From Palestine to Turtle Island: Smash the capitalists’ settler states! Part 2

This is Part Two of a series based on a talk given at a national Workers World Party meeting held on May 18. Part One can be found at workers.org/2025/06/86117/.

Settler colonialism is an important aspect of the national question with its own specific material conditions and history. The question of the relationship between a dominant (exploiting) class and a subordinated (exploited) class or classes is important for understanding any political phenomena. However, it is wrong to ignore national oppression and other special oppressions, in what might be defined as class reductionism by assuming that the material reality ends there.

To fully understand settler colonialism we need to have an understanding of two factors. One is the dialectic between class and racialized national oppression — for example, in the U.S. people who were stolen from Africa weren’t referred to by their nationality but instead by a singular (racial (or racist) term — and how this dialectic manifests itself differently under different material circumstances. The other is the ideology created by the ruling class to reinforce its position as the dominant force in class society, to maintain its exploitation and oppression of the working class as a whole. This article will focus on the first of these two points.

When it comes to understanding different stages of capitalism, Marxist-Leninist theory already has a solid understanding of imperialism and the stage of primitive accumulation leading up to the current imperialist world order. There is also a Marxist-Leninist understanding of colonialism which has been elaborated on by theoreticians such as Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and Kwame Ture.

What is needed now is to apply Leninist theory toward developing a fully systemic and scientific understanding of settler colonialism, an analysis rooted in the methods of dialectical and historical materialism guided by revolutionary practice. Some organizations in the left movement are attempting to refute the existence of settler colonialism by citing works that deny the possibility for active solidarity between workers of the oppressing and oppressed nationalities. These works include “Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat,” by J Sakai.

While Sakai’s main arguments are flawed, many of the key historical facts are accurate and relevant to understanding settler colonialism. He rightly points out that colonies of any type require significant resources to establish. Because of this fact, a large number of the initial waves of settlers are of a petit-bourgeois background, aside from rank-and-file soldiers who are treated as privileged members of the working class.

It is also true that many of these petit-bourgeois settlers become the new bourgeois ruling class through their exploitation of land and labor and after a conflict or event that causes legal separation from the homeland. But those who follow the line of thought that all white workers in a settler colony are members of a privileged class, and therefore are necessarily anti-revolutionary, as Sakai argues, are mischaracterizing the dynamic. Understanding the relationship between nationality, artificial racial categorizations and class requires a careful Marxist dialectical examination of the material circumstances and forces.

Connection between class and national oppression

When looking at the difference between a settler colony vs. a more typical colony, the relationship between national oppression and class exploitation comes into play. In order to understand the relationship between these two factors, we need to have an understanding of the theoretical insights of Marx on primitive accumulation and the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Kwame Ture, Kwame Nkrumah and Franz Fanon on colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism; and Sam Marcy on the national question and on the global nature of the class war between the capitalist ruling class and the workers and oppressed. This series will provide an outline of their contributions

Here is an outline of the combined insights from these thinkers and how together they allow us to understand not just typical colonialism, but also settler colonialism.

First off we must start by breaking down Marx’s writings in Capital Volume 1, Chapters 26 through 32. In this section he outlines how in Europe, capitalism emerged out of feudal society when much of the feudal property owned by the landlords, along with some land still communally owned, was forcibly transformed into capitalist private property. This compelled those who were formerly serfs to have to sell their labor power in exchange for the necessities of life. Marx continues by explaining that the origins of the capitalist farmer in Europe evolved out of the rentier system where someone who used to manage serfs transformed into someone who employs wage labor and/or the renting of farming materials to build agricultural capital and profits.

Marx then explains that this change in Europe allowed for the development of industrial capital “at sea-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds.” (Chapter 31) He finishes by explaining that the first age of colonization from roughly the 1500s to the 1800s led to the first major international conflicts between capitalist powers — which Lenin later explored as part of the historic factors leading to the age of imperialism.

Specifically Marx says: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black [people], signalised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. …

“But, they all employ the power of the State … to hasten … the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.” (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 31)

While we need additional insights to get a full picture of colonialism, Marx provides us with the starting point by explaining how and why colonies form from an economic and class perspective. He makes it clear that in any colony the ability of a place that is being colonized to produce in the manner and scale that the colonizers demand is at an infantile stage.

Capitalism requires national oppression

Capitalism required a conscious separation of the laboring masses into distinct groups, with the nationally oppressed Indigenous and African-descended laborers, notably those enslaved, brutally dispossessed, displaced and superexploited at the bottom of that tiered system which often constituted a semi-feudal society within the colony. This jumpstarts the primitive accumulation of capital as outlined by Marx earlier and allows for the ruling class to divide and conquer the workers.

As time progresses, in a typical colony class and especially national antagonisms boil and intermingle until a revolution from below is organized in an attempt to reclaim the means of production and redress these antagonisms. Most of what were former colonies of imperialist powers have won formal independence but many remain economically dominated by imperialism in what Nkrumah termed neo-colonialism. Others liberated themselves through a socialist revolution or carried out a successful anti-colonial struggle.

In a settler colony however, the entrenchment of the ruling class is deeper, and many of the features of a colony described by Fanon become part of the legal superstructure. In his widely acclaimed book “Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon writes: “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments … recall the existence of Native quarters and European quarters, of schools for Natives and schools for Europeans — apartheid in South Africa. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies.”

These compartments exist in all colonial contexts, but endure longer in settler colonies, because the contradiction of national oppression and the theft of land, labor and resources are structural features of the settler colony which guarantee the long-term superprofits of the big capitalists who rule it. Settler colonies also necessarily develop a faux national identity — a form of patriotic chauvinism in a manner not occurring in a regular colony — in order to keep the manipulation and division of the working class in place.

This access to domestically stolen resources like petroleum and various minerals and domestically superexploited labor, especially imprisoned labor, allows the ruling class to maintain its wider superexploitation over the workers and oppressed both domestically and internationally — making up for some of the losses in resources and exploited labor the settler ruling class faces when anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements abroad refuse to let their countries be pushed around and exploited.

Thus, an essential part of the struggle to abolish capitalism is the struggle to eliminate all forms of national oppression, including every manifestation of settler colonialism. Part of accomplishing this is to interrogate the connected relationship between the interests of the capitalist ruling class when they engage in colonialism, especially settler colonialism and when they engage in the imperialist stage of capitalism, so we can fight them at every turn for the liberation of all workers and oppressed everywhere.