A few thoughts on the notion that Indigenous national liberation is somehow incompatible with Marxism (a notion I've seen some mutuals [rightly] rejecting over the past few days):
1. It's not the settler's place to determine how Indigenous nations conduct their anti-colonial struggles. Dispossession from ancestral land is a brutal condition. I want no part of any political community whose reaction to that condition is something other than compassion.
2. One of the most significant examples of US land theft occurred through the 1887 Dawes (Allotment) Act. Dawes broke up collective land ownership in an effort to eradicate all forms of Native communalism (a huge impediment to assimilation).
3. Go read the congressional debates prior to the Act's passage. US politicians were aghast that Native nations rejected private land ownership and exhibited no cogent distinction between wealth and poverty.
4. In fact, many congressmen argued that poverty is a precondition of being civilized, that Natives cannot progress without embracing the concept of private property, that the greatest indicator of savagery is lack of economic competition.
5. These narratives are by no means limited to the period of Dawes' implementation. They span the founding and development of the USA (and Canada) and are common in today's political discourses, even on the left.
6. In short, the notion that Marxists should reject (or renounce) Indigenous nationalism is not only a fundamentally colonialist (and thus capitalist) position...
...it is also deeply ahistorical, ignoring plentiful evidence that Indigenous nations are quite better suited to what most people understand as "communism" than any post-industrial society.
