Abolition, Decolonization, and Liberation
By Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-L.A./People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)
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 succeeded for a while, 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?
It is vitally important, as many of the illusory restraints and “guardrails” of bourgeois democracy are being stripped away, not only by Trump but in a global turn towards authoritarianism by the bourgeoisie and the so-called “tech broligarchy”, that we turn these crises into opportunities for revolutionary transformation through solidarity and united anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggle.
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. At an earlier stage, we talked about becoming ungovernable. Now, as the ruling faction of the bourgeoisie seems intent on destroying government in favor of direct corporate rule, we need to build forms of anti-authoritarian self-governance, mutual survival, and communal self-determination.
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 US is the quintessential settler colonial empire state. Trump’s professed aims of annexing Greenland and Panama, or Canada as the 51st State, are right in line with Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, Jackson’s invasion of Spanish Florida, James Knox Polk’s invasion and conquest of northern Mexico, Lincoln’s purchase of Alaska from the Tsar, or the US 1898 takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and its overthrow and annexation of the internationally-recognized Kingdom of Hawaii.
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, insurance, and financing of the trans-Atlantic slave “trade”. The product of these enslaved people, including sugar (and rum), tobacco, and silver, (and later cotton) formed the basis of global trade relations that extended across not just the Atlantic but the Pacific, and then of industrialization.
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 those lands.
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 yours by right, and not a road to freedom. It can be taken away at any time if it does not secure your compliance.
Settler colonialism and racial capitalism explain why the US is a carceral state and a police state beneath the trappings of liberal bourgeois democracy, and why prisons and policing, along with private security and intelligence forces, are such a large sector of employment. They are enforcing a constant state of war that exists on stolen land and focused on controlling stolen people. This is the deep vein that Trump has tapped and metastasized in MAGA.
We have an implacable enemy who has stopped 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, only subjects, 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.
As Steven Biko of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement said, the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed. We have to free our minds, break the identification with the oppressor that chains us, to forge a different and better future.
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 the enemy’s weaknesses, and undermine their strengths. In our own case we seek to build our strength and unity, and 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, end the compliance, complacency and complicity that sustains the Empire, and strengthen the powers of resistance and self-determination. As we break free, take direct action to build our unity and solidarity, 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, contact us via email to [email protected] (through which address you can also donate via paypal).