VTS 01 1 John Brown Anti-Klan Committee's "Behind the Burning Cross" (1990)

Decolonization and liberation

Decolonization and liberation:
By Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action L.A./People Against Racist terror

The resistance to European colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Americas has a history over 500 years in length. Resistance to capitalism stretches back over  more than two centuries. The cataclysmic human and environmental costs of the prevailing economic and political order are now exceedingly clear, and have been for decades. 

So we have to ask ourselves, why does capitalist imperialism still dominate this country and the world?

What lessons can we learn from previous partial victories that were undermined and overcome by the system, as well as from previous efforts at revolutionary social transformation and human liberation that ultimately failed, or those that are still in existence? How can we apply those lessons in practice to try to advance the struggle in a fundamental way that shifts the balance of forces between the state, the corporations and the elite on the one hand, and the insurgencies and resistance of exploited and oppressed peoples on the other?

How can we open a path towards an egalitarian, ecological human society that respects human and biological diversity, and liberates our creativity and capacity for love and pleasure, before the current system carries out any further genocides and does irreversible damage to the planetary ecosystem? To answer these questions and unleash the tactical ingenuity of hundreds of millions of people, we need to understand the actual bases of the state, and the economic system, and their grip on our own thinking and practice.

Although people commonly talk about the nation state, the true paradigm of the state has always been the empire, not the nation. States have always been and still are built for and through conquest and subjugation of land and people. A look at the history of any of the European states will demonstrate the truth of that, but it’s also true of the pre-Columbian societies that had state formations in the Americas, as well as pre-capitalist regimes in Africa and Asia before European penetration and conquest. The states created by imperial map-making almost always crisscross existing nations. The boundaries drawn by military conquest divide people and impede human migration and mobility as natural beings.

Similarly, the first form of capital was private ownership of land, a social relationship between the "owner," land and other people. Modern European ruling classes and the empire states they built were based on the conquest and privatization of communally held land and the societies that lived on them , first in the Americas and later within Europe itself. The basis of the state and the economic system is the planting of flags and the imposition of grids, property lines and maps on the fluid reality of human societies and continental terrain. This was accompanied by deforestation, in the Americas (where it is ongoing in Brazil and elsewhere) and then in Europe.

The second form of capital, well before industrialization, was the possession and ownership of enslaved human beings, mainly from Africa. Enslaved Africans  were simultaneously capital "investments" owned by capitalists, high-value commodities bought and sold in markets, and obviously labor, capable of producing wealth for their capitalist owners far in excess of the costs of their labor and often resulting in their relatively swift demise in the mines and on the plantations. Much of the basic organization of capitalism, including the form of limited liability corporations, shares of ownership, and double entry bookkeeping, were generated in the organization and financing of the trans-Atlantic slave "trade". The product of these enslaved people, including sugar (and rum), tobacco, and silver, formed the basis of global trade relations that extended across not just the Atlantic but the Pacific. The wealth they generated created the European bourgeoisie, and transformed land and property relations in Europe itself, transforming feudal land-holdings with obligations to the serfs that labored on them, and the commons and the commoners who survived through their use, into private property in the hands of now capitalist landowners looking to produce commodities for profit on them.

That enabled the driving of European people from the land as well, transforming them into proletarians only able to survive by selling their labor power. This was predicated on the so-called “primitive” or primary accumulation, the looting of colonized people and their land, the land theft and expropriation which is still on-going and central to understanding the nature of "capitalism."

The ability of the resulting bourgeois empire states that emerged in Europe to conquer additional territories and people, using the time-tested strategies of divide and rule, building more extensive empires, also created the basis for winning the allegiance of substantial sectors of the populations of the imperial countries, who actively engaged in settler colonialism. Various forms of identification with the empire, through mechanisms such as racial and national privilege, neo-colonial elitism, and the incorporation of pre-existing systems of hierarchy and domination – such as gender – into capitalism, account for the longevity of the system, along with its willingness to use overwhelming, brutal force to conquer and control colonies.

