[News] Revolutionary Socialism is the Primary Political Ideology of The Red Nation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://therednation.org/2019/09/07/revolutionary-socialism-is-the-primary-political-ideology-of-the-red-nation/ 



  Revolutionary Socialism is the Primary Political Ideology of The Red
  Nation

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/Adopted September 6, 2019/

“I firmly believe that the philosophy of my ancestors lines up quite 
tidily with the philosophy of communism. I make no apology for my 
principles.”

— Lee Maracle

“Socialism is for the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re 
afraid of yourself.”

— Fred Hampton

*Introduction*

This position paper of the Third General Assembly formally adopts 
revolutionary socialism and liberation as the primary political ideology 
of The Red Nation. While incomplete, the purpose of this proposal is to 
articulate the basic principles of revolutionary socialism and Marxism 
and its connection to Indigenous socialism and communism. By adopting 
this proposal, we commit ourselves to the study and practice of 
revolutionary socialism (also known as scientific socialism) by aligning 
ourselves with the long traditions of resistance that predate Marxism 
itself. Nonetheless, Marxism has become the weapon of the poor and 
colonized throughout the world and largely outside of Europe, a weapon 
we now take up as our own. Marxism is the five-fingered fist—the hand of 
the worker, the peasant, the colonized—and our traditions of resistance 
are the power behind that fist.

Marxism is a tool for making revolution, first and foremost. But it is a 
useless tool unless wielded properly by the oppressed. Our traditions of 
Indigenous resistance wield Marxism, not to uphold European traditions, 
but to emancipate ourselves from the colonizers by destroying that which 
destroys us, and building and rebuilding our nations according to our 
traditions and cultures so that our human and nonhuman relations and 
thus all people may live. And we cannot merely destroy capitalism, 
without the foresight and knowledge of replacing it with a more humane 
and just system without rulers and without colonizers. That system is 
called socialism, which seeks to destroy the class system and the ruling 
classes, redistribute land and wealth to its proper owners, and restore 
dignity to the humble people of the earth. Put simply, socialism is 
people power. Socialism puts people before profits. Socialism aligns 
with Indigenous traditions of relationality as we seek to be good 
relatives to other humans and other-than-humans. Socialism is the 
natural state of humanity, to live and work towards peace and justice.

Communism is the greatest expression of love for the people and our 
nonhuman relatives. And it is the only solution for a planet on the 
brink of destruction at the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie and their 
backwards ideologies and institutions.

*US imperialism is the number one enemy of the planet.*

Our socialism is rooted in Indigenous resistance, African slave 
rebellions, and European labor history. It is also rooted in the nations 
of the Tri-Continental—of Asia, Africa, and the Americas—that aligned 
themselves against the primary enemy of the planet: US imperialism. 
Indigenous peoples were the first victims of European imperialism and 
invasion. The US inherited that mantle and has exported the settler 
colonial project to the rest of the globe by plundering and killing 
other darker nations. We are internationalists.

As Indigenous nations, who are in the United States but not entirely of 
it, we align ourselves with the Third World. We seek to end the 
oppressive relations between European nations and the Third World. This 
means opposing US imperialism at all turns, denouncing all US 
imperialist wars, and aligning ourselves with the poorer nations of the 
world in the defense of their sovereignty and self-determination. The US 
must get out of everywhere, including Turtle Island!

Global climate change is also not a Third World problem—it’s a first 
world problem. Nations like the United States consume and produce the 
most carbon. This concentration of wealth and consumption derives from 
the histories of African slavery, Indigenous genocide, and European 
settler colonialism. Thus, the struggle against the multinational oil 
and gas corporations is an anti-imperialist struggle in which Indigenous 
nations are leading the fight. But we also recognize that our socialism, 
our freedom and emancipation, can never come at the expense of our Third 
World comrades and relatives.

Marx and Engels developed their theories of change and history from the 
vantage point of the laboring European proletariat. Industrial 
capitalism, however, didn’t begin solely in the English factory. The 
hands that picked the cotton that was weaved in English textile mills 
were African — stolen from their homelands and enslaved by European 
masters. The land where the cotton grew had to be cleared of Indigenous 
people and Indigenous title to make way for the plantation economy, the 
main driving force behind the expansion of modern capitalism. Thus, the 
expansion of African slavery fueled the dispossession of Indigenous 
peoples.

