test. 

Prevention

Spread of all of the above pathogens can be reduced through one of several means. 

Masking

• Effective against all airborne pathogens. 
• Wearing masks can reduce the amount of pathogens that are breathed out if one is sick, and breathed in if you are in contact with contaminated air. 
• Masks should fit tightly, around the nose and cheekbones, under the chin, and not have any gaps on the side. 
• Once in place, masks should not be removed because this will expose you to contaminated air. Avoid touching your mask (and face in general) to prevent infection through the eyes or mouth. 
•  The most easily accessible are surgical masks but these are by far not the most effective. 
• Properly fitted respirators are far and away the most effective masks. Respirators are ionically charged, meaning they have an effect similar to static, that traps and removes particulates from the air before you breathe it in.
• Properly fitted respirators should have two straps that go around the back of the head, fitting above and below the ears. They should have a good seal around the edges of the mask and your skin that air does not pass through. Depending on the size of your face you may need smaller or larger masks. 
• The most effective masks are N100 or P100 respirators, which block about 99.97% of all microscopic particulates. These can be purchased at hardware stores such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, online at distributors sites, such as 3M or other industrial supply companies. 
• Many people are likely familiar with N95, KN95 or equivalent respirators. Of these, the statistically best respirators are the “duck-bill” respirators. They work best for folks with rounder faces, flatter nose bridges. Other popular choices include 3M Aura respirators or the rounder 3M respirators, and others. Respirator masks with ear loops, such as KN95 masks and KF94 masks, are not as effective because the ear loops do not provide an adequate seal around the mask, and air leaks through. 
• Do not remove masks in bathrooms, when eating, or when in rooms with closed doors, as this will expose you to infection. 

Hand-washing

• Hand washing should be done frequently, before and after eating, after peeing or pooping. 
• Wash your hands in the following manner:
  • Rinse them with hot water for 20 seconds, and spread to your whole hand and wrist. 
  • Use soap and thoroughly scrub your whole hand, palm and back, between all fingers, and under fingernails, for 20 seconds. 
  • Rinse them with hot water for 20 seconds, being sure to wash all the soap off. 
  • Dry with a disposable towel thoroughly until dry. Dispose of the towel.
• Norovirus is not killed or removed from the hands by alcohol hand sanitizer, only soap and water. 

Air Filters

•  Homemade air filters can be constructed from a box fan, duct tape, and four air filters. These can filter out pathogens (and allergens like dust, pollen and pet hair/dander) from the air. 
• You can also purchase HEPA-rated air filters from hardware stores or distributors online. 

Vaccination

• Vaccines are available for Influenza A, Measles, Tuberculosis (unless in the US) and COVID-19. 
• The flu vaccine is generally not taken enough to give herd immunity (needing around 95% vaccination rate), but is effective in significantly reducing infection rate. 
• The COVID 19 vaccine is an MRNA vaccine that is generally safe. It reduces (but does not stop!) risk of spread, and severity of the acute phase of illness. 

Nasal Sprays 

• Airborne viruses are able to be reduced in risk of infection with daily use of  several nasal sprays, including diluted Povidone Iodine (can be diluted from iodine solution), Iota-Carrageenan spray (Betadine Cold defense or other generic sprays), or HOCl (short shelf life of 2 weeks, can be made at home). 

Food Prep

• H5N1 can pass to mammals (humans included) through undercooked poultry and mammal meat, and through unpasteurized milk. Do not drink unpasteurized milk or meat that is not cooked to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit or 74 degrees Celsius. 

Treatment 

Antiviral therapies 

• COVID patients can be treated with Paxlovid, which is a course of 3 pills twice a day for five days. 
• Paxlovid is a very safe medication. It must be started within 5 days of onset of symptoms, and is indicated for mild to moderate symptoms to prevent worsening disease. 
• There is no reason to not start it for most patients, unless you have kidney or liver damage. 
• It is currently being price gouged, and price can be up to $1700, but insurance covers it for around $25, and there are federal programs in place to apply for reduced cost. 
• Influenza can be treated with Tamiflu, a five day antiviral, or Xofluza, a single dose anti-viral. 
• There are no antivirals for H5N1, Measles, or Norovirus. 