But the failure of anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist forces to recognize the system for what it is – a constant, institutionalized state of war – also sustains the system. We talk of “class war” without having a deep understanding that our enemy is waging class and colonial war every minute, every day. We try to identify allies and classes without seeing that capital in land is an essential form of capitalism. Participating in building a society based on conquered land and the private ownership of that land impacts not only class consciousness but actual class realities and identification and goes far to explaining why the US is the world bastion of reaction.

Settler colonialism also explains why the right understands that the state does not have a monopoly on the use of force, but the left fails to recognize this. It exposes the material basis of white supremacy and white privilege that must be overcome. Imperialism offers privileges to control people, our thinking and our practice. What you have by privilege is not your by right and not a road to freedom.

We have an implacable enemy who has and will stop at nothing to maintain its rule, and only war will end it. Just as colonialism is central to this system, decolonization is central to dismantling it. Once we see those central strategic realities, then a vast array of tactical and organizational possibilities open up. The Empire is fractal or holographic in nature – every part of it is imbued with the whole. We can organize in the workplace or the community, in the city, suburbs or rural areas, around issues of liberation from the oppressive binary gender system or educational or environmental justice, around the human right to housing or health care. Just remember, there are no citizens in an empire, and there is no room for collaborating in our own oppression or compromising with our exploiters. Remember that conscious solidarity with all oppressed and exploited people is essential.

We must act with an understanding that we confront an enemy with whom we have an irreconcilable contradiction, and yet one that has its claws inside our minds and hearts. The class struggle takes place within us and within classes as well as between them. That makes self-critical analysis of our weaknesses and failures, using our strengths to overcome them, absolutely essential, so that masses of people will see the prospects and possibilities of victory.

We have to study the class enemy as deeply and rigorously as it studies us. We have to determine its weaknesses and disabilities, and our own. In their case, we seek to magnify and exploit those weaknesses. In our own case we seek to purge or overcome the weaknesses through constructive criticism and self-criticism. Only in this way can we weaken the power and grasp of the Empire and strengthen the powers of resistance and self-determination. As we break free, take direct action to build self-determination and meet human needs, we simultaneously increase people’s power and decrease the power and endurance of our enemy.

If you are interested in discussing these ideas further, check out “Turning the Tide” at https://www.antiracist.org or (where you can subscribe to our journal by clicking on the "buy me a coffee" button) or contact us via antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com

The basics of settler colonialism in the U.S.

It’s impossible to understand the nature of the social, political and economic system in the United States without grasping the settler colonial nature of the state and society. The USA is and always has been an empire. Although European settlers and their descendants are the most privileged within the Empire, it is vital to remember that in an Empire, there are no citizens, only subjects.

Imperial privilege is one of a number of enforcement and compliance mechanisms for social control; those who are privileged have no rights, only privileges that can be revoked for disobedience, insufficient loyalty, identification with the oppressed, and other transgressions.

The basis of colonialism, particularly settler colonialism, and thus of racism, white supremacy and white-skin privilege, is the conquest of land and people. The US system in its entirety is built and based on the stolen lands of indigenous people, and the imposition of a system of private property in land, the demarcation of property lines, which laid the basis for the imperial state and the national borders.

As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, US conceptions of freedom are inextricably bound up with the “freedom” of conquest and expansion. One of the settler colonists’ key disputes with the British crown was the monarchy’s insistence on following its treaties with the indigenous First Nations, reflected in a willingness to limit settler expansion into Native territories to the west of the Atlantic seaboard settlements.

Jefferson, allegedly an opponent of a strong central government, leaped at the chance to acquire Napoleon’s “Louisiana Territory,” offering the opportunity for a vast expansion of the slave system, and outfitted the Lewis and Clark expedition to seek to map and claim the territories all the way to the Pacific (into areas claimed by other European imperial powers besides the French). Similar factors of British cooperation with Native American allies were central to the so-called War of 1812, though our schools usually teach that this was provoked by British impressment of US merchant sailors.

The colonized African people, kidnapped from Africa, traded for Amerindian slaves with the West Indies plantation colonies, or bred in captivity, developed a claim to the land they worked, particularly in the US southeast; many intermarried and combined with indigenous or tribal people. Fear of a combination between African slaves and indigenous nations was always a key reason behind US military action against “Indians,” such as Andrew Jackson’s illegal actions in Florida and against the Cherokee.