US settler colonialism was thoroughly a racial project of genocide and 
Indigenous elimination, which is an enduring structure that changes over 
time. After all, even the so-called Five Civilized Tribes who had 
adopted the plantation economy and African slave system from their 
European counterparts were themselves dispossessed and extirpated from 
their lands. And both freed Africans and Indigenous people fought as 
soldiers and scouts for the US settler wars of extermination against 
western Indigenous nations and overseas campaigns of conquest. Despite 
their military service in the US imperialist army, their stations within 
settler society have always been subordinate to white Europeans. They 
faced Jim Crow segregation, police violence, mass incarceration, and the 
continued settler occupation of Indigenous lands. We reject settler 
colonialism and US imperialism as the means of emancipation for the 
working class and for colonized people.

Our communist and anti-imperialist principles to which we ascribe are as 
follows:

 1. End the unequal relations between European and colonized nations.
 2. End the violent competition between the nations of exploiters and
    colonizers.
 3. End the plunder of the earth for profit.

*Marxism is not European. Socialism is Indigenous.*

Marxism is founded on the expropriated knowledges of non-capitalist 
Indigenous societies. Although Marx himself was wrong about many things, 
Marxism, as a science, has a built-in self-correcting mechanism that has 
helped revolutionaries throughout the world build off the political 
theory Marx first formulated. If this were untrue, there would be no 
Russian Revolution, no African Revolution and decolonization movement, 
no Vietnamese liberation, no Bolivarian Revolution, no Cuban Revolution, 
no Chinese Revolution, etc. Each adopted Marxism and applied it to its 
specific and unique circumstances by building off the long struggles 
against exploitation and European imperialism.

Even for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the concepts and theories 
of decolonization explicitly derive from Marxist revolutionary 
movements. It’s dishonest for us to not recognize this history. It’s not 
because of Marx or European thinkers that these revolutions were 
successful. It’s because Marxism is the science of revolution for the 
poor masses, the colonized, and the wretched of the earth. 
Fundamentally, Marxism is the science of how to get free. It is the 
study of class struggle.

If capitalism upholds the systems of racism, settler colonialism, 
heteropatriarchy, and imperialism, then we cannot use capitalism to undo 
these systems. It’s not enough to just be anti-capitalist. Like our 
ancestors we must be forward-thinking by drawing from and amplifying our 
non-capitalist social relations as Indigenous peoples, not to make 
Indigenous traditions relevant to Marxism or socialism but to make 
socialism and Marxism relevant to our struggle as Indigenous peoples.

You cannot fight fire with fire. You cannot fight capitalism with 
Indigenous capitalism. You cannot fight nationalism with 
hyper-nationalism. You can only fight fire with water. And the solution 
to all these ills—and it is what capitalists and colonists hate the 
most—is socialism. If capitalism is burning the planet, then socialism 
is the water to douse the flame. Water is life. We all need water to 
live, but we don’t need capitalism.

And for us to fight colonialism, we must ensure that our nations can 
live. But our nationalism cannot mirror the bourgeois settler 
nationalism of colonial states, which is premised on exclusion and white 
supremacy. We adopt a revolutionary Indigenous nationalism that aligns 
with the most oppressed and marginalized first, within and outside our 
own communities. And we recognize that by organizing production—for our 
food, medicines, resources, etc.—according to need and not profit is the 
only possible path forward according to our traditions.

The philosophy of communism neatly lines up with the philosophy of our 
Indigenous ancestors. Friedrich Engels admitted as much when in the 1888 
English edition of the /Communist Manifesto /he added a footnote to the 
famous line: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the 
history of class struggle.” He clarified, “That is, all /written 
/history,” making note specifically of Lewis Henry Morgan’s study of the 
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which was a communistic, classless, and 
democratic society before European invasion. Moreover, it was the 
relative gender equality of Indigenous societies that inspired the 
suffragettes — white women seeking parity with white men. The study of 
Indigenous societies, the inherent equality and freedom they engendered 
among producers and the common ownership of property and social 
institutions, also inspired European workers to demand eight-hour 
workdays and the abolition of child labor. And, in the final analysis, 
despite their own limited understandings, Marx and Engels, the founders 
of the modern communist movement, had developed theories of emancipation 
largely from the expropriated knowledges of Indigenous and communal 
people, whose examples they relied on to prove that capitalism is 
neither inevitable nor natural. But, in fact, communism is both natural 
and inevitable.