Antibacterial therapies

• Tuberculosis is treated with either an injection or oral form of Penicillin antibiotics. Contact medical providers for instructions on seeking treatment. 

Measles

• Measles causes a fine rash and is contagious for about 4 days before the rash appears. The rash is red, splotchy, and appears across the face, body and limbs. 
• Contact a physician immediately if you are concerned that you have measles or if you were exposed, and follow instructions. 

General Treatment for Viral Illness

• Rest, rest, rest. 
• Fever is often treated with Tylenol/Acetaminophen, or Advil/Motrin/Ibuprofen. Follow instructions on packaging and advice of medical providers. 
• Drink lots of fluids (especially if you have diarrhea), especially broths, or electrolyte drinks (Pedialyte or store brand. Avoid gatorade/powerade, as these are mostly sugar). 
• Cough medicine, either started by doctors or over-the-counter medications as instructed. 

The Diseases

SARS-CoV-2  / COVID-19 / COVID

This virus was discovered in late 2019, sourced to a meat market in Wuhan, China, where it spread rapidly across the world. It is a disease that affects and can damage every system in the body, including the neurological system (brain, spine and nerves), the cardiovascular system (the heart and blood vessels), pulmonary system (lungs), gastrointestinal and digestive system, skin and hair, and every organ. 

Risks of COVID are as follows:

Especially concerning, COVID damages the immune system in the same manner that HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) does. It may cause anyone infected to lose their body’s natural ability to fight off all other diseases. 

COVID damages the brain, causing brain fog, memory issues, can cause neuron cells in the brain to fuse into clumps, can damage other sensory nerves throughout the body causing neuralgia (a burning-type nerve pain), loss of smell and taste. Since the start of the continuing COVID pandemic, dementia rates have drastically increased, and are occurring in younger and younger populations, including young adults. 

COVID damages the heart and blood vessels, and causes blood to clot much more often. Strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, have all increased in all age groups and significantly younger since the start of the COVID pandemic. It can also damage the kidneys due to the blood vessel damage it does. 

COVID makes developing cancers significantly more likely,  with all age populations experiencing increased risk of developing cancers such as colon cancer. 

Mortality from all causes has increased in all age groups and populations since the onset of the COVID pandemic, with the number of car accidents increasing, heart attacks and strokes becoming much more frequent. 18-34 year olds are dying twice as much as compared to before the COVID pandemic. 

COVID is deadly, resulting in deaths in 1-2% of all cases. Only about a third of the hospitals reporting deaths from COVID, averaging 1000 deaths a week, but multiplied out to all the hospitals not reporting, it may be killing several thousand people. 

Despite rumors to the contrary, there is no evidence that the source of COVID-19 was from labs of various world governments, nor is this functionally possible with the current level of genome editing technology. 

Influenza

Influenza is a collective name for many related viruses. Influenza A and B are labels given to the most likely strains of influenza to become extremely contagious, and spread during the year. These likely candidates are then taken, and vaccines are made to prevent them by triggering the body’s immune response. 

Flu kills tens of thousands of people each year, and since the start of the COVID pandemic, has killed more and more people every year. 

H5N1 and other avian flus are related to most other common flu strains, but tend to be much more severe, and dangerous to the human body, with much higher likelihood of death (up to 50% of all humans infected with H5N1 die without treatment, and 20% of people die even when aggressively treated). H5N1 is spreading entirely unchecked and uncontrolled in wild, domestic, and agricultural birds, among agricultural mammals like cows and pigs, with many and growing instances of human infection.

All flus damage the lungs and can cause pneumonia (fluid filling the lungs, also risking a secondary bacterial infection). 

Measles

Measles is an extremely infectious, dangerous virus. This is normally vaccinated against in infancy, but efforts by anti-vaccination interests have significantly reduced vaccination rates, either delaying vaccination or not vaccinating outright. Some places in the US are below vaccination required for herd immunity, meaning there are enough unvaccinated people to allow spread. 

