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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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<h1 class="reader-title">Revolutionary Socialism is the Primary
Political Ideology of The Red Nation</h1>
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<p><span><em>Adopted September 6, 2019</em></span><span> </span></p>
<p><span>“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.” </span></p>
<p><span>— Lee Maracle</span></p>
<p><span>“Socialism is for the people. If you’re afraid of
socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.” </span></p>
<p><span>— Fred Hampton</span></p>
<p><span> </span><b>Introduction</b><span> </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><b>US imperialism is the number one enemy of the
planet.</b></p>
<p><span>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.</span><span> </span></p>
<p><span>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!</span><span> </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span><span> </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>Our communist and anti-imperialist principles to
which we ascribe are as follows: </span></p>
<ol>
<li><span> </span><span>End the unequal relations
between European and colonized nations. </span></li>
<li><span> </span><span>End the violent competition
between the nations of exploiters and colonizers. </span></li>
<li><span> </span><span>End the plunder of the
earth for profit.</span></li>
</ol>
<p><span> </span><b>Marxism is not European. Socialism is
Indigenous.</b></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span> </span><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><span><i>Communist Manifesto </i></span><span>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 </span><span><i>written
</i></span><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span> </span><span>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.</span></p>
<p><b>The United States is not a “nation of immigrants”
but a nation of colonizers. </b></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span><span> </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><b>Indigenous liberation is the tip of the spear.</b></p>
<p><span>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.</span><span> </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
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