This is not to suggest Indigenous societies were utopias — no society is 
perfect. It is, however, important to understand that Indigenous peoples 
have been knocked off the path of their natural social development to 
live in balance and correct relations. We are not trying to recreate the 
past so much as steer Indigenous nations back on their communal 
developmental path that has been destroyed or seriously distorted by 
capitalist social relations.

*The United States is not a “nation of immigrants” but a nation of 
colonizers. *

Whereas contemporary racial identity politics attempts to mask or 
obscure class antagonisms, a class struggle that doesn’t overturn white 
supremacy and settler colonialism frees no one. We are not seeking 
parity with colonizers or further integration into a colonial system. 
We’re seeking to end settler and white supremacy entirely over Black, 
Indigenous, and colonized people. We aim to end the colonial system 
entirely.

Why? The United States, as a nation of European colonizers, had no 
feudal or communal past. Unlike other nations in history who 
transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, the United States was the 
first nation born entirely as a capitalist state. It was constructed 
from the ground up according to the nightmare vision of European slave 
owners and Indian killers — the nation’s founding bourgeois ideologies. 
The United States began as an oppressor nation, as a colonizer of 
oppressed people, and its function remains so. It not only has a 
capitalist ruling class, but all strata and classes of white Europeans 
among its ranks are encouraged to become preoccupied with the aims of 
the ruling class through petty racial privileges and private property 
ownership, the guiding stars of white settler nationalism. We reject 
those national and settler aspirations and ask our comrades in struggle 
to reject them as well.

The current US colonial state is not only an instrument of racial and 
class rule, it is also an instrument of imperialist plunder and the 
oppressor of nations. It thus obscures its own internal divisions of 
colonizer and colonized. The United States fabricates national myths by 
calling itself a “nation of immigrants” to hide its unnaturalness and 
crimes. Immigrants come to a land to integrate within the existing 
legal, social, and political orders. The first European settlers came to 
colonize, to destroy and replace existing Indigenous legal, social, and 
political orders. The United States is, therefore, more accurately 
described as a “nation of colonizers.” Immigrants don’t come in chains; 
you can’t immigrate to a land you already belong to; and refugees 
fleeing imperialist violence are not immigrants.

We recognize that the colonial state keeps in place irreconcilable class 
antagonisms, between rich and poor, between settler and Native. The 
state is first and foremost police and military violence. Its legitimacy 
is maintained by force. It’s primary function is enforcing capitalist 
social relations. The veneer of “representative democracy” is only 
possible because the ruling classes have crushed and will continue to 
crush any alternative to capitalism by mobilizing the police and military.

In this sense, Indigenous people are the first “Red Scare.” Because we 
held land in common and represented an alternative to the settler state 
(whether it be by taking in escaped slaves or mounting armed 
resistance), we had to be annihilated. Today, because we adopt 
revolutionary socialism as our struggle and vision for a free society, 
we are the second coming of the “Red Scare.” But we are not exclusive in 
our struggles for freedom. We align ourselves with all colonized and 
oppressed people of the world. Only imperial borders and nation-states 
that are not of our own making divide our common humanity. Therefore, 
our struggle transcends the state, but we are not naive enough to turn 
away from the state as a site of struggle.

We understand that state power is nearly impossible to achieve, since 
Indigenous peoples are a minority. Yet, in alliance with other colonized 
and oppressed peoples, we can take state power, not to become the new 
rulers of a capitalist society, but to use the mechanisms of the state 
to wage our rightful struggle against our class enemies—the rich. A 
socialist state uses the power and democracy of the masses to undo the 
privileges and wealth of the ruling classes and the colonial elite, even 
among our own people. A socialist state seeks to destroy itself because 
it is built in the shell of the old. But it has to be wielded by the 
oppressed in the service of the oppressed to achieve freedom and the 
abolition of the state itself, because, whether we like it or not, the 
state is the primary organizer of society. And through a decolonized 
socialist state, we will reorganize society to redistribute wealth and 
land by taking it back from those who stole it from us in the first place.