Measles can damage the body’s immune system, and wipe out your immunity to diseases you have been vaccinated for previously. 

Measles can permanently damage the brain from inflammation, and the lungs through inflammation and pneumonia. 

Tuberculosis / TB

Tuberculosis was eradicated in the US until very recently. There are vaccines available for this bacteria outside of the US, but it has not occurred enough to warrant vaccine use in the US. It is treatable with Penicillin antibiotic, but until it is treated and resolved is highly infectious and contagious, spreading through droplets of mucus, blood or saliva. 

Norovirus

Norovirus is a virus that causes diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration in individuals. It is highly contagious and particles can remain suspended in bathrooms for several hours. Ventilation is key, and washing hands and wearing high quality respirators is imperative. Dehydration is a major threat of the illness and is the primary danger especially to the elderly, infants, and children. Norovirus sticks to surfaces extremely well, and cannot be neutralized with hand sanitizer alone. Avoid going to eat at restaurants. 

Up to half of this “aid” has been in the form of shrouds for Palestinian dead, and the remainder has not been distributed. No food or supplies have reached the population since the 2nd of March. Almost everyone inside Gaza is suffering from severe malnutrition, with disease rampant and medical services overwhelmed and under constant bombardment. Over 3,000 people have died in the past two months. Ninety-eight people were killed on Tuesday this week.

They aren’t sending aid.

They’re sending tanks.

A comprehensive invasion is currently ethnically cleansing the strip from north to south. The zionists have established increasingly shrinking “humanitarian zones,” outside of which Palestinians are killed on sight, and have forced the nearly 2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza into highly concentrated “refugee camps” in the south. The zionist state regularly bombs these refugee camps, resulting in horrific casualties. Since the 15th of May, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, israel’s bombardment of the surviving population of Gaza has intensified to unprecedented levels. Around 100 people are being killed every day by the relentless bombings. 

Every leading scholar on genocide worldwide is calling this what it is, but the mainstream media refuses to report accurately on conditions in Gaza. They refuse to admit that this is an intentionally targeted genocide, being waged with our tax dollars, our “defense” industry, and our complicity. Instead they are under standing orders to continue to run PR for the genocidal zionist occupation of Palestine. The world’s governments continue to make symbolic gestures, denouncing the occupation’s actions in words while continuing to support it in practice..

The United States is the primary beneficiary and driver of this zionist atrocity; all pressure must be exerted on the United States government to cease. This genocide is U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded, and is being carried out with tactical direction from U.S. soldiers.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY IN THE ZIONIST HOLOCAUST.

Immediate action is desperately needed on all fronts:

Arms shipments to the zionist occupation of Palestine must be stopped immediately. Visit workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel for a list of weapons companies involved in materially enabling the genocide.

Relief is desperately needed for the hundreds of thousands of people starving under intense bombardment. Visit gazafunds.org to contribute to relief funds, every donation helps the people of Palestine resist genocide, every donation is a potential life saved.

Visit chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza to help provide e-sims to keep Palestinians in Gaza in contact with their families and the outside world.

Visit bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for information on which companies are investing in, or directly involved in the occupation. 

Spread this message everywhere you can. This Holocaust is being systematically covered up through mainstream media silence and social media censorship. Visit clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-05-23-emergency-bulletin-zionists-begin-last-stage-of-genocide for the web version of this article, or unity-struggle-unity.org/palestine-emergency-bulletin-tri-fold for a printable PDF copy. Get this message into as many hands as possible! With every hour that passes more innocent men, women, children, and babies are being murdered. U.S. bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes, built with parts from Canada, the E.U., targeted by surveillance drones from the U.K. 

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY. 

INACTION IS COMPLICITY. 

THIS HOLOCAUST IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENDING IT.

