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

This is Part Three of a series based on a talk given at a national Workers World Party meeting held on May 18, 2025. Read Part One. Read Part Two.

A previous article in this series mentioned that the ruling class relies on “racialization” of different nationalities into categories which are easier for a white supremacist state to divide and oppress. In a settler colony, the white supremacist ruling class needs to divide the working class to keep its system alive. Divisive tools work together to create a false settler-colonial consciousness.

Just as imperialist conquest relies on the bourgeois culture of “great nation” chauvinism or “patriotism” in order to coerce support for its military force, settler colonialism likewise relies on these tools to maintain its domestic forces of state violence — such as the police, National Guard, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security agents.

Lenin explains in “The Right of Nations to Self Determination” that “every nation possesses a bourgeois culture (and most nations a reactionary and clerical culture as well) in the form … of the dominant culture. Therefore, the general ‘national culture’ is the culture of the landlords, the clergy and the bourgeoisie.” In the case of both imperialism and settler colonialism, the class interests of the capitalist ruling class necessitate pushing its ideas upon all of the workers and the oppressed. 

Settler states have oppressing and oppressed nationalities just as they have oppressing and oppressed classes. The ideas — such as white supremacy or pro-capitalist propaganda — of the oppressing group(s) make up this “dominant culture” that Lenin mentioned. These ideas then worm their way into and negatively impact the dominant cultural attitudes of the different nationalities in the settler colony. They work to support a “settler culture,” which is a kind of “patriotism” or “bourgeois culture of great nation chauvinism,” that supports keeping the capitalist settler state alive. 

Unfortunately, due to settler culture, a large number of people in the United States and Canada struggle to accept the current and ongoing existence of settler colonialism in these territories and fail to properly understand the tasks faced by our class forces on Turtle Island (an alternative name for North America preferred by a growing number of nationally oppressed peoples). The lie that ongoing attacks on and denial of self-determination to nationally oppressed communities — especially Indigenous nations and communities — are something from the “distant past” is a core component of this misconception.

At face value, to many folks — especially white activists and allies descended from European settlers — the relationship between international imperialist aggression, domestic settler-colonial aggression and the patriotic chauvinism created by these forces working together makes solidarity seem impossible. 

However, the reality is in fact the opposite. Acts of solidarity informed by a correct understanding of what Marxist-Leninists call the “national question” will allow the working class to move beyond false consciousness and toward establishing a true multinational proletarian vanguard to dismantle the U.S. empire, which has been and remains a prison house of oppressed nationalities both at home and abroad. 

This understanding will aid us in dismantling support for the Zionist settler colony currently occupying Palestine and other territories subjected to imperialist or colonial control.

The socialist future which ends settler colonialism on Turtle Island would meet the basic needs of the people living on this land regardless of their national background, but must have special emphasis — as a matter of reparations and correct political practice — of prioritizing the rights to national self-determination and territorial sovereignty of the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island. These must be respectfully negotiated alongside the rights to national self-determination of other oppressed nations of Turtle Island, including the Black, Xicane, Boriqueñe, the many Latine and Asian, including West Asian, communities. 

The needs of migrants, nationally oppressed people who have sought refuge here from the waves of violence at the direction of the capitalist ruling class, must be respected. 

We cannot know exactly what this will look like until that time is upon us, but we can — and must — ensure that we are working towards a future that heals the wounds left by settler colonialism and imperialism instead of repeating the errors of our current society. Understanding national self-determination is key.

Marcy and Lenin on national self-determination 

Sam Marcy, a founding member and chairperson of Workers World Party, summarized the Leninist argument on national self-determination in his 1975 article in Workers World newspaper titled “Busing and self-determination: The NAACP rally.” 

Marcy wrote: “It is up to the oppressed nation to decide its own destiny. The business … of Communists, is to … resolutely prosecute the class war and fight for class solidarity between workers of the oppressing and oppressed nationalities. … The victory of socialism based on the solidarity of the working classes of the world will ultimately lead to an amalgamation of all the nations of the world. Unquestionably, it will also lead, on the basis of socialist solidarity and equality of all nations, to gradual assimilation of the nations of the world.

“ This concept, however, differs wholly from the concept of forced assimilation which is practiced by the oppressing imperialist nation against the oppressed. Their aim is to subjugate the oppressed, deprive them of their cultural heritage, reduce them to second-class citizenship or no citizenship at all and foist upon them the language and the literature which is that of the oppressing ruling class. Revolutionary Marxists and progressive people generally must fight against what amounts to cultural and national genocide.

“What has happened to the Native Americans of this country, the Chicano people, the Puerto Rican people and the Black people is a clear-cut example of the damage … inflicted on the oppressed in the U.S. It is only in the last few years that some measure of alleviation has taken place in this area, so that Spanish-speaking people in New York City, for example, are given some opportunity to be taught in their own language — something which is literally ABC in socialist countries like the USSR and China. 

“But while Revolutionary Marxists must stand firm against any repression in the direction of depriving oppressed peoples of their own culture and nationality, they must at the same time not oppose efforts by oppressed nationalities to demand rights which members of the oppressing nation have, even if this be regarded as assimilationist, as long as that is what they prefer. … It is the oppressed people’s right to choose, and it is the obligation of Marxists in the oppressing nation(s) to vigorously support and relentlessly defend that right.”

Building on this framework set by Marcy, the following six points, which were presented at the national conference of Workers World Party, are an updated outline of the situation vis-à-vis settler colonialism for revolutionaries to consider: 

1. The “oppressing state” (the U.S.) is not merely imperialist but also colonial.
2. The practice of forcing nationally oppressed people to adopt U.S. patriotism and settler culture is a key component of perpetuating settler-colonial relations for the benefit of the ruling class. In some cases this constitutes cultural genocide. Likewise, forcing white workers to adopt U.S. patriotism and settler culture in addition to perpetuating settler-colonial relations isolates them from nationally oppressed people at home and abroad. 
3. Whether in Israel, the United States, Canada or Australia, patriotic culture in business, media and through the state apparatus is used to secure the dominance of the colonial ruling class through the development of a false consciousness and false sense of collective “nation-hood.”
4. The fight to decolonize Turtle Island must be done according to the needs of the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island and the needs of other oppressed nations on Turtle Island, such as the Black, Xicane, and Boriqueñe communities and of those who are in diaspora here.
5. Revolutionaries must create the structures and spaces — in the process of building socialism — through which negotiations on the specifics of reparations and land return to oppressed nations can be enacted respectfully and without coercion, subjugation, tokenism or exploitation of the oppressed nations 
6. In the course of fighting for socialism, if we do not dismantle patriotic chauvinism and other white supremacist power structures, we are in effect continuing the injustices perpetuated by the dictatorship of capital under different circumstances.