To put it as plainly as possible, if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the “settler working class” as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.
A shame, a sad sad shame. For anyone that’s read settlers, or knows about the history of labor zionism, or prioritizes any kind of indigenous voice in their praxis, this is really bad. No peace for settlers! Settlers cannot lead the revolution! I hope we see an end to any respect given to this “settler colonialism is over” politic soon.
Yeah, I’ve had multiple convos with them where I wasn’t entirely clear what their stance is other than centering indigenous struggle (which is sort of vague when, like you point out, the % is so low). If they just think “any not indigenous in leadership bad”, that seems way too simplistic and naive. That said, I believe in the idea even the article seems to include as valid:
The way I’ve understood it in the past is that indigenous liberation and black liberation in the US need a certain amount of independent power as distinct from relying on the good graces of the institution of whiteness. But that said institution, developed over hundreds of years with some pretty arbitrary distinctions made up along the way (like how the Irish in the US weren’t considered white at first), also needs to be dismantled. And it may be that in order for it to be dismantled with security for the most marginalized groups, they need a certain amount of independence of power to guard against revising how it works rather than dismantling it. Along with just needing the sovereignty of culture and so on, in the case of the indigenous.
But none of this means those who would count as descended from settlers can’t hold any power at all; without the numbers there, I just don’t understand the logistics of how it would work. And while there are some people who are considered “white” europeans who are close enough to their ethnic ancestry they could return home and get citizenship, plenty others aren’t (nor does such a path have anything to do with indigenous sovereignty and flourishing necessarily; I’ve never heard of indigenous groups endorsing a mass exodus of “settlers” from the US, but maybe I’m not tuned into the right sources of information). As it is, without time for indigenous groups to have the pressure off and rebuild, simple abandonment of the locale would leave a hell of a lot of cleanup behind for far too few people to fix. The geographical area that counts as the US is huge, one of the largest areas designated as a country in the world, and full of capitalist waste and infrastructure. It’s going to require a lot of people power (in sheer numbers) to address that and begin to get it back to a mode that is more centered on being caretakers for the land.
So I guess for me, it comes down to: On the one hand, I would like to be able to say simplistically “oust the settlers and put the indigenous in power.” But having grown up in the US and having a decent level of familiarity with how things are here, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the logistics of doing so. It seems like there’d sooner be the US split into lots of smaller states without the federal than see something on the federal scale of the US that is indigenous run. I understand there can be issues of white people betraying non-white historically, in working class and other like movements in the US, which I can only guess is where the staunchness of it comes from. But there’s still the matter of the sheer amount of logistical planning and decision-making of scale when we’re talking about the size of the land and the 330 some million people living within it. There are those western chauvinists who don’t care at all and just want better working conditions for white working class people, and they are a real concern, but I don’t see that as being the same as white people who are doing what they can to reject whiteness and organize in solidarity with the most marginalized, where possible and desired.
I do think we won’t ever see this kind of communist America with federal control, as the concept of America was a settler construct to begin with. I understand the logistical issue, but it’s important to understand many areas do have active indigenous presence that could lead governance and steward the land. Many areas have large ghettoized black populations that would be in their best interest to be able to govern the communities they understand and economies they do the labor for. The main idea is taking the settler out of the populace, the white out of the euro-american. Having black people teaching the schools and hiring people and otherwise leading society as to flip this relation on its head and nullify the benefits of white supremacy. Many people will move back to Europe in this process and the rest will either go along and contribute to a new society or need to be policed and prevented from interfering. It’ll largely depend on the specific areas and the forms of governance able to take power, and likely will be an ugly balkanization that deals mostly with preventing white supremacists from ruining society building projects, but this has always been inevitable.