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

Forgive this short introduction for there is much to cover; Hawai’i’s nature is certainly one of the most beautiful on Earth. If we want to keep it that way, we must do everything in our power to decolonize the Hawaiian islands that have been under U.S. occupation since 1893. But let’s start with some history. Let’s talk about the illegal occupation and annexation of Hawai’i.

While we should rightly begin where history begins — that is, from the initial Polynesian settlement of the islands to the establishment of the unified Kingdom of Hawai’i in 1795, this is not a history I would be able to tell, because it is not mine to communicate. I could not do justice to the millennia of Hawaiian history and  its language, culture and people. For that, I would instead point to Indigenous Hawaiian sources, such as the Ka Mooolelo Hawai’i — the first history of Hawai’i written by Native students in 1838 — or the Papaliko database which hosts a collection of data on historically and culturally significant events, curated by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, If you know more Indigenous resources, feel free to post them in the comments for our readers.

We will begin shortly before the pivotal event that cemented Hawai’i’s status to the United States: the overthrow of queen Lili’uokalani.

In January of 1893, the queen of the independent and sovereign kingdom of Hawai’i (which had been united by King Kamehameha I in 1795, putting all the islands under one monarch) was overthrown at gunpoint by U.S. Marines. She had ascended to the throne only two years earlier after the untimely death of her brother Kalakaua, and quickly set out to restore power to the monarchy and native Hawaiians with a new constitution after one had been forcefully passed just four years earlier. This effort, however, was quickly opposed by a group of U.S. and European businessmen and lawyers, known as the “Committee of Safety”, who favored annexation with the United States.

We have to understand the context surrounding the United States in 1893 to understand why the U.S. were interested in Hawai’i. By that time, most of the territory that now forms the continental United States had been settled and attached to the Union. In 1846, just half a century earlier, settlers had stolen Texas from Mexico, which led to a war in which Mexico relinquished control of what now forms the southwestern quarter of the United States territory, including California. With this, coast-to-coast imperial ambitions were  achieved.

The following years would be marked by rapid settler expansion to the west, and with it came industrialization — including the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 and of which 90% of the workforce was Chinese (on the western portion). They would later be expelled by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed by Congress. In Hawai’i, Chinese immigrants were instead welcomed (alongside Japanese immigrants) by Native Hawaiians, though plantation owners instituted a blanket 10-hour work day on plantations under harsh conditions.

This rapid industrialization didn’t please slaveowners in the south who saw their privileges threatened, and led to a civil war that marked the 1860s. The industrialized Union won, and with it came what is called the Reconstruction era: the final rupture of the slaveowning mode of production that remained in the South and towards a proletarianization of the labor force, which allowed manufacturing to become even more productive.

This laid the final brick in the foundation of the American Empire’s hegemonic ambitions, and they could start to look outwards. In 1898, the U.S. declared war against Spain and, in the peace deal, took the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam — the final colonies of the declining Spanish monarchy.

But the Philippines are far away, especially in the age of the steamboat. To pave the way to Asia, a base of operations was thus required in the Pacific, and Hawai’i was perfectly suited for it. In 1898, President McKinley declared “We must have Hawai’i to get our share of China.”

On top of that, Hawai’i’s climate made it perfect for growing cash crops — prior to annexation, U.S. businessmen had already established large sugar plantations on the island chain. And of course, Hawai’i also formed a shield against attacks from the west, seen as recently as the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

All of this leads us to the reasons the U.S. wanted to annex Hawai’i.

When queen Lili’uokalani took the throne in 1891, she had her work cut out for her. A few years earlier, the so-called Bayonet Constitution had been passed in the kingdom, imposed on King Kalākaua on July 6, 1887 by the aforementioned plantation owners. They called themselves the Hawaiian League (despite none of them being Hawaiian) and, through arms, forced the new constitution that they had drafted for the king. This constitution allowed foreign residents to vote — which, to this day, no country offers — and denied over two-thirds of Native Hawaiians from voting.

In 1892, the Legislature of the Kingdom of Hawai’i passed the Highways Act to protect public lands from privatization. At the same time, the monarchy was also trying to push forward a new constitution that would undo the Bayonet Constitution.