We recognize the fallacy that capitalists and settlers will simply give 
up their wealth and privilege if we win their hearts and minds. Their 
wealth and privilege were earned by force and it is kept in place by 
violence. Any challenge to that authority, whether it’s democratic or 
“non-violent,” will always be met with violence. Even the fallacy of 
democracy is upheld by force. A capitalist government, even if it is 
“democratic,” will always serve the interests of the ruling classes no 
matter how much we reform it. As revolutionaries, our focus is not to 
organize and appeal to the oppressors for our rights. Our role is to 
organize the oppressed to build authentic democracy from the ground up. 
And we cannot wait for someone else to save us. Only we can save ourselves.

Marxism and socialism take up the position of the poor. That is why they 
are derided and hounded by the rich and powerful, because they work in 
the interests of the colonized and oppressed. We advocate for socialist 
revolution as the only means of achieving decolonization.

*Indigenous liberation is the tip of the spear.*

Class is fundamentally about power. The class system was imported to our 
lands and it upholds racism, sexism, homophobia, and settler 
colonialism. Indigenous nations are not immune to this system, and, in 
fact, have internalized it as their own. Indigenous nations face a 
double class oppression—first as Native people colonized by a foreign 
power and second as poor people. Only revolutionary socialism that seeks 
decolonization and the abolition of the class system can emancipate us 
from the ills plaguing our nations.

Only through creating a revolutionary organization can we hope to 
facilitate decolonization on the path towards socialism. No revolution 
in history ever came about spontaneously. The conditions of a rebellion 
(war, slavery, starvation) may have been spontaneous, but the successful 
defeat of the oppressors always required determined and effective 
organization of a disciplined and highly-trained revolutionary cadre. 
This is the difference between rebellion and revolution. Rebellion is a 
temporary protest that seeks the recognition of those in power to change 
their minds. Revolution seeks to build power from below and doesn’t 
require the recognition of the rulers—but seeks to entirely replace them 
with people power and the organized masses. Rebellion is a nascent phase 
that can lead to revolution. But it is not guaranteed. Revolutionaries, 
however, guide rebellion to revolution. To do so requires a lifetime 
commitment, building the revolutionary organization which is the vehicle 
of democracy and struggle, and the unwavering belief that things can and 
will change.

The Red Nation is a multinational organization, representing many 
different Indigenous nations. Yet we recognize a common oppression, a 
common experience, among Native people. We are oppressed because of our 
Indigenousness. Therefore, as our name suggests, we are seeking to unify 
as a nation in this hemisphere and beyond. But our nation is one in 
which many nations fit. We do not privilege one Indigenous experience 
over the other (for example, Lakota or Diné, urban or Rez, Anglo or 
Spanish, etc.). But our diversity and our plurality is our strength, not 
our weakness. We should actively seek to create and build alliances with 
non-Indigenous people and struggles but our primary struggle is 
dedicated to building our organization and unifying our people and 
nations. Only a revolutionary organization, dedicated to the principles 
of socialism, equality, democracy, freedom, and Indigenous liberation, 
is capable of doing that work. But we must submit to a collective will 
for liberation by abandoning bourgeois individualism and narrow nationalism.

We recognize that we cannot simply make use of the ready-made machinery 
of the capitalist state, and that we must work towards the abolition of 
the police, prison, and related systems of capitalist and colonial 
violence. We fight for the reorganization of the economic system 
according to socialist principles and the democratic control over the 
means of production and distribution of goods, while also not 
reproducing unequal colonial relations. We support the growth of 
workers’ unions and seek to revolutionize unions towards decolonization 
and socialism. We reject the notion that capitalism can be administered 
or reformed towards more humane ends. We do, however, support policies 
and office-holders (even our own members if elected) that work against 
the interests of colonialism, capitalism, and the ruling classes, while 
maintaining socialist revolution as the only solution.

We encourage our membership to develop revolutionary socialism within 
their own nations so long as it is dedicated to the liberation of all 
relations. We also recognize that our traditions have been distorted as 
tools for oppression. If a tradition becomes a shackle, it must be 
broken. And while our specific nations and the lands in which we inhabit 
take priority for our political, cultural, and spiritual development, it 
should never come at the expense of others or exclude people or beings 
removed by force or displaced from their homelands. Therefore, the 
struggle of The Red Nation may take on national Indigenous 
characteristics depending on region and geography, but it is 
fundamentally dedicated to national liberation for all Indigenous 
peoples, which is contingent upon the liberation of everyone and the 
planet.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20190909/feb35ffc/attachment.htm>