There is no mystery to this history. It’s the same one we are taught in school. It’s embodied in the US flag with its ever-increasing rows of stars. It’s “Manifest Destiny.” The question is only whether we glorify and embrace these conquests, and the militarism they require — or reject and seek to overturn them.

Consider the US annexation of Texas and conquest of most of northern Mexico. These were enormous crimes against humanity. Yet they are memorialized in the “Alamo,” institutionalized in the flag, and the basis for US global dominance. Picture a basically indigenous Mexico possessing all its national territory, including the oil wealth of Texas, the copper of Colorado, silver of Nevada and gold and agricultural abundance of California! What a different world it would be!

The war with Mexico set the template for all future US aggression. It was carried out by executive fiat and manipulation, and opposition collapsed once it was a fait accompli. Lincoln, who voted against a declaration of war as a Congressman, quickly changed his tune once the war began, and voted in favor of appropriations, to “support the troops.”

It needs to be pointed out that by capturing Texas and later adding the other Mexican territories, the US reintroduced human chattel slavery into an area where it had already been abolished to realize the full depth of the crimes against humanity embodied in US expansionism.

The addition of Alaska without consultation with the Inuit, the annexation of Hawaii over the opposition of the native Hawaiians (and over the refusal of the US Senate to ratify the treaty of annexation with the plantation owners oligarchy), and the conquest of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines — accepted by Spain but rejected by the indigenous populations — complete the picture. At this very moment, US republicans and Democrats (and their neo-colonial shadow-puppets) are debating how best to rationalize and sustain U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico over 115 years after the invasion, whether as a so-called “free associated state” or by outright annexation as the 51st state (and 51st star on the flag).

Another Year Older and Deeper in Shit

Well, oddly enough I started this blog one year ago and did nothing with it whatsoever. In the intervening year, the San Francisco Eight -- former Black Panther Party for Self Defense members and associates -- have been arrested and jailed on prohibitive bails on charges based on torture (both of some of them and of the sole state's witness, another former Panther associate). This is a clear attempt to legitimize the use of torture "domestically" within the US criminal "justice" system, just as it has been authorized internationally in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The empire becomes ever more seamless every day. The distinction between one side of the current border and the other is becoming increasingly meaningless. It is impossible to understand measures taken in the U.S., like the intense anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican crackdown or the growing militarization of police and schools and the surveillance system, without placing it in an international context -- such as the growth of revolutionary struggle in Mexico and across Latin America, the armed and civil resistance to U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.

Similarly, it is impossible to understand the strength of U.S. reaction internationally, the nature of the U.S. global empire, or the weakness of the U.S. "left" and domestic political "opposition," without understanding that inside its borders, the U.S. state is already an Empire of colonized people and nations, and conquered and annexed lands.

What we need to do, based on these understandings. is to chart a course to turn the contradictions and inherent weaknesses and vulnerabilities of such an Empire against it, to nurture in colonized people and their potential allies among the privileged-yet-exploited among the colonizing population a sense of their own potential, their power and creativity. We must overcome the defeatism engendered by past defeats of heroic but incomplete revolutionary struggles and upsurges.


I invite comment and criticism and contributions on this theme of domestic and international colonization as a strategy for liberation. I will be posting more regularly with comments and evidence myself.

Decolonization or Destruction

At one time, revolutionaries put forward the slogan "Socialism or Barbarism."

Socialism having at least temporarily lost the battle, if not the war, barbarism now reigns, as evidenced by the US response to Katrina, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone bombardment of Yemen and Pakistan, the Israeli attacks in Gaza and Lebanon, and the growth of warlord-ism under US tutelage around the planet.

Today, in the face of the catastrophic consequences of global warming/climate change, our situation is more dire than ever, and the choices are between human, earth and animal liberation on the one hand, or ecocide and genocide on the other.

The question remains:

Which side are you on?

This blog will be devoted to pushing forward decolonization -- national liberation without the nation state -- as a strategy for uniting and strengthening the forces of liberation.