As we’ve already seen, all of this came crashing down in 1893. Shortly after the new year, queen Lili’uokalani made her intentions to push the new constitution clear. Immediately, the Annexation Club — composed of six citizens of the Kingdom (specifically not recorded as being Native Hawaiian) and seven U.S. and European foreigners — carried out their counter-plan: with help from the U.S. government, a fully armed warship anchored in Honolulu harbor (a tactic that the U.S. would use several more times in the future, including in 1974 in Portugal). This move initially scared the legislature who withdrew their support for the new constitution.

Lili’uokalani tried to ease tensions by walking back some of the changes she wanted to make, but it was too late and annexation was within reach for plantation owners. On January 16, 162 U.S. sailors and marines landed in Hawai’i and illegally occupied the sovereign and independent nation.

On January 17, the Committee of Safety — the descendent to the Annexation Club — announced martial law and the deposing of the queen. Specifically, they also declared a provisional government until a union with the United States could be achieved.

Queen Lili’uokalani surrendered to the U.S. government and thus came the end of the long-standing Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Before we continue with this important piece of history, we should take some time to understand what life in Hawai’i was like prior to the coup.

The imperial core’s own institutions recognized Hawai’i as a sovereign nation. By 1843, Hawai’i became the first non-Western nation to receive full recognition as an independent state by Western powers. By 1893, the kingdom maintained over ninety consulates and legations (which served the functions of an embassy) worldwide, including in the United States. Only sovereign states maintain embassies abroad to serve as their representatives on foreign soil.

This fact cements that prior to the deposing of the monarchy (and arguably even prior to the Bayonet Constitution), Hawai’i was a fully sovereign nation in the eyes of the imperialists. Thus, logically, the occupation by U.S. Marines on January 16 was an illegal invasion by a foreign state, and annexation by the U.S. was a coup.

By the mid-19th century, Hawai’i had achieved a 95% literacy rate, the highest in the world. The Constitutional Monarchy established in 1840 guaranteed equal voting rights regardless of race, gender or wealth — the first of its kind in the modern world; at the time, most Western countries were still limiting voting rights to landowning males, if they had any at all. The constitution came about on the impulse of king Kamehameha III himself (also known as Kauikeaouli), as part of efforts to modernize the kingdom.

In 1859, the Queen’s Hospital was established and provided free healthcare to all native Hawaiians. Electric public lightning came to the streets of Honolulu in 1888 — before even the White House had electric lightning. Laws on land distribution made by the Declaration of Rights (1839) guaranteed virtually no homelessness. Affordable mass-transit made travel between islands possible for everyone.

All of these achievements were instantly reversed after the foreign coup in 1893, which turned Hawai’i into a plantation colony for the United States.

Hawai’i became the 50th state of the “Union” in 1959. What happened between 1893 and then?

Immediately after the queen was deposed, a provisional government was set up. This government immediately sent envoys to Washington to seek a treaty of annexation — manifesting their desire for the complete destruction of an independent Hawai’i into an occupied colony of the United States. The treaty was delayed by the inauguration of Grover Cleveland as U.S. president however, and stalled there. Because of this, the Republic of Hawai’i was proclaimed by the Committee of Safety in 1894. Sanford B. Dole, a white man born in Honolulu, became its president. He was approved for a six-year term and if the name Dole is familiar, that is because his cousin James D. Dole is the one who started the Dole fruit company (then called the Hawaiian Pineapple Company). James Dole came to Hawai’i in 1899 and developed the pineapple industry which he had started there in 1851 — pineapple, which is used on “Hawaiian Pizza”, is not native to Hawai’i.

The new constitution accompanying this puppet temporary state required voters to swear allegiance to the republic. Strict property requirements prevented most Hawaiians from voting. The U.S. quickly recognized the coup government, despite president Cleveland publicly criticizing the involvement of U.S. Marines, as is usual — to this day we see the same performative criticism of the particular forms brutal occupation takes, but not its end result.

A counter-rebellion was attempted in 1895 to restore the sovereign kingdom, but failed. In 1898, the situation had stabilized sufficiently that then-president McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, which annexed Hawai’i to the United States. A petition signed by over half the Hawaiian population was presented to the U.S. government protesting the move, but was ignored.

In 1900, Hawai’i became a territory of the United States — the same status that Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and ‘American’ Samoa have today. Stanford Dole, previously the president of the coup republic, was named governor of Hawai’i.

At that point, everything that existed under the late constitutional monarchy was broken and rebuilt. There was no more President or king in Hawai’i, but a U.S. governor — and with it, the laws of the occupier came along too, which is illegal under U.N. Occupation Law.

During that time, sugar production expanded from 289,500 short tons in 1900 to 939,300 short tons in 1930 in plantations owned by white Americans and toiled by native Hawaiians. Pineapple grew from 2000 cases in 1903 to 12 million cases in 1931. Tourism, which plagues Hawai’i to this day, started in 1901 with the opening of the Moana hotel. By 1958, tourists amounted to 171 thousand in one year compared to 25 thousand in 1940. All the while political control remained largely in the hands of the Haole — non-Native Hawaiian, specifically white.

In 1896, the Hawaiian language was banned in public schools — that ban remained in place for 100 years, until 1986. Today, UNESCO still classifies the language as critically endangered.

U.S. businessmen were not the only ones scrambling to the newly-acquired territory, of course. The government immediately set out to fulfill its ambitions and established a dozen military bases in Hawai’i between 1898 and 1922. Since it now considers Hawai’i part of their territory, military presence has only increased, and with it came many scandals and destruction. The military occupies 6% of Hawai’i’s land (illegally), and these bases have displaced many Indigenous Hawaiians and destroyed sacred cultural sites. The U.S. military contributes heavily to environmental crises in Hawai’i, being responsible for example for the Red Hill water contamination crisis.

The effects of the colonization of Hawai’i are still felt today because the U.S. government still considers Hawai’i to be their playground for tourism, army and the mass distribution of pineapple.

Native Hawaiians face higher rates of poverty compared to whites — 15.4% versus 9.6%. Cost of living has soared in Hawai’i with the introduction of a tourism industry (owned by white businessmen); 40% of Indigenous Hawaiian households are cost-burdened by rent prices, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent. Indigenous Hawaiians form only 10% of the population of Hawai’i, yet make up 51% of the homeless population. 50% of Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawai’i. The tourism industry pays pittance wages with most of the profits going to the white owners.

More than a quarter of missing girls in Hawai’i are Indigenous, and the average profile of a missing person is a 15-year-old Indigenous girl. Hawai’i is the state with the eighth-highest rate of missing persons in the United States, and 84% of Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime. In Operation Keiki Shield, 38% of those arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old online were active-duty U.S. Military personnel. 

The tourism industry in Hawai’i has put over 60% of plants and animal species in the ‘endangered’ status, largely due to deforestation to build resorts that make a parody of traditional Hawaiian culture. 44.7% of water on the Big Island (the island of Hawai’i) is consumed by hotels and resorts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military causes crisis after crisis, and never cleans up after. They pollute potable water through mismanagement. Over several months in 2021, fuel tanks failed one by one at U.S. navy bases at Red Hill (Oahu island) and released tens of thousands gallons of fuel into the island’s drinkable water supply. The U.S. military controls 30% of the land on this island and used it — and the sacred cultural site at Kaho’olawe — as a bombing range for decades. The issue was compounded by the fact that the leaks happened over several months, raising the question as to why the fuel tanks were not inspected and fixed after the first leak. Petroleum contaminated the public water supply for 1 million residents, and the U.S. Navy both refused to help fix the problem and did not notify the authorities when the leaks happened — the problem was reported far too late, when local residents noticed the leak in their tap water. Instead, the Navy ‘promised’ to close the facility by 2027. Today in January 2025, 4,000 gallons of fuel and 28,000 gallons of sludge still remain in the pipes and tanks. In the first weeks after the leak, colonial authorities in Hawai’i even said that the water was safe to drink, leading to the poisoning of thousands.

Pearl Harbor, which we mentioned at the beginning of this piece, was known as Wai Momi (Pearl Waters) by the Hawaiians, and got its name from the pearl oyster diving trade that took place there. The pristine and shallow waters were perfectly suited for that activity, as well as fishing to feed the population — and they did so faithfully for over 600 years. 27 fishponds lined the shores of the Pearl Waters. In 1887, after the Bayonet Constitution, the U.S. gained exclusive rights to the lagoon as a coaling and repair station and from there built their naval base. Today, the water at Pearl Waters is polluted with arsenic, lead and mercury.

In the mid-20th century, the U.S. military detonated nuclear weapons as part of tests in the Pacific, not far from Hawai’i. At the Pacific Proving Grounds — Johnston Atoll, Bikini Atoll, and Enewetak Atolls — nuclear bombs were detonated. As part of Operation Fishbowl, a nuclear test was conducted in high-altitude, which caused an artificial aurora visible from Hawai’i and an electromagnetic pulse that damaged electrical infrastructure on the island chain. Over 100 nuclear detonations were made in the Pacific between 1946 and 1962, and the fallout caused — and is still causing — cancers in Hawai’i and other Pacific Islander populations. Residents of Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands chain, still cannot grow food locally.

In 2023, deadly wildfires burned on the island of Maui, becoming one of the deadliest natural disasters in Hawai’i’s history. The fires were caused by sparks from broken power lines that ignited dry vegetation. 102 people were killed by the fires, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in history. As of 2025, only three homes have been rebuilt, out of 2,200 structures destroyed. Landlords immediately sensed a good business opportunity, and rent rose by 44% on the island, further displacing Indigenous Hawaiians from their ancestral home. The only help from the federal government was a FEMA loan that will stop in 2028.

In terms of land ownership, some 200,000 acres have been set aside by the Department of Hawaiian Homelands to be distributed to Indigenous Hawaiians, but long waitlists persist. The U.S. Federal government, in comparison, owns 531,000 acres which are used for military bases and national parks. National Parks in the U.S. (under Roosevelt), as in “Israel”, were mainly established to drive Indigenous tribes away from their homelands — Yellowstone Park, for example, is located on the ancestral homeland to the Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, and Nez Perce.

Mark Zuckerberg has also been acquiring land on Kauai since 2014. He now holds over 1,400 acres including beachfront and agricultural properties. In 2016, he initiated lawsuits to force owners of kuleana (small parcels with ancestral rights enclosed in ‘his’ property) to sell their property, dragging them in expensive lawsuits that the families could not finance. He is not the only one: other U.S. tech figures such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) own mansion compounds of their own in Hawai’i. Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, owns 98% of Lanai island, one of Hawai’i’s eight islands. Meanwhile, Indigenous Hawaiians pay $3,000 per month in rent for an average of $18 per hour, which is twice as low as the occupation state’s average wage of $32 per hour.

Again, all of this is technically illegal, not only under U.S. law, but also under international law. The U.S. is illegally occupying Hawai’i, an occupation made possible only by their military might and the putting down of independence movements. In effect, the Kingdom of Hawai’i is under occupation and U.N. Occupation law applies to it — similarly as it does to Palestine. More and more organizations are recognizing this occupation status, including U.N. bodies, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild. Under Occupation Law, the occupied population has the right to resist occupation, including by force.

Indigenous Hawaiian groups have been very clear about the effects tourism has on their homeland, and have thus requested that tourists refrain from visiting Hawai’i — not just U.S. tourists, but all tourists. I can only echo their voice and make you reconsider visiting Hawai’i as long as it remains a U.S. colony. 

Like many other countries and territories, Hawai’i is not spared by the effects of ongoing colonization; and all of this is still happening in the 21st century. The only just solution for Hawai’i is the complete expulsion of the U.S. army, the recognition of a sovereign Hawaiian state and nation by the U.S. government, and the relinquishing of its status as a U.S. state or dependency of any kind.

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)